Psychopathy and society, a short essay
By Aki Greus
Helsinki Open University
Persoonallisuuspsykologia I
Definition of Psychopathy
For the sake of clarity, I will refer to Psychopathy instead of Antisocial Personality Disorder or Dissocial personality disorder. Psychopathy as I see it and as I believe is commonly seen is different from APD or DPD despite the stance of the American Psychiatric Association [1]. What differentiates between Psychopathy and APD is that essentially Psychopathy is caused by a lack of empathy for others that does not necessarily cause destructive or illegal activity. I believe that APD can only successfully diagnose a portion of psychopaths and even then clumps together a great deal of other problems alongside psychopaths. The difficulty with diagnosing Psychopathy is the same as with diagnosing any psychological illness where the patient has no desire to be diagnosed. While we are relying essentially on statements by the patient as well as past records of activity it is easy to confuse various different disorders with one another. While it is true that diagnosis of Psychopathy does rely on tests of varying degree of accuracy, while these tests are publicly available there is nothing to stop the test subject from reading the tests and their proper answers and thus learn how to fool the tests. Due to the nature of open society and the nature of the psychopathic behavior which seeks to hide deviant behavior and conform to societal norms as best they can for as long as they can without truly understanding the nature of society it is possible for psychopaths to read all they can find on their own personality in an effort to increase they chance of hiding. Which is why publishing the results of studies as is necessary in an open society can be counterproductive [2]. There is nothing stopping a potential serial killer with knowledge of the testing procedure to learn how to lie and fake it as they have learned to fool the community they live in. The situation is essentially the same as with publishing police or government procedures regarding crimes or emergencies which can lead to serious problems as criminals know how the police will behave and can plan accordingly. This is already obvious in the crime streak in south Sweden or in the more distant past during the era of prohibition in Chicago. When criminal knew how the police planned to catch them they were able to form good counter measures and avoid capture for a long time. Thus the worst case scenario is that as new methods of diagnosing psychopathy are found the methods themselves become extremely quickly outdated as ways to fool them are invented.
So the problem is not with diagnosing psychopaths who commit crimes and are caught. The problem is with diagnosing psychopaths who have yet to commit any crime that will warrant enough police attention that they will be caught. If we compare the Cleckley's list for Psychopathy [3] with the DSM list for ASPD [4] or Hare's items [5] it will immediately be clear that Hare and Cleckley are talking of a disorder that differs greatly from the ASPD as described by the DSM list. It is stated in the ASPD list that since things such as lack of remorse are difficult to assess in a patient that is adept at lying they were excluded from the list for ASPD. Perhaps the greatest difference between ASPD and Psychopathy is the lack of interest in the internal mindset of a psychopath by the ASPD diagnosis criteria, focusing instead of purely external factors such as criminal history and external actions. This certainly makes diagnosis of psychopathy easier but it also increases the probability of diagnosing various other behavioral problems as ASPD and no longer focusing exclusively on psychopathy itself. The same is true for the ICD-10 diagnosis criteria for psychopathy, known in this list as Dissocial Personality Disorder or DPD. The problem with these differing diagnostic criteria is that, as stated in the wikipedia article regarding psychopathy: “A sample research finding is that between 50% and 80% of prisoners in England and Wales meet the diagnostic criteria of dissocial personality disorder, but only 15% would be predicted to be psychopathic as measured by the PCL-R.” Which leads back to the initial problem with psychopathy, the glibness, ability to lie, no remorse and no empathy make a reliable diagnostic criteria that relies mostly on past actions and at best half lies by the patient themselves will be exceptionally inaccurate.
I lack the medical expertise, funding and the research facilities to accurately study psychopathy and associated behavior patterns, so it is safe to say that I cannot possibly verify the claims of brain activity difference between psychopaths and non psychopathic criminals as described by various medical sources [6][6.1]. Perhaps most disturbing is the reported increase in the rate of criminal behavior by psychopaths after therapeutic work is done on them [7]. Psychopaths also have a markedly different reaction to stimuli when compared to non psychopathic population [8].
The behavior of psychopaths is so strikingly different that it is potentially cause for a restructuring of human society to avoid the increasing chances of psychopaths to pray on those with no psychopathic tendencies. As the world grows ever smaller and the chances for a single individual to cause harm to others increase exponentially, which leads me to the point of this article. It is obviously very difficult to diagnose psychopathy in humans as well as in animals. Due to their marked difference from non psychopathic humans psychopaths have been referred to as the other race or interspecies predators in popular culture as well as some less than reputable medical papers. The fact remains that there is little consensus in the scientific or popular culture as to what a psychopath really is. However, for the remainder of this essay I will refer to psychopaths as defined by Hare and Cleckley and not ASPD as defined by the APA.
Successful VS Unsuccessful psychopaths
The measure of success for any creature is divided into 3 subgroups, ability to survive, ability to pass on its genes and ability to adapt to new environments. Survival in the environment the creature is currently in is the most important characteristics for the short term. Ability to pass on its genes is the second most important characteristics as a great deal of the adaptive ability of a any species is dependant on its offspring and their ability genetic variances and the faster a lifecycle a species has the faster it will adapt to a new environment, thus an extremely fast lifecycle such as is present in bacteria will allow a species to outpace any environmental changes except for the cataclysmic sudden change. While the ability to pass on the genes, the ability to adapt to new environments and the ability to survive are linked they are not mutually inclusive. A species that is too adept at passing on its own genes at the expense of the environments ability to support it will quickly find itself heading for a population collapse as the environment turns unsuitable due to overuse. If we view the human species as an inherently competitive system, its own ecosphere if you will, we can start to see various interesting behavioral patterns that closely mimic that of the earth as a whole. If we split the human species into smaller subspecies divided those into smaller casts and groups and families and finally the individual, we receive a new look at what human interaction is really about.
Since the vast majority of individuals will always operate with the 3 basic ideas, eat, survive and reproduce. A more modern way of putting it, physical survival, reproduction either directly or indirectly and procuring food or things required for food. We can break down human behavior in the grand scale into a biosphere like behavior, with each subset of humanity providing a role comparable with something we would see in nature. Against this backdrop of neutral nature psychopathic behavior starts to make sense. In a system where the vast majority of people need to and do indeed work together for a common goal, be it gathering food or generating electricity a predator willing to go outside the rules has a huge market for opportunities. The very nature of society is such that group behavior for a common goal can not be enforced strongly enough that a motivated predator will be unable to take advantage of the situation. It is necessary for the function of a modern society to assume others are friendly or at worst neutral towards you, even walking down a street would become impossible if mutual neutral behavior could not be anticipated, not to even mention complex finances or sale of stocks or goods. So the very nature of society has to be neutral or society would start to collapse into smaller niches that no longer communicate with one another and the potential hunting ground for a predator would become smaller and an increased risk of capture and early death due to deviant behavior would increase. So, I propose then, that there is an imaginary tipping point in society, beyond which an increase in the number of predators would cause an adverse reaction and the ability of the biosphere to support the predators would decrease leading to a massive extinction of the predators. To put it in a more socio-psychological term, an increase in deviant illegal behavior by a separate distinguishable part of a larger group will lead to cure, expulsion or incarceration of the small group by the large group.
History is full of examples where a small group has been imprisoned, either justly or unjustly by a larger group because of perceived deviant behavior. Jews, Native Americans, Indians, Africans, Japanese Americans, Germans in the UK and various other groups too numerous to mention were all expelled from a larger group because of perceived danger or deviant behavior. In modern times when it is possible to diagnose brain disorders directly and say, this man is incapable of emotions, this man has the brain of a criminal the temptation to use the technology in mass screenings of the population is only held back by our devotion to freedom and liberty, both of which are arguably under attack by more and more stringent police measures from within and war from outside. So, where is the mathematical breaking point of the population, beyond which the acts of the predators become so outrageous that our love of liberty will lose to our love of hatred? If you can argue that a psychopath has a 95% chance of committing a crime could she be sentenced to jail as a pre-emptive measure simply because of probability? Of course it is easy to say that our justice system does not judge a person for a crime he has not committed but that is not entirely true. There are such crimes as conspiring to commit murder, planning to commit murder and with a recent court ruling there is now precedent for even talking about committing a crime. With the closure of the kotikemian foorumit website and now with the charges against Nikki, a Finnish blogger actively protesting the website blocking law which allows the Finnish police to block any website they deem fit without listing a reason with no channel for protests it is obvious that the mere thought of crime, or mere mention of crime has indeed become a crime [9]. The Finnish police do not see the inherent problem with charging a person with distributing materials when all he is doing is posting a list of websites which have already been blocked by the police and as such are inaccessible from Finland. So the crime is not that he is distributing materials, he is distributing a list of actions the police have done, which should on its own be legal in Finland. So clearly there is both theoretical and practical law and precedent for imprisonment for merely thinking of doing a crime. So can it not be argued that a person who is incapable of empathy and views others as little more than cockroaches [10] is constantly thinking of committing a crime?
If it is this easy to moralize the incarceration of psychopaths then I can only ask, how difficult would it be if there were 5% or even 10% psychopaths in a population instead of 0.5-2% as is currently claimed[11]. Would society collapse under the weight of so many predators or would it figure out a way to deal with it. Either way this is somewhat besides the issue at hand. As long as the number of psychopaths remains under the population tipping point then psychopaths have an easier time than non psychopaths to succeed as non psychopaths are cumbered by emotions that assist them in functioning in a group while psychopaths have no such burden and are indeed free to roam as they see fit. If we view the actions of a psychopath from a purely selfish reproductive standpoint what they do is smart for them, they receive a great deal of potential mates and are free to pick the ones they want because non psychopathic humans are for the most part just as unable to view the mind of a psychopath as they are the mind of a non psychopath, in the words of a prison psychiatrist, “It was like he is from another planet” [12]. So, from the 3 ways to define success a psychopath who does not get caught and does not kill their mates they are indeed very successful. Their behavior guarantees them mates, food and survival and thus a chance to pass on their genes to the next generation. It is no accident that our present societal structure has started to favor those without conscience and those without care for others[13]. When one looks back in history to the different eras of humanity it becomes obvious that every now and then a sufficiently warped mind can lead humanity in a direction of its choosing before we wake up as a whole from its grasp. I hate to make sweeping statements but it is not a great stretch to compare most governments with clinical psychopaths. It is even less of a stretch to compare most multinational corporations with psychopaths.
After the 2nd world war many of the low echelon Nazi’s expressed disbelief at how easily they were taken into a system of organized psychopathy, a system that essentially was as far remove from humanity and what they thought they were doing as black is from white[14]. This disbelief at what they did and what was done to them as a people is strikingly similar to the disbelief exhibited by victim of psychopaths after the psychopaths mask of sanity is removed. It is quite common for people to say they had no idea the man next door was a serial killer or that the nice uncle who liked being with the kids was a serial pedophile[15]. A system of government which emphasizes ruthless competition for limited resources with any means available as long as one doesn’t get caught will inevitably lead to a situation where those who reach the top are the most ruthless players. It should come as no big surprise that this same system breeds politicians who express no remorse when their policies kill millions and joke about how as a child they liked to torture animals to death [16]. So then, what I see as the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful psychopath is that a successful psychopath has the ability to remain hidden or cover up his crimes well enough not to arouse suspicion in his potential victims. Indeed the history of the western society seems filled with wonderful case examples of psychopaths and their collected crimes, from Adolf Hitler to Stalin to Emperor Nero and so on. It is pointless to try to diagnose someone who lived a thousand years ago but studying the actions of long dead people has always been a hallmark of history and a hallmark of psychology, from the names like Oedipus complex to the still present trend of naming everything in Latin. To study psychopathy is to study history as history is filled with very clear examples of psychopathic behavior that by present day moral terms would be repugnant.
If the present day society, as I believe it to be, is very favorable to the psychopaths at the expense of everyone else, I must ask how this society came into existence. Did the present societal structure form on its own and then slowly turn into one that let psychopaths come into power or did psychopaths indeed form the societal structure. To answer this it is necessary to study other species and their hierarchy and society. While it is obvious that the hierarchy of a primate or an ant is nowhere near as sophisticated as that of humans they are still a very valuable source of information. There seems to be two general styles of society in existence in the animal world. There are of course more than two styles but they generally fall under the 2 prime groups, those that are ruled jointly and those that are ruled by a single individual. Those ruled by a single individual are generally careless with a single life and are predatorial in nature, where every member has to fight or cajole other members into supporting them in the power struggles, and failure to survive this power struggle can lead to quick annihilation of the individual as survival depends on the ability to fight. The other type of society is characterized by high emphasis on individual life and a high emphasis on children and the health of the entire pack as opposed to simply care for the leader. It does not take a great deal of thought to find both these basic structures on a great many animal societies, ranging from the Ant’s to the migratory birds or butterflies. So there are clearly different kinds of animal societies, some value the life of one individual over all others and some value all individuals roughly equally. There are even cases of rape [17], murder [18], and various other supposedly human behaviors evident in animals. What separates humans from animals in this context is that humans have a great deal of different societal structures while most animals have one or at best a few different societal structures. As an example of different societal structures in the same non human species is from several monkey species that have different societies in human encroached jungles than in jungles with no human presence [19]. Evidence would indicate that the societal differences between the two previously mentioned monkey societies is so drastic that one group is dominated by violence and what we would easily term Machiavellian behavior with complex political connections and complex political structures between the various families and bloodlines of monkeys, while the other group lives in an evidently peaceful setting where violence appears to be rare [20].
It is a common understanding that violent behavior and psychopathic behavior, even though violent behavior is not always psychopathic behavior can be caused by social relations and potentially even some deep traumas, thus the name sociopath. There is a fundamental disagreement on the wording used to describe psychopathy as indicated before. Psychopathy, Sociopathy, ASD, DPD have all been used to describe, with varying accuracy, the same psychological makeup. So the difference in animal behavior based on how humans have interacted with them leads to one possible explanation for the psychological condition I refer to as psychopathy. It is potentially possible that it can be promoted if not outright caused by deep enough social traumas. So is it possible that psychopathy is similar to schizophrenia, the underlying cause can be neurological but the trigger can be social interactions, if not in all cases then at least a significant minority of cases. Before I proceed to the next topic I would like to point out that even the most abhorrent behavior makes sense to the person committing it. In my admittedly short stay on earth I’ve yet to see a madman or a sane man who would seriously admit that their behavior is not what they want to do and keep doing it. Most behavior is a way of avoiding an imagined or real danger and as such behavioral therapy can reduce or eliminate most mental disorders. However, this depends on the persons desire to change or confront their fears and as such psychopathy is theoretically either incurable or prohibitively difficult to cure as the person has no desire to change. From the standpoint of a person who suffers from OCD they have a problem and they want to change or rid themselves of the problem, even if it takes them a long time they at least have a chance. From the standpoint of survival and from the standpoint of success a psychopath is heavily in control of their lives even if they lack some of the higher emotional abilities that non psychopaths have. Higher and more developed is not necessarily always a good thing, a great many highly developed life forms have perished in the course of time while the amoeba still survives.
Biological VS Societal
To return to the point I made earlier, is psychopathy biological or societal, nature or nurture if you will. To answer that question with any accuracy I feel we must step outside the normal scope of psychology and biology and look at human society as a large scale organism onto itself as I stated earlier. To understand biology and history we must take into account the fact that all organisms are inherently selfish, granted it is possible to be selfless and act to benefit others if enough willpower is used, on the basic level however almost all actions are likely to be motivated either directly or indirectly by selfishness. So observing the actions of psychopath we must for a moment set aside our own mask of sanity and try to put on the mask of insanity. Perhaps a bit too poetic but as the psychologist I quoted earlier said, they are like from another planet so setting aside the mask of sanity the mask of humanity and putting on the mask of insanity the mask of the beast is an apt metaphor. Viewing the world from behind the goggles of the predator the world is divided squarely into 2 types of people, pray and stronger predators. As stated by a convicted criminal who also scored very highly on the psychopathy checklist revised [21], doing it is just so easy. As repugnant as the behavior of psychopaths is to non psychopaths to the psychopaths themselves there is nothing wrong, people are so deserving of what the psychopath does that it is the victims who are at fault, they were the ones who presented the psychopath with such a good opportunity, they were the ones who needed a lesson. To return to the point of Nature V Nurture, I might be so bold as to argue that psychopathy is the logical and proper behavior for those who exhibit it, they drive the wheel of evolution forward by their actions, at least as far as their DNA is concerned. If we must ask is psychopathy the proper way to proceed we need to hold a mirror to our own society and ask if war is the proper way to proceed. If it is proper to cause 2 billion people to live in near constant danger of dying from either hunger, thirst, or easily preventable disease and let the top 0.0000005% of humanity hold so much money that most of the problems relating to poverty could be solved if that money was used on humanitarian work[22]. So before we use our moral and judge the psychopaths we should keep the goggles of psychopathy on for a while longer. Instead of focusing only on the psychopaths who make their presence known by their actions should we not also focus on the actions of non psychopathic people who behave in a psychopathic fashion. It is often easy to set our sight on a single societal group, be it the Jews, Germans, Gays, Lesbians or Psychopaths and blame them for all our problems instead of looking in the mirror. It is certainly true that from a societal standpoint psychopaths cause a great deal of crime and a great many of the violent offences in particular. It is also equally true that it does not take a great deal of effort to save the lives of thousands of people, the fact that people so hate psychopaths can be partially explained by projection. It is easy to project our own failings and our own problems onto the psychopaths and use our internal guidelines to try to correct the behavior of another instead of simply removing the other from the societal context. Instead of a live and let live policy civilization exhibits a strong live and let die policy. The utter disregard that people have for the welfare of other people and the incredible lack of ethics that such thing as industrial animal farming shows is perhaps more telling of us than it is of the psychopaths. So is psychopathy an expression of the nature of humanity simply brought up for us to see and perhaps change our ways?
Viewing Psychopathy from a neurological standpoint it is clear that the brain of a psychopath is markedly different especially in the pre-frontal cortex from that of a non psychopathic human. However it is also clear that a person who is a dry drunk or a homosexual or even artistically talented has a markedly different brain. Does the brain arise as a result of the action or the action as a result of the brain, the age old question of predetermination versus freewill? There is definitely compelling evidence for both from a neurological standpoint, there are certain brain tests which would indicate that all actions are predetermined, the way the brain decides to press a button is quite striking. The areas of the brain responsible for the movement light up before parts of the brain responsible for the decision to move light up. So in essence the brain knows you are going to move your hand before you do [23]. There are a wide variety of potential explanations for this ranging from misunderstanding of the functions of the brain to time traveling electrons. For the present moment however the debate has not been answered conclusively and is unlikely to be any time soon. While the underlying biological differences between the brains of psychopaths and non psychopaths are clearly understood it is impossible to say if this is caused by nature or nurture. Long term stress exhibited by victims of sexual assault or sufferers from PTSD has shown to significantly alter the brain. As I said it is potentially true that psychopathy is caused by Nature or Nurture, both have a strong case to make and neither has been able to disprove the other. It is a point of strong speculation on how nature and nurture should be divided. It is clear that the DNA of the child is definitely an act of nature, but what genes are active and how the child acts can be both of nature and nurture. Any hormones that affect the child while in the womb can be attributed to nurture as the mental state of the pregnant mother can greatly affect the hormones and thus the mind of the child. While it is beyond the scope of this essay and beyond the scope of my knowledge and abilities to truly classify psychopathy into one or another category I can try to view it from an evolutionary standpoint.
As I stated earlier the actions of the psychopath makes sense from their point of view, equally the actions against psychopaths makes sense from non psychopathic point of view. As life is inherently a struggle between different forms of life even inside the same species it is obvious that most actions arising from this struggle are designed to further the survival of the self or those directly linked to the self. As such humanitarian aid is frowned upon by those with a narrow definition of self or whose interests are being threatened by aid to the poor. If once Business Empire depends on the ability to farm cotton or gather mineral from Africans at dismal wages and sell them for exuberant profits to their prospective markets or oil from economically and socially devastated countries that suddenly rises in value 15 times after it leaves the war zones and reaches the western markets. It is obvious that any attempt to raise the living quality of the areas needed to produce goods will meet stiff resistance even if the psychopathic mindset is not used. So the snakes in suits or psychopaths in office, is perhaps not the real problem, psychologically or otherwise. The real problem is the society that promotes and perhaps through subconscious actions even causes psychopathy. I hesitate to guess on the potential of millions upon millions of people suffering so the rich can have their private yachts on children. How the soul anathema as it is in western psychology might react to being born into a world with an organized system of suffering to feed it, would it let go of its humanity and become what we have created for it. I understand that to even mention the word soul in a western psychology essay is as unpopular as mentioning that the earth is round or that earth orbits the sun was in western intellectual circles in the 14th century.
So then I ask, how have we come to this point that, even if we exclude the existence of souls and things of that nature, that humanity considers it the best course of action for itself to sit on a proverbial pile of skulls and struggle with one another eternally for the top position. Rolling that boulder up a hill like Sisyphus eternally trying to accomplish the peace and standard of living that is ever elusive as it depends on others not having it and those that have nothing will always try to gain everything. So our very society is formed in a way that promotes ruthless competition for limited resources and the competition itself has taken on an absurd form. With the US yearly military budget now so grossly overpowered that the limited resources they are competing for are being used to keep competing for even less limited resources. Sadly this seems to only strike those who are struck by the US military budget as odd and rarely evokes more than a curious joke from the present western intellectuals. The very word, disorder, means something that does not fit into the accepted norm, if the accept norm of society is as seems likely the procurement of resources at any means available from others then psychopathy is really not a disorder. If we however view society as some form of altruistic all for one and one for all utopia then it becomes obvious that psychopathy as well as most human behavior is deviant from the norm however, realistically speaking human society is hardly any kind of altruistic utopian society.
So can it not be argued, even if psychopathy supposedly has organic causes in the brain dysfunctions that the true cause is in a society that espouses psychopathic values? Or is the charge that there might truly be something wrong with our society as repugnant as saying that the victim of rape might also have a responsibility to bare for the action? Perhaps these questions are better left to more capable hands but I must still point out that our society is truly psychopathic in more than one way as I pointed out before. That the only real difference between a psychopath who abuses randomly and a healthy man who abuses purposefully those in the distance is the randomness of the psychopath’s actions. The psychopath has no compassion even for those close to him like normal humans do. If I run a factory or a corporation and kill thousands or even millions over the course of decades to bring my products to the western markets I make the Forbes 500 lists. If I do the same with a gun I make the FBI’s most wanted lists. This irony does not escape the mind of a psychopath either.
Conclusions
The conclusions I have drawn from writing this essay and spending the last decade reading a great deal of material about psychopathy as well as other forms of disruptive behavior is simple, whatever the cause of psychopathy, Nature or Nurture we must face psychopathy as a whole far more seriously than we have now! If psychopathy is caused by our own societal choices then we must look in the mirror and see what it is that is making us as a society bring forth psychopathy in such a way that is causing billions to suffer needlessly? If Psychopathy is caused by biological factors then we should try our best to find a cure and a way to prevent psychopathy from ever surfacing, even then, I believe it is of the utmost importance that we as a society look into a mirror and see what we have become. While it is normally not the task of psychology to act as philosophy and ask these hard questions I feel compelled to do so. Why are we as a society still complacent, why can we not expand our sphere of family to cover the entire humanity, why is it that we can so easily stand by and allow billions to suffer when in reality it would only take us less than to move a finger to help them. I’m hesitant to say this but if there truly is a God out there that is looking down on us I’m certain that we would not be judged favorably. Instead of marching people into the concentration camps, two by two we march them to our mines and factories and tell them to work until they die of the poisons and the dangers we bring upon them. That it is alright to abuse by ignorance but not by design. That it is alright to kill if you know not what you are doing.
During the Nuremberg trials many tried to appeal that they were only doing their job and it did not work then and it will not work in the eyes of any moral judge. As long as psychology describes illness based on inability to fit into mainstream society and as long as main stream society is as it appears to be dominated by its lack of empathy. Psychology will always miss the big picture regarding psychopathy as well as other illness of that nature, that they are only doing openly what others do covertly and true enough, psychopathy is detected only by its outer actions and what people with psychopathy get caught doing, thus the distinction into successful and unsuccessful psychopaths, those who abuse and get caught and those who abuse and don’t get caught.
Psychopathy is right at home in our society.
Bibliography and Citations
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Diagnostic_criteria_and_PCL-R_assessment
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2943160.stm
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_M._Cleckley
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPD
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
[6] http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18573/
[6.1] http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/182/1/5
[7] Psychopaths and response to treatment Rice, Harris and Cormier (1992). Text can be bought online if searched for, I have a copy from a friend in Cardiff university.
[8] http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/58/8/737?lookupType=volpage&vol=58&fp=737&view=full
[9] http://hack.fi/~muzzy/lapsiporno/
[10] Dr. Robert Hare; Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. One of the quotes from psychopaths.
[11] http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~pzapf/classes/PY761/Week%207%20Notes.htm
[12] Dr. Robert Hare; Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. One of the quotes from psychologist.
[13] http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html
[14] http://academic.kellogg.edu/mandel/hansen_rev.htm
[15] http://books.google.fi/books?id=Pze8UEwpMVsC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=sex+offender+charm&source=web&ots=K6GzlnJsr5&sig=Q3ywlVKjBH5OKa6YKtpc8lRdiTI&hl=fi
[16] http://prorev.com/2007/11/george-bush-has-always-liked-torture.html
[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sexuality
[18] Various primates as well as wolf packs or bears can intentionally kill another after long term planning to gain something even if it risks its own long term survival. Single source difficult to acquire but reading on animal behavior will produce an acceptable source.
[19] Source is a little fuzzy here as well as, there are discovery channel documents about the different behaviors of primate groups under stress but finding an appropriate one here is difficult.
[20] Previous points are valid for this as well, I would recommend reading up on the social structures of small monkeys for an appropriate reference.
[21] Dr. Robert Hare; Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. One of the quotes from psychopaths.
[22] http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/free_forbes/2003/0317/087.html 476 billionaires total net worth is 1.7trillionUSD. http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/index.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations With an UN yearly budget of 20 billion USD to 5 billion depending on source. That 1700 billion could be spent to fund the entire UN for 85-340 years. For example, the cost of a vaccination program for Africa and Asia that would save up to 10 million lives is 4 billion USD http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/2006/0516iffim.htm At a cost of 0.2% of the total worth of the top 476 billionaires of the world.
[23] I apologize for not being able to provide the source for this, I’ve seen it several times in scientific magazines but can’t track them down anymore.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
My new book [Work in Progress]
This is a work in progress in no particular hurry. Feel free to read and comment.
Book 1
Chapter1
Mistakes I made on the road homeward.
The tentative working title for this book is “Mistakes I made on the road homeward.” Hopefully after I am done writing it will still be an accurate title. One of the most important steps on the road home, the road to the inner self, the core self and in essence to who you are and who you want to be is admitting once mistakes. The second step on the road is letting go of the blame. Could just as easily be the millionth step because when one lets go of the blame one is almost to the goal anyway so it’s all relative really.
My biggest mistake is … self hatred? Or perhaps it is my rational mind or my obesity. Or the very search for the mistake that is the mistake itself. I don’t know that yet and I hope that by writing this book I will. It is difficult to hold all the thoughts in a coherent form for long, over the last 10 years I have gathered so many thoughts and ideas about myself that it is getting impossible to hold them all for any period of time and try to integrate them into who I am and still remember not to lose more when I integrate less. So I wrote the first book in an effort to teach healing, views on the universe and go through my personal purgatory emotionally. What I called books in the first book are closer to acts or parts. In the future I will attempt to refer to them as parts or acts instead of individual books. So this is my second book by the new calculation. This second book then will be more about my study of my own mistakes on a more personal level as I go through my own healing journey now that I am out of the emotional purgatory I was in during the first book. Having just recovered from emotional breakups and the likes I start this second book from a far more balanced approach, ready to come out of the emotional sauna and take my first uneasy steps on this road. Soon I will leave my country of birth, Finland, and go on a journey I do not know where to. This journey was started by me long before I was born, by the choices I made in the past lives that lead me here and through the infinity all of my existence has culminated on this one point, this point that will lead me away from the womb. Of course every step of the road is a step that the entire universe listens to with silent reverence as well as a cacophony of applause.
Even the smallest of ants taking the smallest of steps warrants a symphony of ecstasy from a universe that knows nothing but beauty. So, now I am sitting on the doorstep looking out, where will this new path lead I wonder, who will I meet, what will I laugh about, what will I cry about, how will I suffer, how will I enjoy. All that my mind is focused on is how exciting it will be. All the feelings of dread, fear, anxiety, and horror are mixed in a pot in my stomach and my soul throws in one breath of spices and it is all transformed into loving anticipation for the journey ahead. I will try not to bore the universe with too many details of how this journey came about but it is best to write it down at the beginning.
I am a conscientious objector, when I was assigned to work at a government facility, the supervisor and I did not exactly see eye to eye, and eventually the situation reached a point where the supervisor forged documents against my wishes and postponed my service illegally. I sued and I was returned to service but by that time the situation was so inflamed that another incident was bound to happen, which did when they first refused to give me a mandatory work assignment in effect once again delaying my service illegally and then refusing to compensate any of the trouble they caused. After this I was forced to admit that Finland despite my deep love for my country and commitment to it, was and still is a class society. Thus I refused to serve as I was being seriously mistreated and threatened for doing my job as a conscientious objector. I took the matter to case and lost, as I am writing this I face four and a half month in prison because I refuse to be a warrior, because in essence I refuse to kill others to defend a state that does not defend its own.
Like Mahatma Gandhi I refuse to accept tyranny and a silent class society as the way forward. I refuse to live in a society where it is accept that the government teaches how to kill for free but to learn first aid you have to pay. I refuse to live in a country where there are tens of thousands of homeless people risking death every day, and we spend billions on defense, preparing for a war that nobody can win. It is like a man spending his entire life building his sons funerary pyre but never having any children. So I leave, in the hope that Finland will wake up and see what it is doing to itself. I know there is little chance for that as my life is too small and too insignificant, yet I do it anyway. It is not about how small or insignificant my life or my actions are. It is about standing up to tyranny and oppression.
So I leave, I leave my country of birth, I leave the country where my family has lived for more than 10 generations. I hope I will come back one day, what the future holds in store for me I can not say.
It is so hard, so hard to think I have to leave. I know I should simply lay back and let it happen, to go with the flow and let what is going to happen to happen. I always have a choice but I’m not sitting here to make a choice, I am here to try to understand it. Then again, I’ve made my choice and I do not write about it here in the hopes of changing my future, I write about it here in the hopes of changing your future. There is divine beauty in everything in fact everything is nothing but divine beauty. I do not refuse to serve because violence is wrong by definition a man who makes a choice to kill is as beautiful as the man who makes a choice to love. In the eyes of God, if I dare to even think what he would see, all are equal and all acts are one. So I am here, choosing to refuse armed service not because killing is wrong but because killing is unnecessary. In a world where we struggle for resources with too few for too many killing would be necessary, or more accurately, death would be necessary. But in a world where there is more than enough to go around for everyone and as societies develop birth rates decline we no longer need to kill and no longer need to struggle.
When we are threatened with violence we should first avoid our attacker, then embrace our attacker and if nothing else works, prevent our attacker. Meaning that we should seek to avoid confrontation, then reconcile differences and only then seek to defend ourselves with force and never strike in anger or in vengeance. If our neighbor takes our land in a war it is theirs and we should not seek to gain it back years or even generations later. As long as there is a way to survive on the kindness of friends we should never seek to survive on the weakness of our foes. A strong friend is always better than a weak enemy. If you surround yourself with weak enemies you can rule and dominate, one spell of weakness and you will find yourself surrounded by stronger enemies. If you surround yourself with strong friends no matter how weak you might be you will be safe.
So, we should seek to be friends to all and enemies to none. Not because it is what weaklings or cowards would do but because it is what a true leader amongst nations would do. Seek to be friends with all and enemies with none. Even those whom we hostile to us would be our friends, and like friends in error we should wait patiently for them to correct their ways so we can welcome them as brothers and sisters! All nations just as all living creatures need a system to defend themselves with. Countries need armies but before that they need something to defend. Is there a purpose for a defense if all you are defending is a system of inequality, illogicality and injustice?
Love is the answer, when you act out of love and not out of fear or hate you will be acting in accordance with your higher desires and through that, the will of god. When you defend your country or your land with the force of arms and do so in accordance with love combined with wisdom and courage you will do great things. A country governed by fear, by a fear of the foreign, fear of the alien or the strange assaulting a country governed by love will succeed if the country governed by love does not defend itself. The country governed by love can strike with the smallest amount of force needed to incapacitate the enemy and tend to those who no longer threaten it, with equal love as it does to those that love it. When your immune system fails and you get ill your body has to kill those viruses or bacteria that are already in and threatening you, but before that happened your body had to have a long series of weaknesses leading to the eventual illness. When tissue or cells don’t get energy and release of toxins as they need to they slowly build up until they get ill and eventually a sickness sets in, by which point the immune system has to step in. It is possible to tend to your body well and reduce the amount of viruses and bacteria that can enter you at all but some bacteria will always enter and your choice to stay alive is stronger than their choice to kill you. But still it is possible to vastly reduce, even if not completely eliminate death in your body by making it impossible for bacteria to get a foothold in it.
This is of course just my view as the universe and god, at least as I understand it, has no preference what so ever so you are just as right as I am. One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is realize that abusers, the dirtiest child molesting pedophiles and Stalin’s and Hitler’s in the world are just as beautiful as you or me or Jesus Christ or any other creature that has ever lived. They were not born with the tag on their forehead that reads, sinner, their actions were not and are not inherently bad any more than our actions are, by negative, inherently good. Their actions simply are. What defines us and them is how we want to be in relation to them. What do we want our existence to say about pedophiles and mass murderers? Looking at the recent fairly popular movie 300 about the Spartans and the hero worship that their culture had I couldn’t help but feel saddened by the lack of mention that Spartans considered it a proper education for young girls age 13 to be given to older men to do their sexual bidding, though I must point out it was only anal sex. The Spartans thought it was all right if it was simply anal but they forbade vaginal intercourse for these sexual pupils until they were properly married or so has been told. In their society it was the thing to be and the way to be, had our supposedly modern values been used in that era it would have been considered barbaric and godless.
So who am I to go back in time and say they were wrong and I am right, just as I wonder, who am I to go sideways in time and say they are wrong and I am right. That the act of killing or raping is badly simply because. It is bad because I choose that I do not wish to be so. I do not wish to kill and I do not wish to rape but it is not inherently so. I’ve gone through a development that led me to this point where I choose to be something other than a killer or a rapist. But knowing that there are still killers and rapists in the world means I have to defend myself as I see fit or risk having my existence over-ruled by their desire. So towards that end I have to be in the physical and be in the now. That is also why a country must have an army, to enforce the collective ruling of the country against other countries. The only way to completely eliminate war and organized pain and suffering would be to change or force everyone to be peaceful and agree and such a world is a world where change is no longer happening, a world that is standing still. The wonder, the beauty and the horror of Earth is that we are a world that is not standing still, that we are a world that is fast moving from one disaster to another simply because objects moving fast get to make more choices and we as humans are a fast developing people, mere 10 millennia’s ago we were living in mud huts and running after deer with sticks in hand while now we are blasting rockets into space and a few years from now we will begin to really settle into space. Just so we don’t miss the adventure we will come across some new universal danger we have to face, resist, struggle, lose or overcome and head to the next challenge.
The more people resist and struggle, the more people seek to be more, to be less, to be enlightened, to be earthly, to be tall to be short the more choices we need and the faster we go. Like a fast beating heart making love, we will fill with all that the universe has to offer before we explode in joy and start it all over again. It is the fear of the end of our journey as well as the love of our journey that keeps the journey going. As the end of our journey approaches we are filled with both fear and love, fear of the end of our journey, what truly lies beyond and love at the end of our journey and the beginning of another. Love truly has no opposite love simply is. Opposite of love isn’t fear since fear is an expression of losing love and to lose something you need to have something. Fear and love are deeply connected and will remain that way for all time. It is fear we do not face and love we do not face that is the opposite of love. Opposite of love is that which we do not meet and that which we do not feel.
Were a meteorite to strike the earth today and I to watch it come down I would be filled with fear as fear is a part of the human existence, I would also be filled with love, I would be filled with love at the end of the journey and return to the beginning. If I were to deny myself the feeling of fear I would deny myself a large part of my existence, a large part of what can bring me joy. It is like a rollercoaster, if you do not fear it there is no joy in it, it does not grip your stomach it does not make you love life if it is all safe. So enjoy your fear, enjoy your limited existence, enjoy all the limitations as they are in part what define you, they are also a great important part of who you are and who you’ve chosen to be. If you fear losing love then rejoice in that fear, it tells you that you value your love, you value what you love and be true to yourself. Act as you feel, if you feel fear don’t turn it into anger if it did not come to you as anger, let the fear come to you, let it flow to every cell and every fiber of your being, let it be everything you are. Go with the experience until something else comes along for you to play with. God answered to Neale Donald Walsch in terms he could understand because he asked the questions, God answers to you in terms you can understand because you are asking the questions. God talks to all of us in our terms always saying precisely what we want to hear because there can be nothing else. I would venture as far as to say that god speaks to the schizophrenics in their terms just as he speaks to the saints in theirs. Both of them have chosen their path and need their support, when I blame myself it sounds the same as when I praise myself. In my darkest moments the voice of god is there just as in my brightest moments the voice of god is there.
God spoke to Mohammad in terms he could understand, he spoke to Buddha in terms he could understand, he spoke to Neale in terms he could understand and speaks to me in terms I can understand. God speaks in every small piece of universe and every large piece of creation in the sky. There is no boundary to creation and we can do what we wish. So love when you hate, love when you love, love when you fear, love when ever you are and what ever you are. Some times let go and forget it all, sink back into oblivion and rise again slowly reaching realization, cry about your mistakes, shake, throw up, feel sick, enjoy, laugh, promise to never make the same mistakes, lie back and start all over again. What ever you do God loves you because God could to no else. God doesn’t tell you to enjoy life and do something, God tells you to enjoy life because there is nothing but joy, you simply need to be reminded of it every now and then simply for the joy of remembering it.
I’ve been here 3 times or more in this life time. Come to the top, realize it all, spin around and jump back into the water and climb again. Some people climb mountains, us spiritual enthusiasts climb truths, we scurry to the top, we fight clean, we fight dirty and once we get there we laugh, party, sigh and jump back into the water laughing the entire way down.
I can understand the true face of god but never talk about it any word I use to describe it always marks away something that it is as well. How do you say where to shoot to hit a target when you are in inside a bubble? No matter where you aim you will always hit the bubble and no matter where you say you shouldn’t aim you will always hit the same bubble. So it is pointless to describe gods love directly, I can only hope to describe its actions, but even that is impossible as all actions are of equal value, I can’t say you should love and not hate as God loves hate as much as God loves love. God is the absolute everything, from the most judgmental pieces of existence to the most all loving piece and everything in between. That is the difficulty in describing God, no matter how you describe it you will always be wrong, just as much as you will always be right. You can be a judgmental preacher and be right, you can be a loving and be right, you can be neither, both, all, or the box by the door and always be right and always be wrong. There really is no up and no down, no left and no right, nothing at all. Let there be light, let there be matter, sound, electricity, sports cars, MTV and pop music, though hopefully less of the last two. The thing that brought all of this together, all of this energy to matter was a thought, when a choice is made in a state with no choices that choice twists matter itself, forms it into a shape of your choosing. So the spark that set off this chain of creation was a simple thought that shaped the background energy of clay, to put it in biblical terms.
So what links all of these creations to each other, was it simply one background word, one creator somewhere far hidden that set it all in motion and decided how gravity will work, how all the forces of nature will work, how they can be bent, how they can be broken, how they can be used. Or is it us, is it our thought, is it the self realizing machine, the world exists because we exists and we exists because the world exists. Information, wishes, electricity and even matter travel backwards in time. What if when I stand up and flex and look back in time and scream. Let there be light! That thought, that scream, that energy travels on the winds of time back to the very moment the universe was born and plays some part. Moments later and moments sooner someone who lives next to me would scream. Let there be darkness! That thought as well, that scream, would travel back in time and disrupt the process, setting off a chain of events that influences us both billions of years later. A chicken or the egg spanning billions of years!
So, back to the topic at hand, I don’t leave Finland because what my government did is inherently bad, I don’t refuse to do armed service because it is inherently bad, I refuse to do armed service because the Finnish armed forces no longer serve our country’s interests and they no longer serve my interests. I refuse to stand by a ruling that is unjust because it doesn’t serve the interests of Finland or my own to let an unjust ruling become the norm.
So, now that I’ve got that written down its time to get back to the topic of the book, mistakes I made on the road homeward. I don’t know if I’ll ever get home, if I’ll ever find the peace I’m looking for, probably not but I should at least try. So this is a collection of my worst mistakes, my worst blunders and how I came to make them and how I got a way out of them, from many different perspectives.
Let’s start off with the big one. Love
Mistake Numero Uno; Love!
Or how you are and always will be unworthy of love.
Or at least the perception that you will be, since that is what the world is, simple perceptions of something that is not in the perception but what the perception hopes to point to. So, the truth is you are and you always will be unworthy of love, simply because love isn’t earned, love is given. You don’t give love to those who deserve it through actions, you simply give love. You can never be worthy of love because love as it is, is universal and pure and to live a human life is never to be universal and never to be pure, there are only varying degrees of impurity and varying degrees of filth. So stop trying to earn love, stop trying to strive to become something you can never become. Accept that all human life will eventually fail and all human endeavors will eventually come to an end when the stars and all of existence grows cold and dead. At best you can stem the tide for a few years, to create something more, to hope that your actions will speak well of you when you are no longer around. Trying to earn love and trying to strive to actually accomplish something is akin to trying to earn all the money in the world. You can never accomplish it as the moment you have all the money it become worthless, people invent another form of money and what you hold will have no meaning and no value. So don’t strive to be perfect to earn love, accept love when it is given, love when you wish to give it and stop trying to be perfect because you’ll never be.
This is one of those things I would tattoo on my eyelids if I could. “You are unworthy of love” to stop fooling myself that I could possibly ever earn love and accept that love is given, not earned. But all that true nonsense aside. True because it happens to be true and nonsense because even if it is true it still makes little sense. Fact of the matter remains that all of us, through the virtue of reincarnation are the worst scum in existence, we are all rapists, murderers, pedophiles, serial killers. There isn’t one of us that is above any other of us and as soon as we forget that and start to think that I am worthy of divine love, earthly love or even the base love of good food and they are not is the moment we are judged. It is the proverbial black hole calling the kettle black. The reason earthly love, the love between people is judgmental is because there is death. If death did not exists then we would all be equal in our spirit and eventually nothing would differ from one another, for creation and for judgment and love to exist there must be death and there must be separation. What this changes for love is simple, universal love and the love of the divine, the love of all that is can never judge simply because we are all the same, a murder in this life can be mother Theresa in another. God knows this and so God does not judge, God gave judgment to us so we could judge as we see fit, gave us the power of good and evil, so we can decide for ourselves what we love. While it is impossible to ever earn love in the universal sense from the divine source, it is possible to act in accordance with other peoples desires and have them reward you. That may not be the same as the universal love but in a world of relatives, in a world where all life is truly relative and nothing has any real substance everything is relative, even love. So love is never earned in the grand sense but it can be earned from others for acting in accordance with what they want. So to get the physical relative love what one must do is not try to seek some higher universal purpose to life simply because there is none, there truly is no meaning to life, but to seek what the other person desires and act in accordance with that.
In that goal lies the real mistake I made, I always assumed that what people want is to be happy and to do happy things and all things of that nature. I painfully learned that this is not the case. People do not wish to be happy, people do not wish to be content, what people wish for is to be beaten around emotionally and physically. But more than anything else, people wish to feel superior. Being married to an abusive partner fills that desire, so does working for some illusionary position in an illusionary company on an illusionary existence, it makes one feel superior to those who work less. Our existence amounts to a contest to feel superior to others, even in a society designed to eliminate the desire to compete and the desire to feel superior will breed little more than a competition on who feels the least superior. People will compete in anything they can, especially love. So the mistake I made here is making myself readily available emotionally, assuming that people want happiness and offering to give them happiness. This lead me to a great many bumps and bruises in life. When I saw into the minds of people I realized that the key to receiving earthly love is to be difficult, to be distant and to be hard to get. I got more action than I wanted to, it didn’t make my life any easier but now I understood how to get what I wanted. So I was equally as lost as the people on the street, the people who wanted to feel superior. After I got what I thought I wanted I was still unhappy, still lost, getting the illusionary price of an illusionary love was still not enough, so the next logical question was what I really want since this illusion was clearly not it.
This has always been the center of my spiritual quest, love. I could stop, click my boots twice and I would be home faster than I could say Kansas, in home in heaven. But I don’t want to and I don’t do it so there must be something here I want.
The archangel and the girl in the mountains
I sit here once more, in front of my computer with thoughts running in my head, am I truly back here, back in the state of nirvana, back in the state of buddhahood. To even say it gives me shivers, have I truly fallen so far from knowing what is proper that I might say I’m in a state of buddhahood. That I’ve once attained what can’t be described. Yet my mind comforts me with what the great once have said before me, the wisdom of others fills my mind and whispers to me things I know to be true. That it would be the height of arrogance to say I am anything but what I am simply because to accept a gift I am given would offend those I mean to help. That I would be so tied to the world and the people in it that I could not dare to be myself out of fear that they would be offended, that what others think matters to me more than what I know to be true. It would be like Siddhartha abandoning his quest for buddhahood when he was called a failure by his ascetic brothers, had he chosen to value illusionary bonds over his goal of buddhahood he would have surrendered and never sat under the bodhi tree. To forsake what I know to be true simply to fulfill what others desire of me to do. Am I truly ready for this I wonder, am I truly ready for the steps I need to take if I finally surrender to the realization that I’ve reached buddhahood again. All the pain and all the emotions in my life have been set in motion by me and I can see how I did this, I did it when I was in this state the last time, I carefully chose my words an set in motion a chain of events which lead me here. Truly I must accept that it all returns back onto me, when mere weeks ago I would have cursed the world for giving me what I asked for now I feel differently, I am in state of buddhahood. Yet even when I say those words I can feel my stomach turning, I can feel my fear, my sadness all my feelings crying to me; “Let others do it, let others lead, don’t stand up, don’t act, don’t help, you know it will hurt, you know how much it will hurt, some weeks back you called to us in pain, you asked us to end it and now you wish to do it again, you wish to start it again.” I know how much power words have and how many ripples on the sea of souls will expand if I truly take this step. There is no going back, there is never the possibility to go back, only to stop going or to go forward and eventually we all go forward.
I would trade all of this, I would trade all of what I have attained for a chance to simply lie in the grass, to lie next to someone I love and look at the clouds as they dance in the sky. Yet that is not my path that is not what I have chosen to do. Sometimes the desire to go home, the desire to go back to where it all began and simply lie still for an eternity overwhelms me and I forget why I am here. In time I must go through it again to continue my work but that time is not now. To have a pupil, to show someone the way you must be on their level, it is of little use to be so high no one can see you, the real teacher is exactly where others are, not above not below. When the pupil builds a mountain of repressed emotions so they may look down on others when they try to reach heaven you must build a mountain of your own repressed emotions. Sometimes the pupil must struggle to reach the master, sometimes the master truly must be on the mountaintop simply because that is where the pupil thinks he should be. It is equally true that sometimes the master must be in the gutter, must be the worst drunk, the worst addict, the worst pedophile to teach us the highest things, to teach us sometimes the master must do this. But this is so simply because the master must be like a mist around the student, never hindering their vision but always gently guiding. If the student falls into the ocean the mist must follow. To clear a vision is to allow one to see. This is why you must, as a teacher, be ready to do what is asked of you. I have enough scars on my heart, soul and body to prove that I’ve been down in the thorn bushes with the addicts, the drunks and the pedophiles. So, in the end, I would not trade all of this away for anything, I have had my greatest wishes within reach, all I needed to do was reach out my hand and I would have had all I wanted to and this is when I always realize that I am already doing what I most want to do. Many masters forget why it is necessary to be high, they meditate and remove themselves from the community they are meant to help because this is what Buddha or Christ did so many years ago and so this is what they do now, they don’t realize that they didn’t do it because the action itself was important, they did it because that is what the students wanted, they wanted Buddha to be the way he was, he is and was the precious wish fulfilling jewel. The wish you have when you go to him is what he will give you, you ask him for help and he will help you in what you ask. Same is true for Christ, he gave to his followers and the people he met only what they asked of him and no more. When you as a teacher forget that the student is not there to help you but you are there to help the student you lose your way and if you are not careful you will not find it again this lifetime. When the Buddhist monks in Tibet forgot that the country was not there to maintain them but they were there to maintain the country the invited the karma of a Chinese invasion. Truly it is painful to watch as the Tibetan exiles still yearn for a country they know they can not have, to return to a time they can not return to. I would carefully remind Tibetans that just as Siddhartha had to leave his palace to find his way so must you leave your home to find your way. In time you will return to your home but it will not be before you have found your way in the world.
I was just in the mountains with a pupil of mine, a young girl no older than I when first attained this state and was aware of it. We were not in mountains of earth and stone but in mountains of repressed emotions, in mountains of our own making. For so long she had pushed down everything she could not deal with and try to reach higher and higher. After a while all that was left of her was her soul and her heart and she was starting to cut those into small pieces too and push them down as well so she could try to reach the heaven she always sought. She would have reached it but she would have rejected it, she would no longer be able to live in heaven because that mountain of repressed emotions would contain all she ever was and when you have no more dreams you can’t be in a place that fulfills your dreams. You would find only nothingness. When you discard your emotions and your feelings to be lighter you become like a hot air balloon, with nothing but a sack of skin to protect the balloon that is where your heart used to be and everything that touches you will be a danger to you. You can’t let anything close because to hug you too tight would be to release the air and you would collapse like an empty bag onto yourself. You must always guard yourself more and more closely because the more of yourself you abandon the bigger the bag becomes and more dangerous it becomes for someone to be close to you. After a while nothing more remains than skin and armor, a heavy armor to protect the balloon that is your skin and eventually you start to sink as the armor becomes heavier and heavier and you have nothing left of yourself to throw away. The way out of this is to slowly bring back inside all the things you threw away, to stop trying to climb, sit down and start shifting through the mountain you were walking on. This is where the teacher must remember, to have gone through what the pupil is now going through, to remember what it was like and to remember what is important. To show the student that despite all the piles of emotions they were walking on side by side it is easy to come down again, the mountain can be cleared away in a fraction of a second if the will is there. To always show that it is possible, if the student strives to do it they will liberate themselves and no longer need a guardian, no longer need a teacher.
So there I was, mere days ago, on the mountaintop of repressed emotions side by side with my student, who for the first time in a long time stopped and looked in her heart, looked at all the things she had thrown away, turned around and look at the path she had taken. She had always done as was asked of her in the spirit, always been there to help others and been there to do the bidding of others, so I reached a time when I had to leave her to clear out the mountain herself, I poked a hole in her bubble and handed her a shovel and a bucket to clear it all out and left. The most difficult part about the state and path I am on is that I must always leave in the end.
The other part of the name for this chapter, the archangel, is one of my forms, just as it is one of your forms. Simply because I choose to hold true to that form in my life does not mean I am any higher than you. If you react with anger to someone saying this then study your feeling, why would it make you angry? Why does it make you angry that a normal man can become Buddha or an Archangel or anything he chooses to be. Siddhartha was a spoiled prince with no knowledge of the world until he was 29 and saw the world for what it was for the first time. Jesus was nothing more than the son of a carpenter born to a insignificant town in a poor part of the world yet he rose to great things, perhaps not the son of god, perhaps son of god but the lesson is the same non the less, never judge someone based simply on what you think they are. In your heart you should always remember that it all comes down to you, all the strands of destiny, all the Buddha’s and Christ’s and the entirety of existence is at your fingertips begging for you to play with it, so perhaps I, the old archangel, will stay here for one more show, for one last hurrah.
Book 1
Chapter1
Mistakes I made on the road homeward.
The tentative working title for this book is “Mistakes I made on the road homeward.” Hopefully after I am done writing it will still be an accurate title. One of the most important steps on the road home, the road to the inner self, the core self and in essence to who you are and who you want to be is admitting once mistakes. The second step on the road is letting go of the blame. Could just as easily be the millionth step because when one lets go of the blame one is almost to the goal anyway so it’s all relative really.
My biggest mistake is … self hatred? Or perhaps it is my rational mind or my obesity. Or the very search for the mistake that is the mistake itself. I don’t know that yet and I hope that by writing this book I will. It is difficult to hold all the thoughts in a coherent form for long, over the last 10 years I have gathered so many thoughts and ideas about myself that it is getting impossible to hold them all for any period of time and try to integrate them into who I am and still remember not to lose more when I integrate less. So I wrote the first book in an effort to teach healing, views on the universe and go through my personal purgatory emotionally. What I called books in the first book are closer to acts or parts. In the future I will attempt to refer to them as parts or acts instead of individual books. So this is my second book by the new calculation. This second book then will be more about my study of my own mistakes on a more personal level as I go through my own healing journey now that I am out of the emotional purgatory I was in during the first book. Having just recovered from emotional breakups and the likes I start this second book from a far more balanced approach, ready to come out of the emotional sauna and take my first uneasy steps on this road. Soon I will leave my country of birth, Finland, and go on a journey I do not know where to. This journey was started by me long before I was born, by the choices I made in the past lives that lead me here and through the infinity all of my existence has culminated on this one point, this point that will lead me away from the womb. Of course every step of the road is a step that the entire universe listens to with silent reverence as well as a cacophony of applause.
Even the smallest of ants taking the smallest of steps warrants a symphony of ecstasy from a universe that knows nothing but beauty. So, now I am sitting on the doorstep looking out, where will this new path lead I wonder, who will I meet, what will I laugh about, what will I cry about, how will I suffer, how will I enjoy. All that my mind is focused on is how exciting it will be. All the feelings of dread, fear, anxiety, and horror are mixed in a pot in my stomach and my soul throws in one breath of spices and it is all transformed into loving anticipation for the journey ahead. I will try not to bore the universe with too many details of how this journey came about but it is best to write it down at the beginning.
I am a conscientious objector, when I was assigned to work at a government facility, the supervisor and I did not exactly see eye to eye, and eventually the situation reached a point where the supervisor forged documents against my wishes and postponed my service illegally. I sued and I was returned to service but by that time the situation was so inflamed that another incident was bound to happen, which did when they first refused to give me a mandatory work assignment in effect once again delaying my service illegally and then refusing to compensate any of the trouble they caused. After this I was forced to admit that Finland despite my deep love for my country and commitment to it, was and still is a class society. Thus I refused to serve as I was being seriously mistreated and threatened for doing my job as a conscientious objector. I took the matter to case and lost, as I am writing this I face four and a half month in prison because I refuse to be a warrior, because in essence I refuse to kill others to defend a state that does not defend its own.
Like Mahatma Gandhi I refuse to accept tyranny and a silent class society as the way forward. I refuse to live in a society where it is accept that the government teaches how to kill for free but to learn first aid you have to pay. I refuse to live in a country where there are tens of thousands of homeless people risking death every day, and we spend billions on defense, preparing for a war that nobody can win. It is like a man spending his entire life building his sons funerary pyre but never having any children. So I leave, in the hope that Finland will wake up and see what it is doing to itself. I know there is little chance for that as my life is too small and too insignificant, yet I do it anyway. It is not about how small or insignificant my life or my actions are. It is about standing up to tyranny and oppression.
So I leave, I leave my country of birth, I leave the country where my family has lived for more than 10 generations. I hope I will come back one day, what the future holds in store for me I can not say.
It is so hard, so hard to think I have to leave. I know I should simply lay back and let it happen, to go with the flow and let what is going to happen to happen. I always have a choice but I’m not sitting here to make a choice, I am here to try to understand it. Then again, I’ve made my choice and I do not write about it here in the hopes of changing my future, I write about it here in the hopes of changing your future. There is divine beauty in everything in fact everything is nothing but divine beauty. I do not refuse to serve because violence is wrong by definition a man who makes a choice to kill is as beautiful as the man who makes a choice to love. In the eyes of God, if I dare to even think what he would see, all are equal and all acts are one. So I am here, choosing to refuse armed service not because killing is wrong but because killing is unnecessary. In a world where we struggle for resources with too few for too many killing would be necessary, or more accurately, death would be necessary. But in a world where there is more than enough to go around for everyone and as societies develop birth rates decline we no longer need to kill and no longer need to struggle.
When we are threatened with violence we should first avoid our attacker, then embrace our attacker and if nothing else works, prevent our attacker. Meaning that we should seek to avoid confrontation, then reconcile differences and only then seek to defend ourselves with force and never strike in anger or in vengeance. If our neighbor takes our land in a war it is theirs and we should not seek to gain it back years or even generations later. As long as there is a way to survive on the kindness of friends we should never seek to survive on the weakness of our foes. A strong friend is always better than a weak enemy. If you surround yourself with weak enemies you can rule and dominate, one spell of weakness and you will find yourself surrounded by stronger enemies. If you surround yourself with strong friends no matter how weak you might be you will be safe.
So, we should seek to be friends to all and enemies to none. Not because it is what weaklings or cowards would do but because it is what a true leader amongst nations would do. Seek to be friends with all and enemies with none. Even those whom we hostile to us would be our friends, and like friends in error we should wait patiently for them to correct their ways so we can welcome them as brothers and sisters! All nations just as all living creatures need a system to defend themselves with. Countries need armies but before that they need something to defend. Is there a purpose for a defense if all you are defending is a system of inequality, illogicality and injustice?
Love is the answer, when you act out of love and not out of fear or hate you will be acting in accordance with your higher desires and through that, the will of god. When you defend your country or your land with the force of arms and do so in accordance with love combined with wisdom and courage you will do great things. A country governed by fear, by a fear of the foreign, fear of the alien or the strange assaulting a country governed by love will succeed if the country governed by love does not defend itself. The country governed by love can strike with the smallest amount of force needed to incapacitate the enemy and tend to those who no longer threaten it, with equal love as it does to those that love it. When your immune system fails and you get ill your body has to kill those viruses or bacteria that are already in and threatening you, but before that happened your body had to have a long series of weaknesses leading to the eventual illness. When tissue or cells don’t get energy and release of toxins as they need to they slowly build up until they get ill and eventually a sickness sets in, by which point the immune system has to step in. It is possible to tend to your body well and reduce the amount of viruses and bacteria that can enter you at all but some bacteria will always enter and your choice to stay alive is stronger than their choice to kill you. But still it is possible to vastly reduce, even if not completely eliminate death in your body by making it impossible for bacteria to get a foothold in it.
This is of course just my view as the universe and god, at least as I understand it, has no preference what so ever so you are just as right as I am. One of the hardest things I’ve had to do is realize that abusers, the dirtiest child molesting pedophiles and Stalin’s and Hitler’s in the world are just as beautiful as you or me or Jesus Christ or any other creature that has ever lived. They were not born with the tag on their forehead that reads, sinner, their actions were not and are not inherently bad any more than our actions are, by negative, inherently good. Their actions simply are. What defines us and them is how we want to be in relation to them. What do we want our existence to say about pedophiles and mass murderers? Looking at the recent fairly popular movie 300 about the Spartans and the hero worship that their culture had I couldn’t help but feel saddened by the lack of mention that Spartans considered it a proper education for young girls age 13 to be given to older men to do their sexual bidding, though I must point out it was only anal sex. The Spartans thought it was all right if it was simply anal but they forbade vaginal intercourse for these sexual pupils until they were properly married or so has been told. In their society it was the thing to be and the way to be, had our supposedly modern values been used in that era it would have been considered barbaric and godless.
So who am I to go back in time and say they were wrong and I am right, just as I wonder, who am I to go sideways in time and say they are wrong and I am right. That the act of killing or raping is badly simply because. It is bad because I choose that I do not wish to be so. I do not wish to kill and I do not wish to rape but it is not inherently so. I’ve gone through a development that led me to this point where I choose to be something other than a killer or a rapist. But knowing that there are still killers and rapists in the world means I have to defend myself as I see fit or risk having my existence over-ruled by their desire. So towards that end I have to be in the physical and be in the now. That is also why a country must have an army, to enforce the collective ruling of the country against other countries. The only way to completely eliminate war and organized pain and suffering would be to change or force everyone to be peaceful and agree and such a world is a world where change is no longer happening, a world that is standing still. The wonder, the beauty and the horror of Earth is that we are a world that is not standing still, that we are a world that is fast moving from one disaster to another simply because objects moving fast get to make more choices and we as humans are a fast developing people, mere 10 millennia’s ago we were living in mud huts and running after deer with sticks in hand while now we are blasting rockets into space and a few years from now we will begin to really settle into space. Just so we don’t miss the adventure we will come across some new universal danger we have to face, resist, struggle, lose or overcome and head to the next challenge.
The more people resist and struggle, the more people seek to be more, to be less, to be enlightened, to be earthly, to be tall to be short the more choices we need and the faster we go. Like a fast beating heart making love, we will fill with all that the universe has to offer before we explode in joy and start it all over again. It is the fear of the end of our journey as well as the love of our journey that keeps the journey going. As the end of our journey approaches we are filled with both fear and love, fear of the end of our journey, what truly lies beyond and love at the end of our journey and the beginning of another. Love truly has no opposite love simply is. Opposite of love isn’t fear since fear is an expression of losing love and to lose something you need to have something. Fear and love are deeply connected and will remain that way for all time. It is fear we do not face and love we do not face that is the opposite of love. Opposite of love is that which we do not meet and that which we do not feel.
Were a meteorite to strike the earth today and I to watch it come down I would be filled with fear as fear is a part of the human existence, I would also be filled with love, I would be filled with love at the end of the journey and return to the beginning. If I were to deny myself the feeling of fear I would deny myself a large part of my existence, a large part of what can bring me joy. It is like a rollercoaster, if you do not fear it there is no joy in it, it does not grip your stomach it does not make you love life if it is all safe. So enjoy your fear, enjoy your limited existence, enjoy all the limitations as they are in part what define you, they are also a great important part of who you are and who you’ve chosen to be. If you fear losing love then rejoice in that fear, it tells you that you value your love, you value what you love and be true to yourself. Act as you feel, if you feel fear don’t turn it into anger if it did not come to you as anger, let the fear come to you, let it flow to every cell and every fiber of your being, let it be everything you are. Go with the experience until something else comes along for you to play with. God answered to Neale Donald Walsch in terms he could understand because he asked the questions, God answers to you in terms you can understand because you are asking the questions. God talks to all of us in our terms always saying precisely what we want to hear because there can be nothing else. I would venture as far as to say that god speaks to the schizophrenics in their terms just as he speaks to the saints in theirs. Both of them have chosen their path and need their support, when I blame myself it sounds the same as when I praise myself. In my darkest moments the voice of god is there just as in my brightest moments the voice of god is there.
God spoke to Mohammad in terms he could understand, he spoke to Buddha in terms he could understand, he spoke to Neale in terms he could understand and speaks to me in terms I can understand. God speaks in every small piece of universe and every large piece of creation in the sky. There is no boundary to creation and we can do what we wish. So love when you hate, love when you love, love when you fear, love when ever you are and what ever you are. Some times let go and forget it all, sink back into oblivion and rise again slowly reaching realization, cry about your mistakes, shake, throw up, feel sick, enjoy, laugh, promise to never make the same mistakes, lie back and start all over again. What ever you do God loves you because God could to no else. God doesn’t tell you to enjoy life and do something, God tells you to enjoy life because there is nothing but joy, you simply need to be reminded of it every now and then simply for the joy of remembering it.
I’ve been here 3 times or more in this life time. Come to the top, realize it all, spin around and jump back into the water and climb again. Some people climb mountains, us spiritual enthusiasts climb truths, we scurry to the top, we fight clean, we fight dirty and once we get there we laugh, party, sigh and jump back into the water laughing the entire way down.
I can understand the true face of god but never talk about it any word I use to describe it always marks away something that it is as well. How do you say where to shoot to hit a target when you are in inside a bubble? No matter where you aim you will always hit the bubble and no matter where you say you shouldn’t aim you will always hit the same bubble. So it is pointless to describe gods love directly, I can only hope to describe its actions, but even that is impossible as all actions are of equal value, I can’t say you should love and not hate as God loves hate as much as God loves love. God is the absolute everything, from the most judgmental pieces of existence to the most all loving piece and everything in between. That is the difficulty in describing God, no matter how you describe it you will always be wrong, just as much as you will always be right. You can be a judgmental preacher and be right, you can be a loving and be right, you can be neither, both, all, or the box by the door and always be right and always be wrong. There really is no up and no down, no left and no right, nothing at all. Let there be light, let there be matter, sound, electricity, sports cars, MTV and pop music, though hopefully less of the last two. The thing that brought all of this together, all of this energy to matter was a thought, when a choice is made in a state with no choices that choice twists matter itself, forms it into a shape of your choosing. So the spark that set off this chain of creation was a simple thought that shaped the background energy of clay, to put it in biblical terms.
So what links all of these creations to each other, was it simply one background word, one creator somewhere far hidden that set it all in motion and decided how gravity will work, how all the forces of nature will work, how they can be bent, how they can be broken, how they can be used. Or is it us, is it our thought, is it the self realizing machine, the world exists because we exists and we exists because the world exists. Information, wishes, electricity and even matter travel backwards in time. What if when I stand up and flex and look back in time and scream. Let there be light! That thought, that scream, that energy travels on the winds of time back to the very moment the universe was born and plays some part. Moments later and moments sooner someone who lives next to me would scream. Let there be darkness! That thought as well, that scream, would travel back in time and disrupt the process, setting off a chain of events that influences us both billions of years later. A chicken or the egg spanning billions of years!
So, back to the topic at hand, I don’t leave Finland because what my government did is inherently bad, I don’t refuse to do armed service because it is inherently bad, I refuse to do armed service because the Finnish armed forces no longer serve our country’s interests and they no longer serve my interests. I refuse to stand by a ruling that is unjust because it doesn’t serve the interests of Finland or my own to let an unjust ruling become the norm.
So, now that I’ve got that written down its time to get back to the topic of the book, mistakes I made on the road homeward. I don’t know if I’ll ever get home, if I’ll ever find the peace I’m looking for, probably not but I should at least try. So this is a collection of my worst mistakes, my worst blunders and how I came to make them and how I got a way out of them, from many different perspectives.
Let’s start off with the big one. Love
Mistake Numero Uno; Love!
Or how you are and always will be unworthy of love.
Or at least the perception that you will be, since that is what the world is, simple perceptions of something that is not in the perception but what the perception hopes to point to. So, the truth is you are and you always will be unworthy of love, simply because love isn’t earned, love is given. You don’t give love to those who deserve it through actions, you simply give love. You can never be worthy of love because love as it is, is universal and pure and to live a human life is never to be universal and never to be pure, there are only varying degrees of impurity and varying degrees of filth. So stop trying to earn love, stop trying to strive to become something you can never become. Accept that all human life will eventually fail and all human endeavors will eventually come to an end when the stars and all of existence grows cold and dead. At best you can stem the tide for a few years, to create something more, to hope that your actions will speak well of you when you are no longer around. Trying to earn love and trying to strive to actually accomplish something is akin to trying to earn all the money in the world. You can never accomplish it as the moment you have all the money it become worthless, people invent another form of money and what you hold will have no meaning and no value. So don’t strive to be perfect to earn love, accept love when it is given, love when you wish to give it and stop trying to be perfect because you’ll never be.
This is one of those things I would tattoo on my eyelids if I could. “You are unworthy of love” to stop fooling myself that I could possibly ever earn love and accept that love is given, not earned. But all that true nonsense aside. True because it happens to be true and nonsense because even if it is true it still makes little sense. Fact of the matter remains that all of us, through the virtue of reincarnation are the worst scum in existence, we are all rapists, murderers, pedophiles, serial killers. There isn’t one of us that is above any other of us and as soon as we forget that and start to think that I am worthy of divine love, earthly love or even the base love of good food and they are not is the moment we are judged. It is the proverbial black hole calling the kettle black. The reason earthly love, the love between people is judgmental is because there is death. If death did not exists then we would all be equal in our spirit and eventually nothing would differ from one another, for creation and for judgment and love to exist there must be death and there must be separation. What this changes for love is simple, universal love and the love of the divine, the love of all that is can never judge simply because we are all the same, a murder in this life can be mother Theresa in another. God knows this and so God does not judge, God gave judgment to us so we could judge as we see fit, gave us the power of good and evil, so we can decide for ourselves what we love. While it is impossible to ever earn love in the universal sense from the divine source, it is possible to act in accordance with other peoples desires and have them reward you. That may not be the same as the universal love but in a world of relatives, in a world where all life is truly relative and nothing has any real substance everything is relative, even love. So love is never earned in the grand sense but it can be earned from others for acting in accordance with what they want. So to get the physical relative love what one must do is not try to seek some higher universal purpose to life simply because there is none, there truly is no meaning to life, but to seek what the other person desires and act in accordance with that.
In that goal lies the real mistake I made, I always assumed that what people want is to be happy and to do happy things and all things of that nature. I painfully learned that this is not the case. People do not wish to be happy, people do not wish to be content, what people wish for is to be beaten around emotionally and physically. But more than anything else, people wish to feel superior. Being married to an abusive partner fills that desire, so does working for some illusionary position in an illusionary company on an illusionary existence, it makes one feel superior to those who work less. Our existence amounts to a contest to feel superior to others, even in a society designed to eliminate the desire to compete and the desire to feel superior will breed little more than a competition on who feels the least superior. People will compete in anything they can, especially love. So the mistake I made here is making myself readily available emotionally, assuming that people want happiness and offering to give them happiness. This lead me to a great many bumps and bruises in life. When I saw into the minds of people I realized that the key to receiving earthly love is to be difficult, to be distant and to be hard to get. I got more action than I wanted to, it didn’t make my life any easier but now I understood how to get what I wanted. So I was equally as lost as the people on the street, the people who wanted to feel superior. After I got what I thought I wanted I was still unhappy, still lost, getting the illusionary price of an illusionary love was still not enough, so the next logical question was what I really want since this illusion was clearly not it.
This has always been the center of my spiritual quest, love. I could stop, click my boots twice and I would be home faster than I could say Kansas, in home in heaven. But I don’t want to and I don’t do it so there must be something here I want.
The archangel and the girl in the mountains
I sit here once more, in front of my computer with thoughts running in my head, am I truly back here, back in the state of nirvana, back in the state of buddhahood. To even say it gives me shivers, have I truly fallen so far from knowing what is proper that I might say I’m in a state of buddhahood. That I’ve once attained what can’t be described. Yet my mind comforts me with what the great once have said before me, the wisdom of others fills my mind and whispers to me things I know to be true. That it would be the height of arrogance to say I am anything but what I am simply because to accept a gift I am given would offend those I mean to help. That I would be so tied to the world and the people in it that I could not dare to be myself out of fear that they would be offended, that what others think matters to me more than what I know to be true. It would be like Siddhartha abandoning his quest for buddhahood when he was called a failure by his ascetic brothers, had he chosen to value illusionary bonds over his goal of buddhahood he would have surrendered and never sat under the bodhi tree. To forsake what I know to be true simply to fulfill what others desire of me to do. Am I truly ready for this I wonder, am I truly ready for the steps I need to take if I finally surrender to the realization that I’ve reached buddhahood again. All the pain and all the emotions in my life have been set in motion by me and I can see how I did this, I did it when I was in this state the last time, I carefully chose my words an set in motion a chain of events which lead me here. Truly I must accept that it all returns back onto me, when mere weeks ago I would have cursed the world for giving me what I asked for now I feel differently, I am in state of buddhahood. Yet even when I say those words I can feel my stomach turning, I can feel my fear, my sadness all my feelings crying to me; “Let others do it, let others lead, don’t stand up, don’t act, don’t help, you know it will hurt, you know how much it will hurt, some weeks back you called to us in pain, you asked us to end it and now you wish to do it again, you wish to start it again.” I know how much power words have and how many ripples on the sea of souls will expand if I truly take this step. There is no going back, there is never the possibility to go back, only to stop going or to go forward and eventually we all go forward.
I would trade all of this, I would trade all of what I have attained for a chance to simply lie in the grass, to lie next to someone I love and look at the clouds as they dance in the sky. Yet that is not my path that is not what I have chosen to do. Sometimes the desire to go home, the desire to go back to where it all began and simply lie still for an eternity overwhelms me and I forget why I am here. In time I must go through it again to continue my work but that time is not now. To have a pupil, to show someone the way you must be on their level, it is of little use to be so high no one can see you, the real teacher is exactly where others are, not above not below. When the pupil builds a mountain of repressed emotions so they may look down on others when they try to reach heaven you must build a mountain of your own repressed emotions. Sometimes the pupil must struggle to reach the master, sometimes the master truly must be on the mountaintop simply because that is where the pupil thinks he should be. It is equally true that sometimes the master must be in the gutter, must be the worst drunk, the worst addict, the worst pedophile to teach us the highest things, to teach us sometimes the master must do this. But this is so simply because the master must be like a mist around the student, never hindering their vision but always gently guiding. If the student falls into the ocean the mist must follow. To clear a vision is to allow one to see. This is why you must, as a teacher, be ready to do what is asked of you. I have enough scars on my heart, soul and body to prove that I’ve been down in the thorn bushes with the addicts, the drunks and the pedophiles. So, in the end, I would not trade all of this away for anything, I have had my greatest wishes within reach, all I needed to do was reach out my hand and I would have had all I wanted to and this is when I always realize that I am already doing what I most want to do. Many masters forget why it is necessary to be high, they meditate and remove themselves from the community they are meant to help because this is what Buddha or Christ did so many years ago and so this is what they do now, they don’t realize that they didn’t do it because the action itself was important, they did it because that is what the students wanted, they wanted Buddha to be the way he was, he is and was the precious wish fulfilling jewel. The wish you have when you go to him is what he will give you, you ask him for help and he will help you in what you ask. Same is true for Christ, he gave to his followers and the people he met only what they asked of him and no more. When you as a teacher forget that the student is not there to help you but you are there to help the student you lose your way and if you are not careful you will not find it again this lifetime. When the Buddhist monks in Tibet forgot that the country was not there to maintain them but they were there to maintain the country the invited the karma of a Chinese invasion. Truly it is painful to watch as the Tibetan exiles still yearn for a country they know they can not have, to return to a time they can not return to. I would carefully remind Tibetans that just as Siddhartha had to leave his palace to find his way so must you leave your home to find your way. In time you will return to your home but it will not be before you have found your way in the world.
I was just in the mountains with a pupil of mine, a young girl no older than I when first attained this state and was aware of it. We were not in mountains of earth and stone but in mountains of repressed emotions, in mountains of our own making. For so long she had pushed down everything she could not deal with and try to reach higher and higher. After a while all that was left of her was her soul and her heart and she was starting to cut those into small pieces too and push them down as well so she could try to reach the heaven she always sought. She would have reached it but she would have rejected it, she would no longer be able to live in heaven because that mountain of repressed emotions would contain all she ever was and when you have no more dreams you can’t be in a place that fulfills your dreams. You would find only nothingness. When you discard your emotions and your feelings to be lighter you become like a hot air balloon, with nothing but a sack of skin to protect the balloon that is where your heart used to be and everything that touches you will be a danger to you. You can’t let anything close because to hug you too tight would be to release the air and you would collapse like an empty bag onto yourself. You must always guard yourself more and more closely because the more of yourself you abandon the bigger the bag becomes and more dangerous it becomes for someone to be close to you. After a while nothing more remains than skin and armor, a heavy armor to protect the balloon that is your skin and eventually you start to sink as the armor becomes heavier and heavier and you have nothing left of yourself to throw away. The way out of this is to slowly bring back inside all the things you threw away, to stop trying to climb, sit down and start shifting through the mountain you were walking on. This is where the teacher must remember, to have gone through what the pupil is now going through, to remember what it was like and to remember what is important. To show the student that despite all the piles of emotions they were walking on side by side it is easy to come down again, the mountain can be cleared away in a fraction of a second if the will is there. To always show that it is possible, if the student strives to do it they will liberate themselves and no longer need a guardian, no longer need a teacher.
So there I was, mere days ago, on the mountaintop of repressed emotions side by side with my student, who for the first time in a long time stopped and looked in her heart, looked at all the things she had thrown away, turned around and look at the path she had taken. She had always done as was asked of her in the spirit, always been there to help others and been there to do the bidding of others, so I reached a time when I had to leave her to clear out the mountain herself, I poked a hole in her bubble and handed her a shovel and a bucket to clear it all out and left. The most difficult part about the state and path I am on is that I must always leave in the end.
The other part of the name for this chapter, the archangel, is one of my forms, just as it is one of your forms. Simply because I choose to hold true to that form in my life does not mean I am any higher than you. If you react with anger to someone saying this then study your feeling, why would it make you angry? Why does it make you angry that a normal man can become Buddha or an Archangel or anything he chooses to be. Siddhartha was a spoiled prince with no knowledge of the world until he was 29 and saw the world for what it was for the first time. Jesus was nothing more than the son of a carpenter born to a insignificant town in a poor part of the world yet he rose to great things, perhaps not the son of god, perhaps son of god but the lesson is the same non the less, never judge someone based simply on what you think they are. In your heart you should always remember that it all comes down to you, all the strands of destiny, all the Buddha’s and Christ’s and the entirety of existence is at your fingertips begging for you to play with it, so perhaps I, the old archangel, will stay here for one more show, for one last hurrah.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Holographic theory of existence, School Essay
Review of the Holographic theory of existence and its potential use in Psychology and Psychiatric healthcare
By: Aki Greus
Helsinki Open University, Development Psychology
19th November 2007
Introduction
In this essay I will attempt to take you, the reader, on a journey to a world of a different kind, the holographic world. Where our actions are not simply caused by linear cause and effect, and to quote Morpheus from matrix trilogy or Plato’s allegory of the cave, I can only show you the way, you have to be the one to walk through it. So, without further ado, let us get started.
Holographic theory of existence is rooted mostly on physics and overturning of theory relativity and emergence to the field of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary theories on existence. Most understanding of life and physical existence and by extension psychology are founded in the old physical model of matter gives rise to mind which has, in various theories been overturned. This essay is an overview of the theories proposed by various well known scientists such as Barbara Ann Brennan and how they can be studied and if found to be true their effect on the human condition and human existence.
To understand the holographic theory of existence the reader needs to have at least a basic grasp of physics, preferably considerably more. In this essay I will also study the physics examples presented as in depth as my limited physics studies will allow. Most people at large in the world live in the physics models that have long since been proven to be inaccurate but still work for the basic existence and lack of understanding about physics doesn’t affect their lives. However this lack of understanding causes problems when new theories emerge as criticism of them is often founded in old, disproved or simply faulty understandings of the world. This is a problem most new science has had to deal with for more than a millennia and I see little incentive for it to stop anytime soon. As such I see that the holographic theory will face a great deal of resistance from various other theories, but hopefully the reader will be able to glimpse at the possibility that the holographic theory of existence is correct and consider the possibilities and implications for if it is.
The Science
There has been a debate between those who support the mechanistic world view, perhaps in recent times best represented by Albert Einstein’s famous uttering, “God does not play dice”. And those that support the consciousness based model on the world perhaps best represented as Nils Bohr’s reply to Einstein, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do”. This fundamental debate has, in many forms been going on for centuries. Is the world predetermined independent of our existence where simple cause and effect can determine what happens until the end of the universe? Or is it, as Bohr suggested far more complex than that. For you see dear reader, this has huge implications for the world around us for if the world is predetermined then all disease is also predetermined and through that all our actions become irrelevant as we are simply the actions and reactions on a subatomic world to a chain of events set off during the big bang. However, the model proposed in the holographic theory proposes that the past-present-future division as well as cause and effect are both right only in the crudest of examples and do not apply in any way to the more basic level. Were Einstein to hear some of the more recent studies and results in physics he would undoubtedly spin in his grave.
One of the famous quantum physics experiments called double slit experiment has demonstrated that not only do physical particles react in unpredictable ways to the presence of an observe in the reaction but it also varies between physical matter and energy simply because it is being observed. There are still, half a century later different interpretations of the results and metaphysical as well as psychological implications of the find. I will not go to them in any great length other than in how they affect the holographic theory as it would take more space than I can spare to truly do them justice. In the holographic theory it is generally frowned upon to think of the wave/particle duality as mind/matter or energy/physical but since electrons and even atomic nuclei have, under sufficient stress exhibited strong signs of being simply energy in a specifically organized manner instead of matter as is sometimes commonly thought. As there are various experiments where it can be proven that electrons born together are paired together in a manner where they transmit information across vast distances faster than the speed of light. At the present moment that I am aware of the fastest measured rate of information transfer is 300 times the speed of light at which point our measuring devices reach their limit. There are only so many possible explanations for this, either in some form information truly travels in a measurable linear way between the 2 electrons faster than we can yet measure, in some form the problem would be similar trying to measure the speed of light in the 18th century. The competing theories to this are focused mainly on two categories. One proposes that the electrons communicate information through some higher presently theoretical dimension where time/space acts differently than on our own. There is also the theory that what we perceive as effects following each other might not really be the case on the micro level of cosmos. That in reality there is no transfer of information between 2 different particles but that there is only one particle and that single particle is transferring no information as any effect on one particle is an effect on every particle. Similar to saying that if I whisper something in your ear and you whisper it to the next person that your ears are transferring the information to your mouth and repeating to the next person while in reality there is no distinct ear/mouth separation in the level of neurobiology in the sense that a distinct entity called ear transfers information to another distinct entity called mouth. In reality the two perceived events or entities are one entity.
On a more practical physics level it is possible to observe in the brain areas responsible for motion light up before areas responsible for the decision to move light up. Or in essence, when you sit still in a chair and decide to lift your hand to grab a coffee cup to take a sip, the areas of your brain responsible for communicating that order to the spinal column and from there to the hand start acting fractions of a second before what can be termed the desire to drink from the cup appears in the brain. This has absolutely baffled some brain researches as it would indicate that the universe is entirely predetermined that my body prepares for actions my mind has yet to decide to do. Even if it is only for a fraction of a second that fraction of a second is also where the human mind lives, in the decision to do or not to do something. However, if we instead look upon this past/present/future and cause/effect duality from the standpoint of the various experiments which prove that electrons as well as other particles can in reality transfer information not only instantly but also backwards in time it begins to make more sense. It gives birth to the possibility that yes the mind decides what to do, process the order and then somehow transmits that order a microsecond back in time so the body can act at the time when the decision was first made. This of course raises objections as there is definitely an easily observable reaction period between seeing an stimulus and being able to interpret that stimulus and to act upon it, easily observable by even the simplest of experiments. This does not however preclude the existence of other forms of cognitive processes that go beyond our simple views on time.
It has been possible for a while now with sufficient iniquity and technology to push matter into being in more than one state at the same time. The understanding that there are states to normal matter where a grouping of atoms isn’t simply divided into group A that sits here and group B that sits there but that in reality it is group A that sits as an entire group on points from 1-3000 at the same time. That the single blob or group of matter is in reality in superposition where it does in the real physical world exist in thousands of places at the same time. To quote Jeffrey Satinover M.D. “You got to really stop and think about what that means. That it’s the same object and that it’s in two places at once.” You really do have to stop and think about it, that it is not some cocky sci-fi or some alternative reality that exists in mathematics. It is the real physical world and science has already demonstrated with macro scale experiments that information travels backwards in time, matter can exist in more than one place at once, we are surrounded by fields of EM energy and various other forms of energy that we are only now starting to be able to perceive with technology. That the concept of aura and soul that can affect the physical world simply by its presence and existence is no longer relegated to the field of religion but it starting to slowly come to the very mainstream of understanding. Of course our understanding of the human energy field and the human expanded consciousness is limited by our ability to understand and our ability to research. Both are very dependant on our ability to accept that we might be wrong and someone else might be right. When our consciousness starts to lose elasticity and plasticity we become rigid and set in a single idea and we stop learning. Yet all that being said there is a single constant that has stayed with humanity for thousands of years, every time we’ve thought we knew everything about anything we’ve been wonderfully wrong and there have always been new avenues to research.
Holographic Psychology and World View
All of this relates to the holographic theory of existence and through that the holographic theory of psychology in very direct ways. The situation is somewhat similar to how autism was originally thought to be simply a cognitive problem when neurology later proved that the cause of autism is mostly neurological and only secondarily in the growing environment. It is in some sense human nature to try to fit everything we see to a box and cut away the pieces that do not fit. In essence to try to fit reality into a box that is not suited to contain it. Which is why most of modern medicine doesn’t have a holistic approach to illness, but instead modern medicine has the same problem as modern research. That we are only now starting to reach from one discipline to another, to only now start to create interdisciplinary approaches to the problems. If the simple act of observing a wave particle duality can cause matter to radically change its form from wave to a particle and back again one can only wonder what focused intent when utilized to oneself can accomplish. Perhaps the universe truly does consist of nothing more than stray thoughts that our minds grasp onto and form this coherent physical world. But for the time being that is nothing more than an interesting theory with some proof behind it. The holographic theory in essence gathers these different theories and formulates that the physical world is a construct of the mental/spiritual world not only in that how you view the physical world is affected by the spiritual world. But that the physical world is in a very real and tangible way a hologram projected from within to without. From the internal spirit to the external plate that then builds the world we see. The theory in itself does not posit that things such as magic and throwing fireballs ala: Harry Potter is readily possible. The holographic theory does however state that if there is in reality such a thing as two electrons bound together when they are created together is it not possible to say that we are all still connected to each other, that what you do to one you do to all? Perhaps with this understanding in science it slowly becomes possible to truly understand some of the sages and mystics of old who talked about everything being interconnected, the Father and Son being one makes an entirely different kind of sense when understood in the context of quantum physics.
Holographic psychology relates to the holographic theory of existence and the holographic view in that if one has disease then one also has a cause for that disease and instead of treating the disease itself, say for example treating schizophrenia as a disease that is separate of the personality we should treat it in the context of the personality. By viewing what potential reasons would the person have to create the disease and what they need to change in their life or their mind to remove the reason for that disease? There is no single simple answer to why a person falls ill, physically or psychologically as there is no single human model that can be applied to everybody. Even if we find that the brain of a schizophrenic patient has certain neurological damage it is not prudent or healthy to attribute simple cause and affect to something that can in theory be far outside the simple linear scope of time. It is, under the holographic theory of existence fully conceivable that the person has a deeper seated issue that is manifesting itself as schizophrenia. The theory is open to a wide range of misuse and abuse, the line of reasoning where the patient is unhealthy because they wish to be unhealthy is a very slippery slope. But in many respects it also places the responsibility for the situation where it belongs instead of pushing it onto the sidewalk. By encouraging the patient to view the world in the holographic context the patient not only realizes potential causes for the disease the patient also gains a greater strength to be healthy as they are no longer simply an outside observe in an illness. To use another more common approach, instead of viewing cold or the flu in the context of “I have this gosh darn flu and cant work” the holographic view encourages the patient to think “What have I done to open myself to having a cold that I could avoid, where have I stressed my immune system so much that this disease manifested itself?” The latter approach would encourage the patient to seek out potential reasons why they have the cold, ranging from being out of shape to working too hard, being too exhausted in public to simply not having a clean house and letting bacteria have a field day under the bed. Instead of placing blame for the disease on the doctor, going to the doctor to say: “I have this flu, give me something to make me better so I can work again” and by extension, making the doctor responsible for the patient’s health. Understanding the importance of the self as explained through simple cause and effect such as kissing a person who already has the disease to more complex almost metaphysical examples such as a child whose parents used drugs heavily and the child received brain damage as a result.
As the holographic model of reality points out that we are all connected the problems of the parents, in the previous example of drug use can manifest itself in health problems for the child. Similarly, the victim of psychopathic mental abuse can manifest problems that standard cognitive psychology would call psychosomatic, or imagines health problems. They can in reality be manifestations of the spiritual or emotional damage the psychopath caused for their victim. It is easily observable in the victims of psychopaths but it is also theoretically observable in the victims of modern society, and it also raises some questions about the nature of illness in its entirety. If the victims of psychopaths can manifest very real physical problems in reaction to their abuse is it not possible that normal healthy people who have common illnesses such as back pain or ankle pain can in a very wide number of cases be symptoms of mental or spiritual abuse in some form or another. Mostly this is thought about in the terms of external abuse, what abuse parents have done, loved once have done or just the random people on the street have done. But should it not also be viewed from the point of view of what the patient has done to themselves. What the patient has done to cause a dislocated joint or a bulge in their spine. What have they done physically, from lifting heavy boxes wrong or what are they trying to avoid facing up to. There are a great deal of old theories regarding the body and how the body can manifest the personality. How the body is the mirror of the soul is a different way of expressing the same basic idea.
Potential Practical Application
There are of course never direct models that can be applied to every single person on the planet but while we live in the hereditary and cultural context where certain body language and other small details are picked up unconsciously from the background culture we share a common cultural bubble. Observing the small changes in a wide variety of fields from clothing to physical stance and what parts of the body the person is tensing and what parts of the body the person is relaxing we can make potential interpretations of the underlying causes for disease. As has been observed in the case of certain cancers that they are indeed caused by viruses that affect cell mutations instead of directly by random mutation in the cells, viruses as anyone with fluency in biology knows are better able to enter the body when cells are unable to release and properly function due to being under constant stress. So tensing up a part of the body or inhibiting its natural function can significantly ease the entrance of viruses into the body and cause mutations that then develop into cancer. There are times when there is no direct observable cause and effect, linear or nonlinear and times like these even the holographic theory faces some problems. Sometimes finding the cause for the disease is counterproductive and would take such an extraordinary amount of effort that it is simpler to just cure it but such times are fairly rare and unless something changes from the conditions that originally brought about the illness then it will likely remanifest itself in the future.
Viewing the cognitive process as understood by the holographic theory specifically in the neurological area opens up new interpretations about the rewiring and elasticity in the human brain. As it is apparently possible for the human brain to rewire large parts of itself long into the adult life and according to more recent studies it is possible for the brain to rewire itself all the way until old age and death. It is possible that prolonged focus on certain brain patterns of victimization and pain can start to manifest itself even if we take out the possible spiritual explanations simply because repeated patterns of pain wire the brain to expect repeated input of pain. Or at the very least, repeated patterns of pain can lower the threshold for experiencing more pain. The peptides for pain, the neurochemical chains that trigger the onset of the emotion pain reserve receiver sites on the cells that could otherwise be used to maintain a healthy life for the cell. So is it not possible that by being subjected to emotional abuse our cells slowly changes from their normal function to an unhealthy function simply because of the emotional trauma and as such have more and more difficulty accepting other emotions. That prolonged external emotional abuse can rewire the brain and reprogram the cells of the body should come as no surprise as emotions are nothing more than neurochemical transmitters in the physical sense and like other transmitters they program the cell for certain actions. So it is not also completely possible that if prolonged external emotional abuse can cause this can not prolonged internal emotional abuse also cause this. Can prolonged internal emotional abuse or simply faulty emotional/cognitive patterns cause real physical problems instead of simply imagined, make-believe or hypochondria?
The holographic theory posits as I stated earlier that we are all connected through time and space simply by the laws of physics and all of us contain all there is to existence and in the largest sense that is very little to this thing called physical existence that is truly physical independent of the observer. I’ll leave the speculations of what the grand observer is that is apparently keeping this constructed fabric together to the theologians and philosophers. But I will point out that as it is apparently possible to influence this universe by the simple focused intent over even such a short time as hours then it is more than probable that we can also influence this world through focused intent that lasts for days, weeks and years. If our unconscious thought patterns are such that we keep repeating out victim mentality then we will be recreating the victimization in our lives over and over again. When our mindset is that of the savior mindset we will always look for those who need our help and those that fulfill our delusions of grandeur. Departing once again from the psychological field of self or communally induced mental disorders and going to the field of physical illness I feel compelled to point out that there is a well known physical illness that comes from being forced to potty train too early. When one is forced to learn to control muscles that the physical body has yet to master the only way to hold it in is to constrict different muscles which can, over a long period of time, lead to habitual constricting of those muscles and lower back problems. Although this is a rare diagnosis in modern medicine it is not unheard of and a textbook example of why a learned habit of constricting different muscles that no longer serves the person can turn into a problem. Another example of a similar condition is where children with sexual abuse histories have problems with bedwetting. While this has been explained away to some satisfaction with various neurological problems the underlying cause hasn’t been explained, the reason why sexual abuse causes that particular neurological problem instead of a wide variety of other neurological problems.
One potential interpretation of the holographic theory states that since the original trauma was related to sexuality then the later manifestations are also related to the same general area of the body for various reasons. One possible reason is that sexual abuse can render the person hesitant to mentally properly use the area which can render mental control over it weak. This particular interpretation of the holographic theory also has practical applications for psychological work with patients. If for example a victim of sexual abuse can slowly start to do bodywork and physically use the area of the body abused in a healthy way the healing process should speed up considerably. Instead of simply reliving the trauma in a controlled fashion and discussion it is possible to face the painful memories brought up by using the area of the body by slowly releasing the pain and related emotions by deep body therapy. By slowly releasing the bent up pressure and by reworking on atrophied muscles the neurological connections can be restructured as the mind has to relearn how to use the related area of the body and rewire the brain to longer simply associate the part of the body with internalized shame and pain.
Holistic view, Human Energy Field(HEF) and the Universal Energy Field(UEF)
While to really explain the precepts of the holographic theory even in its narrower confines of psychology would take more pages than I have time for, I can lay down the basic foundation of the holistic and holographic existence as described by Barbara Ann Brennan. In its simpler form as it is applied to individual psychology the holographic theory is used as a foundation to start constructing a holistic view, in other words, a view of the human condition that isn’t separated into individual units but instead views the human as a whole into itself and as a part of a larger whole. The driving principle is to not only understand why something happens to the patient in the narrower confines of that persons life but how one mans illness speaks of that mans world and the world we all live in. How the Holistic view would see a child suffering from HIV after he is born and what the holistic view would do with that vision. As understood by the holistic view the illness of the child is the joint result of the choices made by the parents and the existence of the child reflects the existence of the parents and on the larger scale the choices made by society at large. The holistic view is, in essence, the idea of looking at the whole instead of at the sum of its parts, whether it is in the case of an individual illness or of a community at large.
There are a wide variety of physics studies that have proven all matter to be interconnected and all matter to be in reality energy. What I have not discussed yet are the practical tests and applications to measure and affect the HEF. There was a study done in the 70’s relating to Kirlian photography where a person focusing on the pictures object before or during when the picture was taken could effect a noticeable change in the field. Kirlian photography differs from some of the other supposed forms of HEF photography in that it does not even suppose to picture what is commonly termed the human aura. It only pictures various subtle changes to the surface tension and EM field produced by the object when a picture is taken and these changes can be interpreted to be one of the possible forms of the human aura. I have myself done various tests with this technique and it is clearly provable and testable that when a person in a different room some meters away starts focusing loving thoughts at the test subject the EM field undergoes rapid changes even if the test subject has no knowledge of this process.
I’ll explain the tests I have performed in more detail and potential ways of repeating the tests, but as I am not an expert in the field of Kirlian photography I cannot guarantee that they will work for every pair of people and that the effect will always be as pronounced. The tests we carried out involved a Kirlian camera that takes a picture of each of the subjects fingers and one set of tests is done as the person focuses lovingly on themselves and another set is done while another person focuses lovingly on the person without any line of sight to the test subject and some distance away. The strength and cohesion of the field of the test subject rose by 15% when an outsider was focusing on them. While I admit this was in no way scientifically accurate it was not done to prove the working of the Kirlian photography only that my friend could influence me as supposedly it takes a certain level of emotional bonding for the influence to be possible. We have also since then taken half a dozen or so control pictures and they are with minor variances all at the control level before the emotional focus is present. There are some far more striking examples of the effect of focus, both positive and negative on Kirlian photography that are widely available should further research be desired. However, Kirlian photography is a good way to explore in a macro scale observable world the effects of thought and focus on such mundane things as leaves or grains of wheat.
There are also some studies by Masaru Emoto that claim the long term focus and directed intention towards water can have visible changes on the pattern generated by that water when it is frozen in a Petri dish. While the studies by Masaru Emoto are interesting, they are not scientifically valid as they are neither peer reviewed nor follow the guidelines set out for scientific experiments. The research field as a whole of effecting water by the same principle that we can effect the HEF and on a more micro scale we can effect the changes and patterns of light is interesting and definitely worth more studies. It is no longer impossible from the viewpoint of latest understanding of physics to influence things with simply the power of focused intent. It is still perhaps too difficult to influence and too difficult to observe such changes but that does not mean that they can not be explained in the context of science and no longer relegated to the fringes as pseudoscience.
The holistic view as such isn’t simply about understanding the human mind and the human psyche in its entire view of the society, it is a view that always seeks to understand the larger picture, how the small parts come together to form a greater whole. While the holographic theory of existence, the concept that energy/consciousness is what generates life and this life experiences the world through the physical body as a reflection of the energy present in the objects it comes across. Is by no means a new concept and even if true the effect it has on our understanding of life can be profound but still subtle.
When one takes the example of the French government office worker who was in essence missing his entire brain yet still managed to function from the standpoint of mechanistic physics, that the brain generates the mind then he should not have been able to function in any way how ever remote. However, when one takes it from a view of consciousness generates the mind then it suddenly becomes possible that the brain is not the machine that generates the thought and the experience, the brain only interprets the experience for the consciousness which is not stored in the physical brain. The French office worker suddenly isn’t missing most of his mind, simply the clarity that most of his mind would have offered him. In the example of the holographic plate once smashed each small piece contains the whole picture once reflected back out again. The office workers brain wasn’t missing any critical component of his consciousness as his consciousness isn’t stored in the brain it is simply reflect from the brain. This is why his IQ was roughly 70 when tested yet was still able to see and hear as well as anyone else. The brain does not store sense information in a specific part of the brain permanently, and like any good hologram, if you disable that part other parts of the brain will, if there is sufficient plasticity, leap to the challenge and assume the roles of that part. This has, in the view of the holographic theory, little to do with physical mind having some genetic desire to use a trait it can’t possibly know it just lost. It is a reflection of the holographic consciousness knowing what it needs.
There is some debate in science as to how exactly can a plant when it is growing from a single seed or a child that is growing from an single embryo know what it is growing into. How can every specific part of the cell know where it is meant to go, this has a wide variety of explanations from simple random mutations, chemicals, DNA, surroundings, soul, consciousness to some more creative interpretations. However as some exceptional Kirlian photography has already shown, if you cut away a part of a plant and take a picture of it, once every few hundred times of doing this you’ll see a faint EM field memory of where a part of the plant used to be. While this isn’t sufficient to explain such things as ghost limb pain it is however sufficient to spark a lively debate in scientific circles and should definitely be pursued. If it is even remotely possible that we could for the first time in human history use a reproducible scientific method to measure something as complex and intriguing as the soul or even if only the physical manifestation in the EM field of the human soul it should be pursued with the utmost diligence. It is not up to science to interpret what its studies mean, that should be left up to the poets and dreamers, it is however up to science to study the phenomena, and the provable verifiable reality is, in its simplicity this. We are for the first time in the history of mankind, approaching a time where we can observe and see the effects of focused intent on the objects around us even when no visible action is taken. Here I will take a second of artistic liberty and say, we are indeed approaching the time of the avatars, when all men are truly equal because we finally understand the old rules of Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and all those who have ever perceived this universal energy field. “What you do onto these, my lesser brethren you do onto me”, “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you” “Karma” and what the Zen Buddhists in china called “Wu” the understanding that there is truly nothing concrete to life as it is all created by us, our shared dreams acting on the tapestry of the universal energy field. Perhaps it is time now, with the help of science to take a step forward in our understanding and see that there really is nothing but beauty in the world.
All the pieces and in closing
In closing I want to go through all the individual pieces of the holographic theory as put forward by Barbara Ann Brennan in her books and explain them in short.
1. Consciousness is the basic reality.
Our physical body acts as the interpreter or the filter for the consciousness which in reality is stored elsewhere and is only manifested through the physical body. The brain interprets the world through its holographic system and translates this information into a context we can understand. If we look at an object we perceive the energy of that object through the sense we are using at that time, the brain then converts this raw information into to the world we can perceive leaving out bits and pieces that we don’t actively focus on. As such the world we perceive is not the whole world and we only perceive a small part of it. Our senses only work for information we expect to perceive as our attention is focused on that particular form of information there is in essence a system of cognitive dissonance, we filter out information that we don’t need in our system. Consciousness in essence is what defines our reality and forms our reality, through our ability to effect matter based on our ability to view as explained by the previous examples. Our lack of focus on a certain aspect of our holographic existence an lead to the decrease and in some cases, disappearance of that aspect. Our consciousness is what is real and the physical world is created as a reaction to our internal landscape.
2. Everything is connected to everything else.
In the deeper levels of reality everything happens instantly and there is no spatial or time separating cause and effect. As proven by various electron observations the very basic blocks of our existence are all interconnected and react to one another immediately and as such are far beyond mechanistic world view proposed by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
3. Each piece contains the whole.
Observing the plate that is used in projecting a holographic image reveals that any piece of the whole plate still has all the basic information of the hologram only that it is fuzzier. So if one takes a holographic picture and then splits the plate in two and reflects the required light through one of the pieces what is missing is not the other half of the picture but half of the clarity of the original picture. So every piece of the original whole contains the essence of the original. Vice versa as explained in part 6 if shattered pieces of the original holographic plate are combined then the picture gets clearer with each step.
4. Time is also holographic.
As has been proven through the use of electron observations where the reaction can come vastly before the action that supposedly causes it the nature of time is also quite holographic. It can in fact be stated that time is by its very nature a construct and not a real phenomena. But on a more practical level this means that a decision made now can affect not only the future but also the past. It raises the question, is it possible to vastly alter events in the past by acting now? If it is too difficult to do this in the global level it can be possible to do it in an individual level.
5. Individuation and energy are basic to the universe.
Every single aspect in the universe is different from all the other aspects in the universe and no two things are ever alike. As proven by various experiments such as the double slit experiment particles that are thought of as solid are in fact energy and behave as such under the proper conditions before turning back into physical particles. If even the smallest pieces of what we consider indivisible matter is in reality composed of energy that can under the proper choice turn into a wave function then matter as such does not exist. And following that reasoning far enough neither do we exist in the purely physical sense. Reality suddenly changes from matter based as indivisible atoms, wholes that can not be anything but energy, to a view where everything indeed is energy and only by making a choice does that energy turn into matter. Only by making a choice how the wave function will work will that wave function transform itself into a particle.
6. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
As stated earlier the picture gets clearer and clearer the more of the picture is reintegrated instead and as such the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The fingers of 2 people in love when placed next to each other on a Kirlian photography plate merge and create a shared field bigger than the sum of its parts.
7. Consciousness creates reality and its own experiences of reality.
According to Karl Pribram’s model of the holographic brain, the brain processes data in a manner that it is used to and thus views reality in a manner that it is expecting to view reality. A person stuck on the victimhood state in their life will expect to be victimized and will act to bring forth that victimhood in his or her life. To truly help a victim of a narcissist it is necessary to bring forth the model of narcissism that the victim constantly craves for in their life. Why do some people keep repeating the same mistakes, the same situations in their life? This is a question that has to be answered from the consciousness based model of reality before any real healing can occur. Why alcoholics that are simply cured of their alcoholism without approaching the underlying cause of alcoholism, the desires to be alcoholics, is addressed and corrected will always revert back to their own patterns.
When all or even some of these are combined into an understanding of the human mind and the human condition entirely new and unthought-of ways to approach mental illness and in some cases even physical illness start to appear. And so we begin to approach the end of our journey into the human mind and the human consciousness. I can only do so much and say so much, if I sparked in the reader an interest for the holographic world view there are some books and movies I used as reference and would recommend as extra sources of information. I ask that even if these theories seem strange and unusual that you approach them with an open mind and a loving heart combined with a desire to seek information and to verify before you believe. It is good to have an open mind but not so open that once brain falls out. Remember how long it took for the geocentric model of understanding the cosmos to fall centuries or even millennia after it was proven to be incorrect. It was held up by people who laughed at those who had the courage to question.
I’d like to close this essay with a famous quote of Carl Gustav Jung and send you, the reader on your way with hopefully a new appreciation for the beauty of the universe.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Bibliography and Source References
I opted to not use source references for each individual claim and instead point to the overall sources I used. As both the reader’s digest and the two Barbara Ann Brennan books I used contain more than 25 sources each I felt it prudent to save space and not catalogue each individual source reference here but I will however post the source references most relevant to my work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_slit_experiment
I didn’t use Wikipedia as a source for my information about the DSE but it is an adequate source for more information. I would recommend watching the movie “What the bleep do we know” for an interesting interpretation of the DSE and related concepts. As there are many varying interpretations of the experiment and its results. A wide range of scientific research is recommended.
Barbara Ann Brennan, (1987) Hands of light New York: Bantams Book’s ISBN 0-553-05302-7
Barbara Ann Brennan,(1993) Light Emerging New York: Bantam Book’s ISBN 0-533-35456-6
Both Books were used as sources for the holographic world view and both books contain numerous source references to other books and sources. Both books go to great lengths in discussing hands on healing and other alternative therapy methods but also delve deeply into psychology.
Lord Of The Wind Films, (2004) What the bleep do we know?
http://www.whatthebleep.com/
A shared movie project by 3 participants in Ramtha School of enlightenment. Even though the movie itself is somewhat questionable for its wild interpretation of physics and neurochemistry it opens up the table for interesting debate and studies. Version of the movie used as source was the extended “down the rabbit hole” edition. Talking heads in the movie include psychologists and psychiatrists all with verifiable credentials. I have personally talked with one of the Physicists, John Hagelin, Ph.D. Professor of Physics, Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management. Famous for developing Supersymmetric Flipped SU5 Grand Unified Field Theory. Even though my understanding of science behind the proposed unified field theory is at best extremely limited I had a short but interesting conversation with him about the nature of human existence.
http://www.quotemonk.com/authors/carl-jung/index.htm
Source for Jung quote.
http://www.scandinavica.com/culture/famous/bohr.htm
Source for the Nils Bohr quote. There are various versions of the original quote floating around on and offline. This however is generally considered one of the more reliable ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography
With the same amount of salt as all the previous sources. The problem with Wikipedia when it comes to even remotely on the fringe technology and views on the world is that everybody who thinks they are an expert on the topic can change and edit anything at will. I can’t really quote specific sources as this is a field with extremely varied interpretations. I will however recommend a hand on study on the topic, if that is impossible or impractical google will provide some interesting web pages and articles with the simple search words Kirlian photography.
Reader’s digest, (1982) Into The Unknown The Reader’s Digest Association Inc., New york ISBN 951-9078-89-4
A book that is potentially no longer available made by readers digest in the 80’s where they cover a wide variety of potentially mysterious phenomena and try to have as balanced a view as possible.
http://www.rajatieto.fi/hengen_ja_tiedon_messut
Hengen ja tiedon messut is a Finnish meeting held in late summer/early autumn where a wide variety of different people can convene and discuss in great detail some views on life. It is also a great source for information on Kirlian photography as there are many people there with decades of experience with it.
Following sources were also used but lack ISBN codes
Ehrenwald, Jan, The ESP Experience. Basic Books, Inc., 1978.
Hansel, C.E.M., ESP and Parapsychology. Prometheus books, 1980.
Krippner, Stanley, Advances in Parapsychological Research, 2. Extrasensory Perception. Plenum Press, 1978.
Rhine, J.B., Extra-Sensory Perception. Bruce Humphries Publishers, 1964.
(Author uncertain) , New Frontiers of the Mind. Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1937.
Schmeidler, Gertrude Raffel, ESP and Personality Patterns. Yale University Press, 1958.
Becker, Robert O. and Selden Gary. The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life. New York: William Morrow & co., 1985
Mandel, Peter. Energy Emission Analysis: New Application of Kirlian Photography for Holistic Health. Germany: Synthesis Publishing Company, N.d.
Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. New York: HarperCollins, 1991
Wilber, Ken. The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes. Boston: Shambhala, 1982.
“High Frequency Model for Kirlian Photography.” Energy Research Group, New York. 1973.
Hunt, DR. Valorie, Massey, W., Weinberg, R., Bruyere, R., and Hahn, P., “Project Report, A Study of Structural Integration from Neuromuscular Energy Field, and Emotional Approaches.” U.C.L.A., 1977.
Inyushin, V. M., and Chekorov, P. R., “Biostimulation Through Laser Radiation of Bioplasma.” Kazakh State University, USSR. Translated by Hill and Ghosak, University of Copenhagen 1975.
Inyushin, V. M., “On the Problem of Recording the Human Biofield.” Parapsychology in the USSR, Part II, San Francisco, Calif., Washington Research Center, 1981.
Vladimirov, Y. A., Ultraweak Luminescence Accompanying Biochemical Reactions. USSR Academy of Biological Sciences, Izdatelstvo “Nauka,” Moscow.
By: Aki Greus
Helsinki Open University, Development Psychology
19th November 2007
Introduction
In this essay I will attempt to take you, the reader, on a journey to a world of a different kind, the holographic world. Where our actions are not simply caused by linear cause and effect, and to quote Morpheus from matrix trilogy or Plato’s allegory of the cave, I can only show you the way, you have to be the one to walk through it. So, without further ado, let us get started.
Holographic theory of existence is rooted mostly on physics and overturning of theory relativity and emergence to the field of multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary theories on existence. Most understanding of life and physical existence and by extension psychology are founded in the old physical model of matter gives rise to mind which has, in various theories been overturned. This essay is an overview of the theories proposed by various well known scientists such as Barbara Ann Brennan and how they can be studied and if found to be true their effect on the human condition and human existence.
To understand the holographic theory of existence the reader needs to have at least a basic grasp of physics, preferably considerably more. In this essay I will also study the physics examples presented as in depth as my limited physics studies will allow. Most people at large in the world live in the physics models that have long since been proven to be inaccurate but still work for the basic existence and lack of understanding about physics doesn’t affect their lives. However this lack of understanding causes problems when new theories emerge as criticism of them is often founded in old, disproved or simply faulty understandings of the world. This is a problem most new science has had to deal with for more than a millennia and I see little incentive for it to stop anytime soon. As such I see that the holographic theory will face a great deal of resistance from various other theories, but hopefully the reader will be able to glimpse at the possibility that the holographic theory of existence is correct and consider the possibilities and implications for if it is.
The Science
There has been a debate between those who support the mechanistic world view, perhaps in recent times best represented by Albert Einstein’s famous uttering, “God does not play dice”. And those that support the consciousness based model on the world perhaps best represented as Nils Bohr’s reply to Einstein, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do”. This fundamental debate has, in many forms been going on for centuries. Is the world predetermined independent of our existence where simple cause and effect can determine what happens until the end of the universe? Or is it, as Bohr suggested far more complex than that. For you see dear reader, this has huge implications for the world around us for if the world is predetermined then all disease is also predetermined and through that all our actions become irrelevant as we are simply the actions and reactions on a subatomic world to a chain of events set off during the big bang. However, the model proposed in the holographic theory proposes that the past-present-future division as well as cause and effect are both right only in the crudest of examples and do not apply in any way to the more basic level. Were Einstein to hear some of the more recent studies and results in physics he would undoubtedly spin in his grave.
One of the famous quantum physics experiments called double slit experiment has demonstrated that not only do physical particles react in unpredictable ways to the presence of an observe in the reaction but it also varies between physical matter and energy simply because it is being observed. There are still, half a century later different interpretations of the results and metaphysical as well as psychological implications of the find. I will not go to them in any great length other than in how they affect the holographic theory as it would take more space than I can spare to truly do them justice. In the holographic theory it is generally frowned upon to think of the wave/particle duality as mind/matter or energy/physical but since electrons and even atomic nuclei have, under sufficient stress exhibited strong signs of being simply energy in a specifically organized manner instead of matter as is sometimes commonly thought. As there are various experiments where it can be proven that electrons born together are paired together in a manner where they transmit information across vast distances faster than the speed of light. At the present moment that I am aware of the fastest measured rate of information transfer is 300 times the speed of light at which point our measuring devices reach their limit. There are only so many possible explanations for this, either in some form information truly travels in a measurable linear way between the 2 electrons faster than we can yet measure, in some form the problem would be similar trying to measure the speed of light in the 18th century. The competing theories to this are focused mainly on two categories. One proposes that the electrons communicate information through some higher presently theoretical dimension where time/space acts differently than on our own. There is also the theory that what we perceive as effects following each other might not really be the case on the micro level of cosmos. That in reality there is no transfer of information between 2 different particles but that there is only one particle and that single particle is transferring no information as any effect on one particle is an effect on every particle. Similar to saying that if I whisper something in your ear and you whisper it to the next person that your ears are transferring the information to your mouth and repeating to the next person while in reality there is no distinct ear/mouth separation in the level of neurobiology in the sense that a distinct entity called ear transfers information to another distinct entity called mouth. In reality the two perceived events or entities are one entity.
On a more practical physics level it is possible to observe in the brain areas responsible for motion light up before areas responsible for the decision to move light up. Or in essence, when you sit still in a chair and decide to lift your hand to grab a coffee cup to take a sip, the areas of your brain responsible for communicating that order to the spinal column and from there to the hand start acting fractions of a second before what can be termed the desire to drink from the cup appears in the brain. This has absolutely baffled some brain researches as it would indicate that the universe is entirely predetermined that my body prepares for actions my mind has yet to decide to do. Even if it is only for a fraction of a second that fraction of a second is also where the human mind lives, in the decision to do or not to do something. However, if we instead look upon this past/present/future and cause/effect duality from the standpoint of the various experiments which prove that electrons as well as other particles can in reality transfer information not only instantly but also backwards in time it begins to make more sense. It gives birth to the possibility that yes the mind decides what to do, process the order and then somehow transmits that order a microsecond back in time so the body can act at the time when the decision was first made. This of course raises objections as there is definitely an easily observable reaction period between seeing an stimulus and being able to interpret that stimulus and to act upon it, easily observable by even the simplest of experiments. This does not however preclude the existence of other forms of cognitive processes that go beyond our simple views on time.
It has been possible for a while now with sufficient iniquity and technology to push matter into being in more than one state at the same time. The understanding that there are states to normal matter where a grouping of atoms isn’t simply divided into group A that sits here and group B that sits there but that in reality it is group A that sits as an entire group on points from 1-3000 at the same time. That the single blob or group of matter is in reality in superposition where it does in the real physical world exist in thousands of places at the same time. To quote Jeffrey Satinover M.D. “You got to really stop and think about what that means. That it’s the same object and that it’s in two places at once.” You really do have to stop and think about it, that it is not some cocky sci-fi or some alternative reality that exists in mathematics. It is the real physical world and science has already demonstrated with macro scale experiments that information travels backwards in time, matter can exist in more than one place at once, we are surrounded by fields of EM energy and various other forms of energy that we are only now starting to be able to perceive with technology. That the concept of aura and soul that can affect the physical world simply by its presence and existence is no longer relegated to the field of religion but it starting to slowly come to the very mainstream of understanding. Of course our understanding of the human energy field and the human expanded consciousness is limited by our ability to understand and our ability to research. Both are very dependant on our ability to accept that we might be wrong and someone else might be right. When our consciousness starts to lose elasticity and plasticity we become rigid and set in a single idea and we stop learning. Yet all that being said there is a single constant that has stayed with humanity for thousands of years, every time we’ve thought we knew everything about anything we’ve been wonderfully wrong and there have always been new avenues to research.
Holographic Psychology and World View
All of this relates to the holographic theory of existence and through that the holographic theory of psychology in very direct ways. The situation is somewhat similar to how autism was originally thought to be simply a cognitive problem when neurology later proved that the cause of autism is mostly neurological and only secondarily in the growing environment. It is in some sense human nature to try to fit everything we see to a box and cut away the pieces that do not fit. In essence to try to fit reality into a box that is not suited to contain it. Which is why most of modern medicine doesn’t have a holistic approach to illness, but instead modern medicine has the same problem as modern research. That we are only now starting to reach from one discipline to another, to only now start to create interdisciplinary approaches to the problems. If the simple act of observing a wave particle duality can cause matter to radically change its form from wave to a particle and back again one can only wonder what focused intent when utilized to oneself can accomplish. Perhaps the universe truly does consist of nothing more than stray thoughts that our minds grasp onto and form this coherent physical world. But for the time being that is nothing more than an interesting theory with some proof behind it. The holographic theory in essence gathers these different theories and formulates that the physical world is a construct of the mental/spiritual world not only in that how you view the physical world is affected by the spiritual world. But that the physical world is in a very real and tangible way a hologram projected from within to without. From the internal spirit to the external plate that then builds the world we see. The theory in itself does not posit that things such as magic and throwing fireballs ala: Harry Potter is readily possible. The holographic theory does however state that if there is in reality such a thing as two electrons bound together when they are created together is it not possible to say that we are all still connected to each other, that what you do to one you do to all? Perhaps with this understanding in science it slowly becomes possible to truly understand some of the sages and mystics of old who talked about everything being interconnected, the Father and Son being one makes an entirely different kind of sense when understood in the context of quantum physics.
Holographic psychology relates to the holographic theory of existence and the holographic view in that if one has disease then one also has a cause for that disease and instead of treating the disease itself, say for example treating schizophrenia as a disease that is separate of the personality we should treat it in the context of the personality. By viewing what potential reasons would the person have to create the disease and what they need to change in their life or their mind to remove the reason for that disease? There is no single simple answer to why a person falls ill, physically or psychologically as there is no single human model that can be applied to everybody. Even if we find that the brain of a schizophrenic patient has certain neurological damage it is not prudent or healthy to attribute simple cause and affect to something that can in theory be far outside the simple linear scope of time. It is, under the holographic theory of existence fully conceivable that the person has a deeper seated issue that is manifesting itself as schizophrenia. The theory is open to a wide range of misuse and abuse, the line of reasoning where the patient is unhealthy because they wish to be unhealthy is a very slippery slope. But in many respects it also places the responsibility for the situation where it belongs instead of pushing it onto the sidewalk. By encouraging the patient to view the world in the holographic context the patient not only realizes potential causes for the disease the patient also gains a greater strength to be healthy as they are no longer simply an outside observe in an illness. To use another more common approach, instead of viewing cold or the flu in the context of “I have this gosh darn flu and cant work” the holographic view encourages the patient to think “What have I done to open myself to having a cold that I could avoid, where have I stressed my immune system so much that this disease manifested itself?” The latter approach would encourage the patient to seek out potential reasons why they have the cold, ranging from being out of shape to working too hard, being too exhausted in public to simply not having a clean house and letting bacteria have a field day under the bed. Instead of placing blame for the disease on the doctor, going to the doctor to say: “I have this flu, give me something to make me better so I can work again” and by extension, making the doctor responsible for the patient’s health. Understanding the importance of the self as explained through simple cause and effect such as kissing a person who already has the disease to more complex almost metaphysical examples such as a child whose parents used drugs heavily and the child received brain damage as a result.
As the holographic model of reality points out that we are all connected the problems of the parents, in the previous example of drug use can manifest itself in health problems for the child. Similarly, the victim of psychopathic mental abuse can manifest problems that standard cognitive psychology would call psychosomatic, or imagines health problems. They can in reality be manifestations of the spiritual or emotional damage the psychopath caused for their victim. It is easily observable in the victims of psychopaths but it is also theoretically observable in the victims of modern society, and it also raises some questions about the nature of illness in its entirety. If the victims of psychopaths can manifest very real physical problems in reaction to their abuse is it not possible that normal healthy people who have common illnesses such as back pain or ankle pain can in a very wide number of cases be symptoms of mental or spiritual abuse in some form or another. Mostly this is thought about in the terms of external abuse, what abuse parents have done, loved once have done or just the random people on the street have done. But should it not also be viewed from the point of view of what the patient has done to themselves. What the patient has done to cause a dislocated joint or a bulge in their spine. What have they done physically, from lifting heavy boxes wrong or what are they trying to avoid facing up to. There are a great deal of old theories regarding the body and how the body can manifest the personality. How the body is the mirror of the soul is a different way of expressing the same basic idea.
Potential Practical Application
There are of course never direct models that can be applied to every single person on the planet but while we live in the hereditary and cultural context where certain body language and other small details are picked up unconsciously from the background culture we share a common cultural bubble. Observing the small changes in a wide variety of fields from clothing to physical stance and what parts of the body the person is tensing and what parts of the body the person is relaxing we can make potential interpretations of the underlying causes for disease. As has been observed in the case of certain cancers that they are indeed caused by viruses that affect cell mutations instead of directly by random mutation in the cells, viruses as anyone with fluency in biology knows are better able to enter the body when cells are unable to release and properly function due to being under constant stress. So tensing up a part of the body or inhibiting its natural function can significantly ease the entrance of viruses into the body and cause mutations that then develop into cancer. There are times when there is no direct observable cause and effect, linear or nonlinear and times like these even the holographic theory faces some problems. Sometimes finding the cause for the disease is counterproductive and would take such an extraordinary amount of effort that it is simpler to just cure it but such times are fairly rare and unless something changes from the conditions that originally brought about the illness then it will likely remanifest itself in the future.
Viewing the cognitive process as understood by the holographic theory specifically in the neurological area opens up new interpretations about the rewiring and elasticity in the human brain. As it is apparently possible for the human brain to rewire large parts of itself long into the adult life and according to more recent studies it is possible for the brain to rewire itself all the way until old age and death. It is possible that prolonged focus on certain brain patterns of victimization and pain can start to manifest itself even if we take out the possible spiritual explanations simply because repeated patterns of pain wire the brain to expect repeated input of pain. Or at the very least, repeated patterns of pain can lower the threshold for experiencing more pain. The peptides for pain, the neurochemical chains that trigger the onset of the emotion pain reserve receiver sites on the cells that could otherwise be used to maintain a healthy life for the cell. So is it not possible that by being subjected to emotional abuse our cells slowly changes from their normal function to an unhealthy function simply because of the emotional trauma and as such have more and more difficulty accepting other emotions. That prolonged external emotional abuse can rewire the brain and reprogram the cells of the body should come as no surprise as emotions are nothing more than neurochemical transmitters in the physical sense and like other transmitters they program the cell for certain actions. So it is not also completely possible that if prolonged external emotional abuse can cause this can not prolonged internal emotional abuse also cause this. Can prolonged internal emotional abuse or simply faulty emotional/cognitive patterns cause real physical problems instead of simply imagined, make-believe or hypochondria?
The holographic theory posits as I stated earlier that we are all connected through time and space simply by the laws of physics and all of us contain all there is to existence and in the largest sense that is very little to this thing called physical existence that is truly physical independent of the observer. I’ll leave the speculations of what the grand observer is that is apparently keeping this constructed fabric together to the theologians and philosophers. But I will point out that as it is apparently possible to influence this universe by the simple focused intent over even such a short time as hours then it is more than probable that we can also influence this world through focused intent that lasts for days, weeks and years. If our unconscious thought patterns are such that we keep repeating out victim mentality then we will be recreating the victimization in our lives over and over again. When our mindset is that of the savior mindset we will always look for those who need our help and those that fulfill our delusions of grandeur. Departing once again from the psychological field of self or communally induced mental disorders and going to the field of physical illness I feel compelled to point out that there is a well known physical illness that comes from being forced to potty train too early. When one is forced to learn to control muscles that the physical body has yet to master the only way to hold it in is to constrict different muscles which can, over a long period of time, lead to habitual constricting of those muscles and lower back problems. Although this is a rare diagnosis in modern medicine it is not unheard of and a textbook example of why a learned habit of constricting different muscles that no longer serves the person can turn into a problem. Another example of a similar condition is where children with sexual abuse histories have problems with bedwetting. While this has been explained away to some satisfaction with various neurological problems the underlying cause hasn’t been explained, the reason why sexual abuse causes that particular neurological problem instead of a wide variety of other neurological problems.
One potential interpretation of the holographic theory states that since the original trauma was related to sexuality then the later manifestations are also related to the same general area of the body for various reasons. One possible reason is that sexual abuse can render the person hesitant to mentally properly use the area which can render mental control over it weak. This particular interpretation of the holographic theory also has practical applications for psychological work with patients. If for example a victim of sexual abuse can slowly start to do bodywork and physically use the area of the body abused in a healthy way the healing process should speed up considerably. Instead of simply reliving the trauma in a controlled fashion and discussion it is possible to face the painful memories brought up by using the area of the body by slowly releasing the pain and related emotions by deep body therapy. By slowly releasing the bent up pressure and by reworking on atrophied muscles the neurological connections can be restructured as the mind has to relearn how to use the related area of the body and rewire the brain to longer simply associate the part of the body with internalized shame and pain.
Holistic view, Human Energy Field(HEF) and the Universal Energy Field(UEF)
While to really explain the precepts of the holographic theory even in its narrower confines of psychology would take more pages than I have time for, I can lay down the basic foundation of the holistic and holographic existence as described by Barbara Ann Brennan. In its simpler form as it is applied to individual psychology the holographic theory is used as a foundation to start constructing a holistic view, in other words, a view of the human condition that isn’t separated into individual units but instead views the human as a whole into itself and as a part of a larger whole. The driving principle is to not only understand why something happens to the patient in the narrower confines of that persons life but how one mans illness speaks of that mans world and the world we all live in. How the Holistic view would see a child suffering from HIV after he is born and what the holistic view would do with that vision. As understood by the holistic view the illness of the child is the joint result of the choices made by the parents and the existence of the child reflects the existence of the parents and on the larger scale the choices made by society at large. The holistic view is, in essence, the idea of looking at the whole instead of at the sum of its parts, whether it is in the case of an individual illness or of a community at large.
There are a wide variety of physics studies that have proven all matter to be interconnected and all matter to be in reality energy. What I have not discussed yet are the practical tests and applications to measure and affect the HEF. There was a study done in the 70’s relating to Kirlian photography where a person focusing on the pictures object before or during when the picture was taken could effect a noticeable change in the field. Kirlian photography differs from some of the other supposed forms of HEF photography in that it does not even suppose to picture what is commonly termed the human aura. It only pictures various subtle changes to the surface tension and EM field produced by the object when a picture is taken and these changes can be interpreted to be one of the possible forms of the human aura. I have myself done various tests with this technique and it is clearly provable and testable that when a person in a different room some meters away starts focusing loving thoughts at the test subject the EM field undergoes rapid changes even if the test subject has no knowledge of this process.
I’ll explain the tests I have performed in more detail and potential ways of repeating the tests, but as I am not an expert in the field of Kirlian photography I cannot guarantee that they will work for every pair of people and that the effect will always be as pronounced. The tests we carried out involved a Kirlian camera that takes a picture of each of the subjects fingers and one set of tests is done as the person focuses lovingly on themselves and another set is done while another person focuses lovingly on the person without any line of sight to the test subject and some distance away. The strength and cohesion of the field of the test subject rose by 15% when an outsider was focusing on them. While I admit this was in no way scientifically accurate it was not done to prove the working of the Kirlian photography only that my friend could influence me as supposedly it takes a certain level of emotional bonding for the influence to be possible. We have also since then taken half a dozen or so control pictures and they are with minor variances all at the control level before the emotional focus is present. There are some far more striking examples of the effect of focus, both positive and negative on Kirlian photography that are widely available should further research be desired. However, Kirlian photography is a good way to explore in a macro scale observable world the effects of thought and focus on such mundane things as leaves or grains of wheat.
There are also some studies by Masaru Emoto that claim the long term focus and directed intention towards water can have visible changes on the pattern generated by that water when it is frozen in a Petri dish. While the studies by Masaru Emoto are interesting, they are not scientifically valid as they are neither peer reviewed nor follow the guidelines set out for scientific experiments. The research field as a whole of effecting water by the same principle that we can effect the HEF and on a more micro scale we can effect the changes and patterns of light is interesting and definitely worth more studies. It is no longer impossible from the viewpoint of latest understanding of physics to influence things with simply the power of focused intent. It is still perhaps too difficult to influence and too difficult to observe such changes but that does not mean that they can not be explained in the context of science and no longer relegated to the fringes as pseudoscience.
The holistic view as such isn’t simply about understanding the human mind and the human psyche in its entire view of the society, it is a view that always seeks to understand the larger picture, how the small parts come together to form a greater whole. While the holographic theory of existence, the concept that energy/consciousness is what generates life and this life experiences the world through the physical body as a reflection of the energy present in the objects it comes across. Is by no means a new concept and even if true the effect it has on our understanding of life can be profound but still subtle.
When one takes the example of the French government office worker who was in essence missing his entire brain yet still managed to function from the standpoint of mechanistic physics, that the brain generates the mind then he should not have been able to function in any way how ever remote. However, when one takes it from a view of consciousness generates the mind then it suddenly becomes possible that the brain is not the machine that generates the thought and the experience, the brain only interprets the experience for the consciousness which is not stored in the physical brain. The French office worker suddenly isn’t missing most of his mind, simply the clarity that most of his mind would have offered him. In the example of the holographic plate once smashed each small piece contains the whole picture once reflected back out again. The office workers brain wasn’t missing any critical component of his consciousness as his consciousness isn’t stored in the brain it is simply reflect from the brain. This is why his IQ was roughly 70 when tested yet was still able to see and hear as well as anyone else. The brain does not store sense information in a specific part of the brain permanently, and like any good hologram, if you disable that part other parts of the brain will, if there is sufficient plasticity, leap to the challenge and assume the roles of that part. This has, in the view of the holographic theory, little to do with physical mind having some genetic desire to use a trait it can’t possibly know it just lost. It is a reflection of the holographic consciousness knowing what it needs.
There is some debate in science as to how exactly can a plant when it is growing from a single seed or a child that is growing from an single embryo know what it is growing into. How can every specific part of the cell know where it is meant to go, this has a wide variety of explanations from simple random mutations, chemicals, DNA, surroundings, soul, consciousness to some more creative interpretations. However as some exceptional Kirlian photography has already shown, if you cut away a part of a plant and take a picture of it, once every few hundred times of doing this you’ll see a faint EM field memory of where a part of the plant used to be. While this isn’t sufficient to explain such things as ghost limb pain it is however sufficient to spark a lively debate in scientific circles and should definitely be pursued. If it is even remotely possible that we could for the first time in human history use a reproducible scientific method to measure something as complex and intriguing as the soul or even if only the physical manifestation in the EM field of the human soul it should be pursued with the utmost diligence. It is not up to science to interpret what its studies mean, that should be left up to the poets and dreamers, it is however up to science to study the phenomena, and the provable verifiable reality is, in its simplicity this. We are for the first time in the history of mankind, approaching a time where we can observe and see the effects of focused intent on the objects around us even when no visible action is taken. Here I will take a second of artistic liberty and say, we are indeed approaching the time of the avatars, when all men are truly equal because we finally understand the old rules of Jesus, Buddha, Krishna and all those who have ever perceived this universal energy field. “What you do onto these, my lesser brethren you do onto me”, “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you” “Karma” and what the Zen Buddhists in china called “Wu” the understanding that there is truly nothing concrete to life as it is all created by us, our shared dreams acting on the tapestry of the universal energy field. Perhaps it is time now, with the help of science to take a step forward in our understanding and see that there really is nothing but beauty in the world.
All the pieces and in closing
In closing I want to go through all the individual pieces of the holographic theory as put forward by Barbara Ann Brennan in her books and explain them in short.
1. Consciousness is the basic reality.
Our physical body acts as the interpreter or the filter for the consciousness which in reality is stored elsewhere and is only manifested through the physical body. The brain interprets the world through its holographic system and translates this information into a context we can understand. If we look at an object we perceive the energy of that object through the sense we are using at that time, the brain then converts this raw information into to the world we can perceive leaving out bits and pieces that we don’t actively focus on. As such the world we perceive is not the whole world and we only perceive a small part of it. Our senses only work for information we expect to perceive as our attention is focused on that particular form of information there is in essence a system of cognitive dissonance, we filter out information that we don’t need in our system. Consciousness in essence is what defines our reality and forms our reality, through our ability to effect matter based on our ability to view as explained by the previous examples. Our lack of focus on a certain aspect of our holographic existence an lead to the decrease and in some cases, disappearance of that aspect. Our consciousness is what is real and the physical world is created as a reaction to our internal landscape.
2. Everything is connected to everything else.
In the deeper levels of reality everything happens instantly and there is no spatial or time separating cause and effect. As proven by various electron observations the very basic blocks of our existence are all interconnected and react to one another immediately and as such are far beyond mechanistic world view proposed by Einstein’s theory of relativity.
3. Each piece contains the whole.
Observing the plate that is used in projecting a holographic image reveals that any piece of the whole plate still has all the basic information of the hologram only that it is fuzzier. So if one takes a holographic picture and then splits the plate in two and reflects the required light through one of the pieces what is missing is not the other half of the picture but half of the clarity of the original picture. So every piece of the original whole contains the essence of the original. Vice versa as explained in part 6 if shattered pieces of the original holographic plate are combined then the picture gets clearer with each step.
4. Time is also holographic.
As has been proven through the use of electron observations where the reaction can come vastly before the action that supposedly causes it the nature of time is also quite holographic. It can in fact be stated that time is by its very nature a construct and not a real phenomena. But on a more practical level this means that a decision made now can affect not only the future but also the past. It raises the question, is it possible to vastly alter events in the past by acting now? If it is too difficult to do this in the global level it can be possible to do it in an individual level.
5. Individuation and energy are basic to the universe.
Every single aspect in the universe is different from all the other aspects in the universe and no two things are ever alike. As proven by various experiments such as the double slit experiment particles that are thought of as solid are in fact energy and behave as such under the proper conditions before turning back into physical particles. If even the smallest pieces of what we consider indivisible matter is in reality composed of energy that can under the proper choice turn into a wave function then matter as such does not exist. And following that reasoning far enough neither do we exist in the purely physical sense. Reality suddenly changes from matter based as indivisible atoms, wholes that can not be anything but energy, to a view where everything indeed is energy and only by making a choice does that energy turn into matter. Only by making a choice how the wave function will work will that wave function transform itself into a particle.
6. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
As stated earlier the picture gets clearer and clearer the more of the picture is reintegrated instead and as such the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The fingers of 2 people in love when placed next to each other on a Kirlian photography plate merge and create a shared field bigger than the sum of its parts.
7. Consciousness creates reality and its own experiences of reality.
According to Karl Pribram’s model of the holographic brain, the brain processes data in a manner that it is used to and thus views reality in a manner that it is expecting to view reality. A person stuck on the victimhood state in their life will expect to be victimized and will act to bring forth that victimhood in his or her life. To truly help a victim of a narcissist it is necessary to bring forth the model of narcissism that the victim constantly craves for in their life. Why do some people keep repeating the same mistakes, the same situations in their life? This is a question that has to be answered from the consciousness based model of reality before any real healing can occur. Why alcoholics that are simply cured of their alcoholism without approaching the underlying cause of alcoholism, the desires to be alcoholics, is addressed and corrected will always revert back to their own patterns.
When all or even some of these are combined into an understanding of the human mind and the human condition entirely new and unthought-of ways to approach mental illness and in some cases even physical illness start to appear. And so we begin to approach the end of our journey into the human mind and the human consciousness. I can only do so much and say so much, if I sparked in the reader an interest for the holographic world view there are some books and movies I used as reference and would recommend as extra sources of information. I ask that even if these theories seem strange and unusual that you approach them with an open mind and a loving heart combined with a desire to seek information and to verify before you believe. It is good to have an open mind but not so open that once brain falls out. Remember how long it took for the geocentric model of understanding the cosmos to fall centuries or even millennia after it was proven to be incorrect. It was held up by people who laughed at those who had the courage to question.
I’d like to close this essay with a famous quote of Carl Gustav Jung and send you, the reader on your way with hopefully a new appreciation for the beauty of the universe.
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
Bibliography and Source References
I opted to not use source references for each individual claim and instead point to the overall sources I used. As both the reader’s digest and the two Barbara Ann Brennan books I used contain more than 25 sources each I felt it prudent to save space and not catalogue each individual source reference here but I will however post the source references most relevant to my work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_slit_experiment
I didn’t use Wikipedia as a source for my information about the DSE but it is an adequate source for more information. I would recommend watching the movie “What the bleep do we know” for an interesting interpretation of the DSE and related concepts. As there are many varying interpretations of the experiment and its results. A wide range of scientific research is recommended.
Barbara Ann Brennan, (1987) Hands of light New York: Bantams Book’s ISBN 0-553-05302-7
Barbara Ann Brennan,(1993) Light Emerging New York: Bantam Book’s ISBN 0-533-35456-6
Both Books were used as sources for the holographic world view and both books contain numerous source references to other books and sources. Both books go to great lengths in discussing hands on healing and other alternative therapy methods but also delve deeply into psychology.
Lord Of The Wind Films, (2004) What the bleep do we know?
http://www.whatthebleep.com/
A shared movie project by 3 participants in Ramtha School of enlightenment. Even though the movie itself is somewhat questionable for its wild interpretation of physics and neurochemistry it opens up the table for interesting debate and studies. Version of the movie used as source was the extended “down the rabbit hole” edition. Talking heads in the movie include psychologists and psychiatrists all with verifiable credentials. I have personally talked with one of the Physicists, John Hagelin, Ph.D. Professor of Physics, Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at Maharishi University of Management. Famous for developing Supersymmetric Flipped SU5 Grand Unified Field Theory. Even though my understanding of science behind the proposed unified field theory is at best extremely limited I had a short but interesting conversation with him about the nature of human existence.
http://www.quotemonk.com/authors/carl-jung/index.htm
Source for Jung quote.
http://www.scandinavica.com/culture/famous/bohr.htm
Source for the Nils Bohr quote. There are various versions of the original quote floating around on and offline. This however is generally considered one of the more reliable ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirlian_photography
With the same amount of salt as all the previous sources. The problem with Wikipedia when it comes to even remotely on the fringe technology and views on the world is that everybody who thinks they are an expert on the topic can change and edit anything at will. I can’t really quote specific sources as this is a field with extremely varied interpretations. I will however recommend a hand on study on the topic, if that is impossible or impractical google will provide some interesting web pages and articles with the simple search words Kirlian photography.
Reader’s digest, (1982) Into The Unknown The Reader’s Digest Association Inc., New york ISBN 951-9078-89-4
A book that is potentially no longer available made by readers digest in the 80’s where they cover a wide variety of potentially mysterious phenomena and try to have as balanced a view as possible.
http://www.rajatieto.fi/hengen_ja_tiedon_messut
Hengen ja tiedon messut is a Finnish meeting held in late summer/early autumn where a wide variety of different people can convene and discuss in great detail some views on life. It is also a great source for information on Kirlian photography as there are many people there with decades of experience with it.
Following sources were also used but lack ISBN codes
Ehrenwald, Jan, The ESP Experience. Basic Books, Inc., 1978.
Hansel, C.E.M., ESP and Parapsychology. Prometheus books, 1980.
Krippner, Stanley, Advances in Parapsychological Research, 2. Extrasensory Perception. Plenum Press, 1978.
Rhine, J.B., Extra-Sensory Perception. Bruce Humphries Publishers, 1964.
(Author uncertain) , New Frontiers of the Mind. Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1937.
Schmeidler, Gertrude Raffel, ESP and Personality Patterns. Yale University Press, 1958.
Becker, Robert O. and Selden Gary. The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life. New York: William Morrow & co., 1985
Mandel, Peter. Energy Emission Analysis: New Application of Kirlian Photography for Holistic Health. Germany: Synthesis Publishing Company, N.d.
Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe. New York: HarperCollins, 1991
Wilber, Ken. The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes. Boston: Shambhala, 1982.
“High Frequency Model for Kirlian Photography.” Energy Research Group, New York. 1973.
Hunt, DR. Valorie, Massey, W., Weinberg, R., Bruyere, R., and Hahn, P., “Project Report, A Study of Structural Integration from Neuromuscular Energy Field, and Emotional Approaches.” U.C.L.A., 1977.
Inyushin, V. M., and Chekorov, P. R., “Biostimulation Through Laser Radiation of Bioplasma.” Kazakh State University, USSR. Translated by Hill and Ghosak, University of Copenhagen 1975.
Inyushin, V. M., “On the Problem of Recording the Human Biofield.” Parapsychology in the USSR, Part II, San Francisco, Calif., Washington Research Center, 1981.
Vladimirov, Y. A., Ultraweak Luminescence Accompanying Biochemical Reactions. USSR Academy of Biological Sciences, Izdatelstvo “Nauka,” Moscow.
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