By now we are all familiar with the idea of living in the so-called “Information Age.” Computers have crawled into almost every aspect of our daily lives, and our very identities have been reduced to sets of information that can be stolen and used to others’ profit.
In a way, our computer-driven Information Age has blinded us to the age of information that has existed throughout human history—the information that exists all around us, waiting to be sensed and decoded.
There is something that smacks of New Age philosophy in the suggestion that the Universe takes enough of an interest in us to initiate communication, to open a dialogue with those sensitive enough to hear the call. The question, then, grandly rhetorical and philosophical, would be whether the Universe is a communicator and whether we lowly creatures are hearing anything it is saying.
Fortunately, I think the situation is much simpler. I believe that the disposition of the Universe is unimportant as long as we are sensitive to the information it imparts. After all, a book can be a repository of information, but the book itself takes no interest in its reader. And as for the information it contains, only a reader fluent in its chosen language can possibly extract anything of its intended message.
True, a book is prepared by someone with the desire to impart information, and the book is merely the capacitor for that information, storing its energy to be released at the right moment. Nonetheless, the book retains its power to inform long after its author has died and no longer maintains the task of informing.
To use such an analogy when discussing communication with the Universe is perhaps dangerous. For if the Universe is our book, who is its author? Another way, if our lives are books, are we or the Universe filling the pages?
Perhaps a better example is found in the mundane. We know our five senses as well as we can, for we try to use each one to experience pleasure and avoid suffering. We fill our noses with perfumes, slather our tongues with sweets, massage our bodies with oils, soothe our ears with fine music, and decorate our surroundings to please our eyes. There has been considerable debate for many years whether there are senses outside the five so familiar, and the idea of our obtaining information that should be outside our reach is often described as extrasensory perception, or ESP.
While the idea of ESP is attractive, efforts to confirm its existence have been confounded within laboratory settings. Still, the idea remains compelling, especially considering the information our surroundings impart outside the normal parameters of our familiar five senses.
The sensation of temperature, while highly subjective, is the way our bodies relate to the flow of heat, whether out of our bodies (when we feel something cold) or into our bodies (when we feel something warm). We are able to feel this flow even at a distance, interestingly enough with our sense of “touch.” The same mechanisms that allow us to feel pressure and pain—or even a light caress—enable us to feel heat flowing one way or another. In some ways, we feel this to be a fairly pure experience of the phenomenon of heat, yet it is easy to show how subjective it is.
Try a little experiment: Set up three buckets. In one, place a mixture of ice and water; in another, place hot (but not scalding) water; in the third, place water at room temperature. Then place your left hand in the ice water, and your right hand in the hot water. Let them soak for a few minutes, then remove them both and place them together in the room-temperature water. You’ll notice that your left hand senses the water as warm, and your right hand senses the water as cool, though intellectually, you are aware that each hand is experiencing water at the same temperature.
In matters of heat, it turns out that another sense would perhaps provide a better measure. If our sense of sight were tuned to be sensitive to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would get a very good idea of the heat content of things simply by looking at them. After all, we are able to feel heat flowing due to the phenomena of radiation, conduction, and convection. When objects give off thermal radiation, that transfer shows up in the infrared region of the spectrum.
Our eyes don’t see in the infrared region, though. So, clever beings that we are, we have invented gadgets that take infrared information and convert it into a color-coded scheme well within our visual range, enabling us to use the information. These gadgets prove to us that the information is there, despite our inability to see it otherwise.
I don’t think a hot object cares about informing its surroundings that it is hot, but it does so anyway, merely as a byproduct of its being hot. In that way, information about our environment exists independent of its interest in conveying that information.
Even within the normal range of our senses, there are considerable differences among humans. In matters of taste, for instance, not only are there huge differences in our likes and dislikes for certain flavors, but also differences in our very abilities to taste and detect chemicals. About 70 percent of the population detects the chemical phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) by its bitter taste, while the remaining 30 percent—I among them—cannot detect it at all.
The inability to detect PTC is a recessive trait, and the taste test is a fun little experiment to try in a genetics class. Does PTC have a bitter taste? From my experience, it has no flavor at all. Yet this flavorless thing on my tongue would taste quite disagreeable to seven out of ten people I meet. The chemical’s inherent nature is the same, but the information it imparts is different for me than it is for the majority of others.
Considering the variation in sensitivity of our familiar senses, it is tempting to assume the existence of other senses that measure things we don’t quite have the words for.
I imagine a number of people have felt “the air go out of a room” when an off-color remark has been made, or when a story has outstayed its welcome. It is a distinct sense of the emotional state of the room, and not a personal reaction. It is also something that is evident as a distinct moment, a distinct event, and not a general trend toward an emotional consensus. Even without an audible gasp or the sight or sound of a fidgeting audience, it is possible to detect offense and discomfiture in a group even without sharing that offense. I think this goes beyond what is known as empathy, and, in my opinion, is a major contender as an extra sense.
If this type of empathy is an extra sense, it is a curious thing. For the five senses that we hold dear are useful in relating to the inanimate world, while an empathic sense would allow us to relate to the animate.
But even the inanimate world is a dynamic one. Wind rushes as fluid masses of gas move according to pressure gradients, rustling leaves in trees and jogging memories of fall in our ears. Water from a recent rain runs downhill, following a path of least resistance, devolving into chaotic flow amid a field of so many variables. On a small enough scale, is even chaos a simple matter of cause and effect?
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would have you believe otherwise. In quantum mechanics, it has been established that the observation and measurement of a system disturbs the system sufficiently to alter the results of its measurement. It is therefore that the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be simultaneously known without error. If left undisturbed, though—which is to say unobserved—is cause and effect maintained?
Expanding that microscopic idea to our macroscopic lives, the suggestion can be made that, when it comes to receiving messages from our surroundings, our “measuring minds,” or our logical brains, work toward creating errors in the messages we receive. The more we view information from our environment as cause-and-effect messages in ordinary language, dissecting it and trying to determine its motivation, we work to lose the message.
We then should perhaps live without seeking any particular message, but remain confident in knowing that information is all around us, and only our sensitivity determines our experience of it.
Our conscious minds are the workhorses of logic. It is here that we plug away at problems and try to break them down into their fundamental parts, hoping to find all the connections and paths to a solution. But our logical minds would not serve us well if they were all we had. The acts of standing, walking, chewing, breathing, and maintaining a heartbeat would be impossible tasks, with each one occupying more conscious thought than we could muster if it were a matter of procedure to maintain. Luckily, our hindbrains are able to keep things steady, moving, and beating without our having to give them any thought.
Our brains are always calculating—contracting our muscles just right in order to position ourselves to catch a baseball, locating and scratching an itch without any visual cues, stepping around obstacles first detected in our periphery—and important information is sent to our conscious minds when direct attention needs to be paid. As a result, we may sometimes get impressions that seem to have come extrasensorially.
It is my belief that when useful information is gained from the environment without the usual cause-and-effect channels of ordinary sensory communication, it is because the logical mind is not looking for the message, but an overall awareness exists that such messages are available. If those messages are a product of the subconscious mind’s processing available information on the fringes of our sensory abilities, then the subconscious mind must be allowed to experience that information without the filter of our logical minds. That is made possible by simply being in the moment, in a process known as mindfulness.
If, on the other hand, the Universe takes an active role in our lives, it is also essential to greet it mindfully, trusting that the message will reach us as intended. And if no messages are sent at all, we have done ourselves no harm by practicing mindfulness.
Outside of placing ourselves in peril, no action taken as the result of an insight—the decoding of a message from either within or without—should cause us harm. If our gut tells us to take a left instead of our usual right on the way to work, very little of that decision imperils us, provided we arrive safely at our destination, regardless of whether that destination is the one we had in mind when we set out.
When seeking guidance in life, we open ourselves to messages, whether from fellow people or from our sense of spirituality, which seems to sense information from within and without. At the very least, we interact with our surroundings using our five senses. We are aware that we become desensitized with continued exposure to a stimulus. Therefore, a life without variation, or a life spent without mindful attention, is a life desensitized to sub-sensory information. The same job, for instance, and the same path to and from that job, offers the least chance for experiencing new information and new ways of thinking.
Most people stay highly localized to their workplaces and homes. Only new surroundings—or the conscious decision to view old surroundings in a new way—can create the sensitivity needed for new experiences and new messages in one’s life.
A slight change in perspective can even alter our experience of our usual environment. Consider that our visual sense is our “quickest” sense, gathering information that travels at the speed of light. Once that information hits and then passes our eyes, it travels more slowly through the optic nerve, where it heads to the brain for interpretation. While the speed of light is blindingly fast, it is finite. What this means is that even our quickest sense cannot impart any information to us of an instantaneous nature. The visual field is really a panorama of the past, with the sights from greater distances coming from farther away in space and time. As we look to the horizon, the effect is subtle; as we look to the firmament, the effect is pronounced. But at any distance, no information we gather through our traditional five senses gives us an experience of the present moment. We always live in the past if we rely on traditional sensory data.
Transcending those five senses is the ultimate sense, the mindful awareness of thought itself, the state of conscious being. It is the only opportunity for presence in the moment and our prime opportunity for communication outside the mundane.
In a way, our computer-driven Information Age has blinded us to the age of information that has existed throughout human history—the information that exists all around us, waiting to be sensed and decoded.
There is something that smacks of New Age philosophy in the suggestion that the Universe takes enough of an interest in us to initiate communication, to open a dialogue with those sensitive enough to hear the call. The question, then, grandly rhetorical and philosophical, would be whether the Universe is a communicator and whether we lowly creatures are hearing anything it is saying.
Fortunately, I think the situation is much simpler. I believe that the disposition of the Universe is unimportant as long as we are sensitive to the information it imparts. After all, a book can be a repository of information, but the book itself takes no interest in its reader. And as for the information it contains, only a reader fluent in its chosen language can possibly extract anything of its intended message.
True, a book is prepared by someone with the desire to impart information, and the book is merely the capacitor for that information, storing its energy to be released at the right moment. Nonetheless, the book retains its power to inform long after its author has died and no longer maintains the task of informing.
To use such an analogy when discussing communication with the Universe is perhaps dangerous. For if the Universe is our book, who is its author? Another way, if our lives are books, are we or the Universe filling the pages?
Perhaps a better example is found in the mundane. We know our five senses as well as we can, for we try to use each one to experience pleasure and avoid suffering. We fill our noses with perfumes, slather our tongues with sweets, massage our bodies with oils, soothe our ears with fine music, and decorate our surroundings to please our eyes. There has been considerable debate for many years whether there are senses outside the five so familiar, and the idea of our obtaining information that should be outside our reach is often described as extrasensory perception, or ESP.
While the idea of ESP is attractive, efforts to confirm its existence have been confounded within laboratory settings. Still, the idea remains compelling, especially considering the information our surroundings impart outside the normal parameters of our familiar five senses.
The sensation of temperature, while highly subjective, is the way our bodies relate to the flow of heat, whether out of our bodies (when we feel something cold) or into our bodies (when we feel something warm). We are able to feel this flow even at a distance, interestingly enough with our sense of “touch.” The same mechanisms that allow us to feel pressure and pain—or even a light caress—enable us to feel heat flowing one way or another. In some ways, we feel this to be a fairly pure experience of the phenomenon of heat, yet it is easy to show how subjective it is.
Try a little experiment: Set up three buckets. In one, place a mixture of ice and water; in another, place hot (but not scalding) water; in the third, place water at room temperature. Then place your left hand in the ice water, and your right hand in the hot water. Let them soak for a few minutes, then remove them both and place them together in the room-temperature water. You’ll notice that your left hand senses the water as warm, and your right hand senses the water as cool, though intellectually, you are aware that each hand is experiencing water at the same temperature.
In matters of heat, it turns out that another sense would perhaps provide a better measure. If our sense of sight were tuned to be sensitive to the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we would get a very good idea of the heat content of things simply by looking at them. After all, we are able to feel heat flowing due to the phenomena of radiation, conduction, and convection. When objects give off thermal radiation, that transfer shows up in the infrared region of the spectrum.
Our eyes don’t see in the infrared region, though. So, clever beings that we are, we have invented gadgets that take infrared information and convert it into a color-coded scheme well within our visual range, enabling us to use the information. These gadgets prove to us that the information is there, despite our inability to see it otherwise.
I don’t think a hot object cares about informing its surroundings that it is hot, but it does so anyway, merely as a byproduct of its being hot. In that way, information about our environment exists independent of its interest in conveying that information.
Even within the normal range of our senses, there are considerable differences among humans. In matters of taste, for instance, not only are there huge differences in our likes and dislikes for certain flavors, but also differences in our very abilities to taste and detect chemicals. About 70 percent of the population detects the chemical phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) by its bitter taste, while the remaining 30 percent—I among them—cannot detect it at all.
The inability to detect PTC is a recessive trait, and the taste test is a fun little experiment to try in a genetics class. Does PTC have a bitter taste? From my experience, it has no flavor at all. Yet this flavorless thing on my tongue would taste quite disagreeable to seven out of ten people I meet. The chemical’s inherent nature is the same, but the information it imparts is different for me than it is for the majority of others.
Considering the variation in sensitivity of our familiar senses, it is tempting to assume the existence of other senses that measure things we don’t quite have the words for.
I imagine a number of people have felt “the air go out of a room” when an off-color remark has been made, or when a story has outstayed its welcome. It is a distinct sense of the emotional state of the room, and not a personal reaction. It is also something that is evident as a distinct moment, a distinct event, and not a general trend toward an emotional consensus. Even without an audible gasp or the sight or sound of a fidgeting audience, it is possible to detect offense and discomfiture in a group even without sharing that offense. I think this goes beyond what is known as empathy, and, in my opinion, is a major contender as an extra sense.
If this type of empathy is an extra sense, it is a curious thing. For the five senses that we hold dear are useful in relating to the inanimate world, while an empathic sense would allow us to relate to the animate.
But even the inanimate world is a dynamic one. Wind rushes as fluid masses of gas move according to pressure gradients, rustling leaves in trees and jogging memories of fall in our ears. Water from a recent rain runs downhill, following a path of least resistance, devolving into chaotic flow amid a field of so many variables. On a small enough scale, is even chaos a simple matter of cause and effect?
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would have you believe otherwise. In quantum mechanics, it has been established that the observation and measurement of a system disturbs the system sufficiently to alter the results of its measurement. It is therefore that the position and momentum of a subatomic particle cannot be simultaneously known without error. If left undisturbed, though—which is to say unobserved—is cause and effect maintained?
Expanding that microscopic idea to our macroscopic lives, the suggestion can be made that, when it comes to receiving messages from our surroundings, our “measuring minds,” or our logical brains, work toward creating errors in the messages we receive. The more we view information from our environment as cause-and-effect messages in ordinary language, dissecting it and trying to determine its motivation, we work to lose the message.
We then should perhaps live without seeking any particular message, but remain confident in knowing that information is all around us, and only our sensitivity determines our experience of it.
Our conscious minds are the workhorses of logic. It is here that we plug away at problems and try to break them down into their fundamental parts, hoping to find all the connections and paths to a solution. But our logical minds would not serve us well if they were all we had. The acts of standing, walking, chewing, breathing, and maintaining a heartbeat would be impossible tasks, with each one occupying more conscious thought than we could muster if it were a matter of procedure to maintain. Luckily, our hindbrains are able to keep things steady, moving, and beating without our having to give them any thought.
Our brains are always calculating—contracting our muscles just right in order to position ourselves to catch a baseball, locating and scratching an itch without any visual cues, stepping around obstacles first detected in our periphery—and important information is sent to our conscious minds when direct attention needs to be paid. As a result, we may sometimes get impressions that seem to have come extrasensorially.
It is my belief that when useful information is gained from the environment without the usual cause-and-effect channels of ordinary sensory communication, it is because the logical mind is not looking for the message, but an overall awareness exists that such messages are available. If those messages are a product of the subconscious mind’s processing available information on the fringes of our sensory abilities, then the subconscious mind must be allowed to experience that information without the filter of our logical minds. That is made possible by simply being in the moment, in a process known as mindfulness.
If, on the other hand, the Universe takes an active role in our lives, it is also essential to greet it mindfully, trusting that the message will reach us as intended. And if no messages are sent at all, we have done ourselves no harm by practicing mindfulness.
Outside of placing ourselves in peril, no action taken as the result of an insight—the decoding of a message from either within or without—should cause us harm. If our gut tells us to take a left instead of our usual right on the way to work, very little of that decision imperils us, provided we arrive safely at our destination, regardless of whether that destination is the one we had in mind when we set out.
When seeking guidance in life, we open ourselves to messages, whether from fellow people or from our sense of spirituality, which seems to sense information from within and without. At the very least, we interact with our surroundings using our five senses. We are aware that we become desensitized with continued exposure to a stimulus. Therefore, a life without variation, or a life spent without mindful attention, is a life desensitized to sub-sensory information. The same job, for instance, and the same path to and from that job, offers the least chance for experiencing new information and new ways of thinking.
Most people stay highly localized to their workplaces and homes. Only new surroundings—or the conscious decision to view old surroundings in a new way—can create the sensitivity needed for new experiences and new messages in one’s life.
A slight change in perspective can even alter our experience of our usual environment. Consider that our visual sense is our “quickest” sense, gathering information that travels at the speed of light. Once that information hits and then passes our eyes, it travels more slowly through the optic nerve, where it heads to the brain for interpretation. While the speed of light is blindingly fast, it is finite. What this means is that even our quickest sense cannot impart any information to us of an instantaneous nature. The visual field is really a panorama of the past, with the sights from greater distances coming from farther away in space and time. As we look to the horizon, the effect is subtle; as we look to the firmament, the effect is pronounced. But at any distance, no information we gather through our traditional five senses gives us an experience of the present moment. We always live in the past if we rely on traditional sensory data.
Transcending those five senses is the ultimate sense, the mindful awareness of thought itself, the state of conscious being. It is the only opportunity for presence in the moment and our prime opportunity for communication outside the mundane.
3 comments:
Hi Romann,
I like the way you think. You sound like a physicist with a broader view of the universe, or shall we say, the multiverse.
I've been studying this wacky world of expanded perception for a almost 2 decades now. I came to it kicking and squirming, but I'm here and it's often more real than the "solid" reality we supposedly live in. Oh, I could go on, but you seem to have a darn good handle on it.
A few bits of expanded reading to consider, Hands of Light; and Light Emerging by Barbara Brennan. BB was a NASA physicist before she had some expansive experiences that led her to write her books (self-published when that was hard to do - on faith that they'd sell) which are now translated into a zillion languages.
I attended her four year program for holistic healing. In my class of 120 people, many were doctors and nurses, therapists and non-heath professionals from all over the planet. Lots of time in the field over many years has made me (a open-minded skeptic) see that we are just scratching the surface of our ability to "see" the world around us.
Some other intersting reads are the books of Machaelle Small Wright. She has a research center in Virginia and is doing remarkable work in the tradition of the Findhorn Foundation, but in many ways far expanded beyond their work. A great place to start with her work is Behaving as if the God in All Things Mattered; or Flower Essences: Reordering Our Understanding and Approach to Illness and Health. She has developed a system of co-creative science that is offering remarkable ways of living in the world holistically and beneficially to all things. Her book, Co-Creative Science: A Revolution in Science Providing Real Solutions for Today's Health and Environment, is quite profound and is supported by some pretty hefty scientists (the brave ones willing to step forward - there are many quiet ones in the back row hiding their faces).
So I've gone on here, rambling away. Forgive me, but I hope you find some of the above work of interest.
Thanks again for stopping for a visit at the Yada Feast. I'll hope you'll come back for another visit (if I haven't scared you off with the babbling ;-)).
Fran
Yada Feast
PS - Some related website:
Barbara Brennan
Perelandra - Michaelle Small Wright
Hi Fran!
I was so happy to see that you came back for another visit. I will certainly make a note of your reading recommendations. I am particularly interested in seeing what Barbara Brennan has to say about things. I would recommend to you, in the meantime, the work of Ken Wilber. Perhaps a good place to start is A Brief History of Everything. He believes in the progression of culture through different levels of development and thought, culminating in a true spiritual awareness. The most interesting thing about what he writes is that rationality is a necessary step there; it is a means, and not the end. As much as I love science, it doesn't answer all of the questions that mean the most to me now. I will indeed pop over to the Yada Feast. Right now, as a matter of fact.
Romann,
I have indeed read Wilber. He's cutting edge but not accessible to the average Joe looking for his path, but I suspect many will eventually stumble into his work when they're ready.
And yes, I LOVE science, too. But I think that so much of science has become rigid, lost its way to REAL discovery because of the limitations of the label of what constitutes good science. So many great thinkers, inventors, geniuses have been ignored because their work was seen as outside the bounds of what was consider real science. If you're not in the club, you're often ignored (and worse, not funded).
I think we have to bring wonder and curiosity back into science, especially the teaching of science. I thought it was so magical, not just statistics, facts and test results. I was very lucky to have fantastic science teachers who helped to spark my curiosity about everything, a gift that has served me well in all facets of my life. My parents were the same. (I was not so lucky with math teachers. At an early age, I knew there was something magical or perhaps mystical about numbers, but my math teachers soon pounded that early joy right out of me. I didn't become an engineer because I hated math! Probably a blessing in disguise, really.)
Anyway, I hope you like Barbara's stuff. Michelle's is simply remarkable, too.
See you soon.
Be well,
Fran
Yada Feast
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