Reality Check progress

This book is absolutely flying out of my fingers. Writing is always a wonderful experience when it’s fuelled by passion rather than discipline. I’ve had some energetic writing experiences before, but never so much so quickly. That’s about 60 book-pages in a single week.

Writing a new book: Reality Check

The intellectual and spiritual journey I’ve been on for the past year has been powerful and life-changing. It shows no sign of fading. In fact, the whole picture has gotten clearer and clearer as time has progressed.

I’m really glad I blogged about it all, because I now have a permanent record of what is probably the most important transition of my life. For a while, I’ve been considering turning the past year’s blog entries into a physical book, but I think I need to start afresh and introduce the insights from a more effective angle than the haphazard way that they occurred to me at the time.

I put an outline together today, penned an introduction and the first chapter, totaling some 3,000 words. I’m really happy with the results so far.

I’m not sure how much or how little a book of this kind is going to interest the folks who visit here. I just feel passionately about, so I’m going to do it.

The working title is Reality Check, which is a perfect fit thematically, but is a bit common. I’m sure those words have already been used as titles before now. I’m all ears for an alternative title.

I would like the cover to feature a kitten playing with its reflection in the mirror (i.e. not fully understanding reality), but how I’m going to get a photo of that I’ve no idea.

I want to thank everyone who posted challenging comments to my blog entries over the past year. It’s good to be kept on your toes and also helps me to notice my failure to communicate at times.

The journey is, of course, not over, and probably never will be. I haven’t reached any sort of ultimate conclusion, and I doubt there’s a point where I will say, “I understand it all now. Job done.” So, when is a good time to write a book about the nature of reality? Might as well be now.

There’s no such thing as time … Say what?

Some people think of eternity as a line with no beginning and no end. In church, I’ve heard preachers say things like “Way back in eternity past …” It’s as if God were on his own forever until he decided to make the universe. Likewise, we are led to believe that we, as individuals, had a beginning but will not have an end – that we will simply go on collecting experiences forever, both on earth and in heaven. But I think we misunderstand the nature of eternity. It is not a line with no end. We’ve misunderstood the whole nature of time itself. Infinite Consciousness (my preferred term for what you might think of as God) does not experience time in the way that we (that is, our individual egos) do because it knows the end from the beginning. There is no value for Infinite Consciousness in travelling along a never-ending line where it always knows what’s coming.

Infinite Consciousness exists in eternity, which is not a never-ending time-line; it’s a realm of no-time or all-time – a realm where free will, deductive thinking, and decision making do not exist, because all is known, all is complete. Time as we understand it is merely a construct. Infinite Consciousness created time as a means of fragmenting itself, of experiencing incompleteness, for reasons known only to itself. The consciousness within me is Infinite Consciousness. The consciousness within you is Infinite Consciousness. We are the same being. We have simply been placed into an arena where we cannot access the full awareness of what we are. Just beyond my subconscious mind is Infinite Consciousness holding me here – holding itself here. Likewise, just beyond your unconscious mind is Infinite Consciousness holding you here. We are one and the same being; we have simply been forced into a state of amnesia, because that amnesia is the only way to experience what it’s like for there to be something other than you. To be human is to leave eternity and enter time – to deliberately forget what you are and undergo a period of learning filled with thrills and spills, joys and sorrows.

I experienced a sudden moment of clarity recently. It came like a bolt from the blue when I was out cycling one evening, travelling along a route that I had cycled since boyhood. I was reminiscing about what it had felt to be here doing this when I was a teenager, playfully imagining I could ride through a time-warp and suddenly be that person again, re-living those memorable school days. And it suddenly hit me: “There is no time. You are not moving forward through time. You are Infinite Consciousness, and there is only this one eternal moment – the NOW. Time is an illusion that is playing through you. You are standing still. There is only NOW.” I had read these ideas before, but never understood them until this strange moment when the pieces of the jigsaw clicked. I suddenly got a new perspective on the question “What happens to my soul when I die?” Or as Christians would say: “Where will you spend eternity?” I’m not heading for anywhere, heaven or hell. I’m standing still. The events of time move towards me and play through me, and it’s all a construct. It’s like time is a DVD and you’re the laser reading it, standing still in the now while the movie plays through you. If I could tear the veil of time away, the full knowledge of what I am would flood my consciousness – and time would disappear. When I had this moment of clarity, I just started to laugh joyously (good job I was alone). It was a wonderful moment of intuition that added another layer of clarity to the intuitive journey I’ve been on for the past year.

I have heard the analogy that we are like droplets of water and collectively we make up the ocean. It’s a limited analogy, because we’re still inclined to identify ourselves with the droplet (the ego) and not the ocean. The truth is you are the ocean. Yes, little you. You are Infinite Consciousness. The awareness inside you is the awareness of God, if you like. The only reason you don’t already know that is because the experience of human individuality makes you forget it. It’s the only way the human experience can work. If you suddenly awoke to your true magnitude, you couldn’t function here in this place as an individual. Here at this human level we are individuals. We may still be individuals are a higher level. But at the highest level, you and I are the the same being. In simple terms, imagine two people dying at the same time, suddenly realising they are the same person with two sets of memories (the truth is likely more complex than that, but I hope you get the idea). We are only lulled into thinking that we are separate by “ego.”

Some people who embrace this kind of thinking seem to favour the idea of reincarnation. Now, reincarnation might be true on one level, but at the same time, it’s just another part of the time construct, and we have to get beyond that. Even if my indivudal “soul” has lived a hundred lives before now, on a higher level of awareness, my soul and your soul are the same person. Reincarnation strikes me as just another way to perpetuate the human ego into “eternity to come,” when the whole point is the realisation that ego is a construct, and the future is a construct. There is only ONE existing in the NOW.

The whole universe is an expression of Infinite Consciousness undergoing an experience of separation. And humans are only a small part of that. The three-dimensional physical nature of the universe is nothing more than a holographic projection which allows human and animal life to interact via five senses. In its fundamental essence, way beyond the atomic level, it is pure energy. And all of it is a projection of Infinite Consciousness.

Well, that’s what I think. Crazy as it may sound to some ears, this is the view of life that resonates most clearly to me. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest that I can’t stand in line with a whole bunch of people and call myself a Christian or an atheist or whatever. The world is full of people patting each other’s backs and assuring each other that they’re on the right track. There is a massive section of the population that believes strongly in something that is in direct opposition to the strong beliefs of another massive section of the population, and only one of them can be right. Or maybe neither! The sheer scale of each opposing herd leads me to put no faith whatsoever in the herd mentality. The truth is not found in following the archetypal belief systems of those around us.

Have you ever noticed how someone can say “I’m an atheist,” or “I’m a Christian,” and no one will laugh. But if you should say, “I am Infinite Consciousness. I am everything that ever was, is, and will be,” the person you are talking to might think you are mentally ill. This is how much we are infected with the herd mentality. It doesn’t matter if one herd says something in complete contradiction to another herd. As long as it’s a herd, we give it respect. But when someone stands up and says something different, the ridicule begins (David Icke, circa 1991, anyone?).

We refer to ourselves as “human beings,” but it might be more accurate to call ourselves “human becomings.” None of us are existing in a state of being. The experience of life in a body is the experience of continual change as we move through time. There is only one that possesses being outside of time: Infinite Consciousness. I intuitively believe that this Infinite Consciousness is the awareness inside every one of us. The experience of being propelled through time is just an illusion, born out of our disconnection from the full awareness of the vast being that we collectively are.

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Telekinesis hoaxes and how to spot them

In the following videos I discuss useful principles for discerning whether a video demonstration of telekinesis is real or fake. I expose some popular YouTube videos (particularly those of godspeed09) that are wrongly believed to be examples of advanced telekinesis.

Part 1 of 2:

Part 2 of 2:

Advertising and mind control

Yesterday evening I watched the recently released remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. If you’ve seen it, do you recall noticing a huge McDonald’s advertisement being thrust in your face partway through? If you spotted it, good for you, because you weren’t supposed to. It’s what’s known as a subliminal, which means “below threshold” – something that’s designed to get into your head by bypassing the critical faculty of normal conscious awareness. Most people have heard of subliminal messages, and the example that probably comes to mind is a lightning-quick message flashed across a screen – gone before you’ve time to read it. That certainly is a subliminal, but subliminals are also much more crafty than this. There’s a scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still where Jennifer Connelly and Keanu Reeves pull into a parking lot at night. The camera is positioned in front of their car, looking in through the windshield. As the car grinds to a halt, the reflection of a huge letter “M” crawls up the glass, a yellow “M” with very familiar curved peaks. At this point, the attention of most viewers is on Jennifer and Keanu and the conversation they are having, not on the McDonald’s logo. Typically, we look through the glass, not directly at it. Someone may ask, “What’s the value in an advertisement, if no one pays attention to it?” It’s a sensible enough question, if you’ve never researched how the human mind works. But when you understand something of the nature of the mind, then it becomes clear that it’s precisely your lack of attention that the advertisers are counting on!

Our minds have a tendency to build associations between things that are placed together. I’ll explain what I mean by that by illustrating how a phobia – an irrational fear – operates. I know a young woman who finds it extremely uncomfortable to be photographed. At first I thought her reaction to cameras was based on insecurity about her appearance, but I later learned from her that the origin of her fear was much deeper. As a young child, her parents hired a professional photographer each year for her birthday party. It was always the same bearded man, the physical appearance of whom frightened the child. As the photographer, he was never without his camera. And so the negative emotions that the girl felt in response to the man became associated with the camera, too. When this was reinforced over a few years, the same emotions occurred when the camera alone was pointed at the girl, regardless of who was holding it. As an adult, she is completely aware that her fear of cameras is irrational, but the feelings persist regardless of what her conscious mind knows. You might imagine that all we would need to do to cure a phobia is to realise how irrational it is, but it’s not that simple. The mind creates links that bypass conscious awareness, and these links take time and effort to break.

This tendency of the mind to create unconscious associations may give the impression that our minds are somewhat faulty, or less optimal than they should be. But that’s not the case. The tendency of the unconscious to make associations is vital to us being able to function effectively in the physical world. The fact that I can sit here and tap this computer keyboard rapidly without consciously thinking about each key-press is due to my subconscious having established links. I simply think about what words I want to appear, give the okay to my fingers, and off they go. This is in stark contrast to when I was ten years old, playing with my first computer, gradually learning where each letter was located by roving my index finger across the keyboard. Little did I know back then that I was beginning the process of creating a bridge between intention and action that would allow my conscious mind to be bypassed, turning me into a rapid typist. If you’re not a heavy computer user, a better example of this is driving a car. Remember what it was like when you first learned? All the careful thinking you had to do, between watching the road, steering, changing gears while correctly operating the clutch and accelerator, not to mention the safety aspects of paying attention to the mirrors and being able to find the brake instantly. Now, if you’ve been driving for a few years, you’ll know that the car feels just like an extension of your body, and you don’t even have to think about those things at all. They happen on automatic, because your mind has built the necessary subconscious connections that give your conscious mind the freedom to be elsewhere, such as talking on a mobile phone (not!).

In the case of the woman with the phobia, the very same principle is operating. Her mind has created an unconscious association through repetition of experience. A camera appears, and the subconscious says, “Oh! There’s a camera pointed at you. I know what I’m supposed to make you feel: fear!” The conscious mind says, “Stop it. This is irrational. There’s no reason I’m supposed to feel this.” And the subconscious replies, “Sorry, but I already know what I’m supposed to be doing.” The purpose of the bridge-building tendency is to allow the bypassing of conscious awareness, and that’s why the subconscious isn’t listening to the conscious mind, even when the conscious mind attempts to correct it. The way to cure an irrational phobia is to re-train the unconscious mind to feel something different, by confronting the fear head-on and persistently attempting to create a new experience, until a different association is built through repetition.

So you see, the tendency of the mind to build unconscious connections is both necessary but, given particular circumstances, is prone to veering off in a direction that is less than helpful for our lives. This tendency also makes the mind prone to deliberate abuse by those who know how the mind works. And have no doubt, advertisers are very much in the know.

Picture this: you’re sitting at home, warm and snug in your living room, tucking into a snack, while The Day the Earth Stood Still is pouring out of the TV across the room and into your eyes. While you’re in this feel-good state, a big McDonald’s logo is staring you in the face, but you don’t even see it. Or to state that more accurately, your conscious mind doesn’t see it; your subconscious, on the other hand, takes it all in. You’re not aware of it, but a feel-good emotional connection with the McDonald’s logo is covertly building itself in your subconscious. Later, when you drive your car past the local McDonald’s “restaurant” and you spot that big letter “M” on the building, you start to feel good, and you have no idea why. The effect is so subtle that you don’t even ask yourself why you feel good. Of course, one subliminal message in one movie isn’t going to have much of an effect. A cumulative effect is created by the constant repetition of the same theme, again and again, in other movies and during commercial breaks. Ask yourself, how many television advertisements are designed to inform you, whereas how many are designed to make you feel something? With this is mind, you can start to appreciate the importance of a company having a distinct, simple, identifiable symbol on their products or services. In time, your subconscious learns a clear message from the experiences you feed it, and it starts to tell you: “McDonald’s makes me feel good.” And unless you’ve educated yourself with the likes of Morgan Spurlock’s excellent documentary Supersize Me, exposing the horrors of the fast food industry, then you have no reason not to follow what makes you feel good. Ka-ching! “Big Mac and fries, please.”

Some time ago in the UK there was a television advertisement for the cervical cancer vaccine that was being introduced for teenage girls. Did this advert inform the public of the medical facts about cervical cancer and the vaccine? No. Instead, it staged a little feel-good play, where a schoolgirl sang a song with words like “Had the jab we need; girls feeling safe,” combined with images of her playing netball in the school playground with her friends. This was designed to make the viewer feel the positive emotions associated with fun school activities and associate those emotions with the cervical cancer vaccine, regardless of what the viewer does or doesn’t know about the vaccine. The only useful information in the advertisement was a web-link at the tail end, where you could go and get the facts. I mean, really, who keeps a notepad by their armchair to take down websites while they watch TV? The web-link was there because it covers the NHS’s legal asses. Based on the content of the advert itself, it was essentially saying, “You don’t need to think. Information is irrelevant. Just feel how we want you to feel.” How about instead using those thirty seconds to properly inform me about the risks of developing cervical cancer and the side-effects of the vaccine? Then I can make an informed choice about whether to have my daughter vaccinated. But no, the National Health Service prefers to subject schoolgirls to mind control, to lull them into feeling positive emotions instead of presenting impartial freedom of choice. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I suspect the real reason why the vaccine is advertised in this manner is because it is a product, just like a Big Mac is a product, and they want as many people as possible to “consume” this product, so that they can make as much money as possible at the expense of the tax payers who have no choice but to fund them. “But we care!” says the NHS. I’ll believe that when you stop trying to control my mind. Here’s the advertisement; judge what I’m saying for yourself. See how many different things you can spot that are designed to evoke positive feelings in teenage girls – things which have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with cervical cancer or the vaccine …

A few days ago I spotted another alarming TV advertisement. This time it was a recruiting drive by the armed forces. The advert dramatised a combat scenario in the style of a first-person shooter videogame, placing the television screen as the eyes of the soldier. It was clearly designed to appeal to the young gaming generation. The viewer is reminded of the good feelings associated with playing games – the adrenaline rush of full-on virtual combat, the pleasure of outwitting an enemy with superior tactics. The subconscious is then encouraged to link the real-life combat shown on the advertisement with the good feelings of videogames. The message is clear: “You like videogames? Well, if you want the ultimate adrenaline rush, sign up for the armed forces!” No useful information. No critical thinking encouraged. It’s all feel, feel, feel. “Feel what we want you to feel. You’re the donkey; just follow the carrot we’re holding in front of your nose. No need to think.” Remember, this isn’t an advert that’s trying to make you change your brand of fabric softener. It’s using the feeling you get from killing videogame characters and attempting to associate it with the killing of real people in real war. Here’s the ad …

These are not sinister exceptions in an otherwise clean and safe world of advertising. This is how the whole advertising game is played. It’s the straightforward and informative adverts that are the exception. Emotional manipulation is the norm. Ever watch a television advert and you thought it was completely daft? Doesn’t matter. Did it make you laugh? That’s what mattered. Can you even remember what the product was? No? Doesn’t matter. Your subconscious took note of that brand logo, and rest assured you’ll feel good when you see it again. Why would a company pay thousands of pounds to parade a celebrity in front of your nose for thirty seconds when a second-rate actor would do just as well? You won’t feel the same way about John Smith as you do about Bruce Willis, Ewen McGregor, Samuel L. Jackson – take your pick. We’ve all had experiences with celebrities before, because we’ve enjoyed their movies, appreciated their recipes, tapped our feet to their music, or whatever. Their presence in an advertisement is not to inform you; it’s to make you feel good and manipulate your subconscious to link that feeling to the product or service, regardless of what you do or don’t know.

This is how the wool is pulled over our eyes. This is how we are treated like sheep every day. This is how we make decisions without any awareness that a great part of the decision-making process is being done for us – below threshold. I encourage everyone to start watching their televisions in a very different manner. In movies and dramas, keep an eye out for those product placement logos. In advertisements, always ask, “What am I being encouraged to feel right now and why?” When a subliminal is spotted, all its power over you is gone. And if you want to go as extreme as tossing your television in the dumpster, it’s further than I’ve gone, but kudos to you. The world may laugh, but I won’t be joining in.

In the 1970s film Dawn of the Dead (a splatter movie with a profound subtext), four humans take refuge in a shopping mall from the undead hoards ravaging the world. Gazing at the zombie-infested parking lot from the safety of the roof, Fran asks Stephen, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” Stephen replies, “Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” In another scene, another survivor, Peter, says, “They’re after the place. They don’t know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.” Fran asks, “What the hell are they?” Peter: “They’re us, that’s all, when there’s no more room in hell.” In other words, when Peter looked at the brain-dead behaviour of the zombies, there was no significant difference to the behaviour of a typical human being.

We’re zombies! To one extent or another, we’ve been lulled into becoming mind-controlled non-thinking zombies by a black box that sits in the corner of the living room. We think we have free will, unaware of how much we’re actually reacting to craftily constructed emotional stimuli. The mind control of advertising can only be described as genius, since it can manipulate you to do something whilst you feel it was entirely your free choice. Time to be informed and take back your mind.

Let me hear you make decisions
Without your television.
- “Stripped” by Depeche Mode

The amazing unconscious mind

There is something that lies behind your outward ego – a mysterious thing called the unconscious/subconscious mind, and it’s this part of us that provides the best rational clue to the underlying essence of what we are. First of all, it’s clear that we have an unconscious mind. There are many expressions of it in life, if we only look.

It’s possible to drive a car whilst daydreaming (although I don’t recommend it). One day, shortly after moving house, I accidentally drove home from work to my previous house; I was right at the driveway before I realised, “I don’t live here anymore!” What happened was my unconscious mind followed a pattern that had been imprinted by habit, while my conscious mind was busy thinking about something else. When I type on this keyboard, I don’t think about what my fingers are doing. Words flow out automatically, from my thoughts onto the screen. I’ve been typing for so many years that I don’t have to consciously concern myself with my fingers any more; my unconscious takes care of it for me. The unconscious is also what regulates our bodies; we don’t have to consciously think to take each next breath; we don’t have to consciously control our own heart-rate to keep the blood circulating. The unconscious also plays a huge role in emotions; phobias happen when the unconscious mind associates a negative feeling with a particular experience. It’s possible to be afraid of something in a completely irrational way, simply because of something that happened in the past. And the unconscious is responsible for a lot more than just these issues.

Here’s my favourite example of how amazing the unconscious is: When a person has a hemispherectomy (the complete removal one side of the brain), this paralyses one side of his body, because the side of the brain controlling that side of the body is gone. However, it’s possible to re-train the paralysed limbs to function again, simply by trying to move them. At first, nothing happens. But eventually, the limbs start to work on their own. The brain starts to rewire itself to reconnect with the paralysed limbs. It almost seems like magic, because you don’t have to consciously do anything except wish it to happen. But under the surface, the unconscious mind is listening to the conscious mind, and the unconscious mind is able to do what needs to be done. It’s like you have your very own qualified brain surgeon inside yourself! The unconscious mind seems to be immensely knowledgeable and powerful.

It almost feels like there’s another person inside you, a mysterious hidden servant who is vastly more intelligent than you. But I think it’s more true to say that the unconscious mind is the deeper you, while the conscious mind is an aspect of you that is existing in a state of amnesia from the full magnitude of who you are under the surface. But what is the purpose of this amnesia? Why don’t I know consciously how to rewire my brain, since there’s a part of me under the surface that does know how to do it? I have a speculative answer to that, which fits perfectly …

Imagine the only thing that exists is one single eternal consciousness that never had a beginning and will never have an end. “God” is the word that jumps into most people’s minds at this point. I hate using that word, because right off the bat your mind may start to attach all sorts of religious ideas to the concept: worship, original sin, judgement, redemption, etc. Ideas that are nothing to do with the concept itself, but are adds-ons that come later through holy writings and such. Leave all that stuff at the door for now and concentrate on the core idea. Instead of God, we might call this being The Source, The Whole, or Infinite Consciousness. The name doesn’t really matter. Right now, I’m using “God” for convenience. Imagine that God created the universe, then put himself into a human body to experience it. There are certain problems with this scenario. Imagine yourself standing at an ice-cream counter, trying to decide whether to buy vanilla or chocolate. Now imagine yourself as God doing the same thing. The trouble is, if you’re God, you already knew what choice you were going to make before you made it. In other words, there could be no experience of free will. “I knew I was going to choose chocolate, so I’ll just pick vanilla just to thwart my foreknowledge!” This cannot be because your foreknowledge would have let you know you were going to thwart your foreknowledge. Get it? In order for God to experience free will, he has to forget the totality of what he is. In other words he has to manufacture an amnesic barrier between his eternal all-knowing awareness and what he wishes to experience. I think this is the underlying truth of what is going on with human experience. And I think the edge between the conscious and unconscious mind is where we find the clues to this speculative scenario.

If we delve into the realm of the apparently paranormal in relation to the mind, the clues become even stronger. I’ve spent the past nine months experimenting with telekinesis, and my results suggest that there is a powerful unconscious “me” doing my bidding, a me that may not be entirely brain-based by virtue of its ability to affect objects at a distance. I’ve also made a start to telepathy, attempting to “mind read” drawings that have been placed in envelopes. It’s early days for this one, but the results I’m getting suggest more than accidental likenesses. How is telepathy possible if we are all individuals, completely distinct from each other? Upton Sinclair, in his excellent book Mental Radio (see my review), offers this hypothesis: “It seems to indicate a common substratum of mind, underlying our individual minds, and which we can learn to tap.” A strong pointer to the notion that beyond the physical realm, there is a single unified consciousness. Aldous Huxley, his his book The Doors of Perception (see my review) talks of his experience with the drug mescaline, and how it made him aware of what he termed “mind” and “mind at large.” He saw these two things as being joined by a conduit. Mescaline allowed him to widen the conduit for a period, temporarily squeezing more of “mind at large” into “mind” and providing a unique experience.

There is no you, me and everybody. We only think there is because we have forgotten our totality. There is only one. Your mind is the thing that makes you believe you are separate from everyone else, but the self-awareness inside you is the same self-awareness inside me. We just have different personalities possessing different memories, each one closed off from the other, experiencing its individual perceptions. Imagine two people dying at the same time, and suddenly they become aware that they have two sets of memories. After death, it will not be a case of two sets of personalities fighting for control of a single consciousness. Infinite Consciousness has no personality because it is everything that was, is, and ever will be.

Ultimately, I can’t connect enough dots with this material to prove my view to someone who lives exclusively by reductionist, evidence-based thinking. I believe we are all one consciousness through intuition, and I think there is more to intuition than imagination and wishful thinking. Assuming these egos of ours are limited expressions of a God-like Infinite Consciousness that knows everything, intuition may very well be a means of obtaining reliable information from that Infinite Consciousness via the unconscious mind. I’m doing a complete rational bypass here, which I understand is abhorrent to many people. But whatever you may think about the “one consciousness” viewpoint, it’s clear on purely rational grounds that our conscious minds are connected to something very powerful outside our awareness, and this lends value to intuition. I intuitively believed that there was only one consciousness long before I put all the rational building blocks together. I don’t consider these building blocks as proof, because they’re incomplete, but they provide the most coherent picture for me of what’s really going on with life.

Atheists will say, “Of course you’re just a brain in a body, because we can show it scientifically,” and there’s a sense in which that is true because mind is physical. Religion says, “Of course you’ve got an immortal soul, otherwise life is without purpose,” and that also is true. Yet these belief systems are opposed to each other. The truth is not found in one archetype or the other, but in rejecting hand-me-down belief systems and figuring it out for yourself.

Telekinesis under a glass bowl

A couple of days ago I finally cracked the barrier of doing telekinesis in a sealed environment – under a glass bowl. The psi wheel was perfectly still for many minutes, then I achieved multiple spins for the best part of a minute. I am now nine months into my training. It’s a great feeling to finally put to rest a nagging sliver of scepticism that I’ve felt for so long. Whatever is behind telekinesis, it’s weirder than the sceptics claim, without a doubt.

For me, the real excitement behind telekinesis lies in the gathering of evidence that there’s more to a human being than western science has yet fathomed.

I didn’t record the breakthrough moment. However, I produced the following video earlier this evening. Not quite as dramatic, but the real deal nevertheless …

What is consciousness?

Most people identify who they are with their physical selves. This is evidenced by how obsessed we are with our bodies. It’s all well and good to take an interest in your appearance, on the grounds that your appearance is what you use to interact with the world around you. But few would deny that the pursuit of beauty has reached epidemic proportions. “Buy this new wondercream to hide those wrinkles!” screams the latest TV advertisement. Young people are constantly bombarded with impossible standards of beauty from the media and are urged to think, “This is what you must be or you are not good enough.” Middle-aged people are encouraged to mask what they are becoming by this gel, that needle, or the other operation. It’s as if the entirety of your personal worth hinges on what you look like.

You can buy into the hypnotic trance sold to you by the media and society, or you can think your way out of it by asking one simple question: “What am I?” First of all, you are not your body. Your body is a machine. It may not be made of metal, but it works on exactly the same principles. Grab any human biology textbook, look at the diagrams, and tell me that’s not a machine. Our bodies are made up of thousands of parts, each one unique in appearance and function, each one serving the whole machine, allowing you to walk, run, dance, talk, whisper, shout, look, listen, smell, pick your nose, and so on. The body is a biological machine. You feel this machine is you, because you are so intimately aware of it and connected to it. If someone kisses you or slaps you on the face, you feel this, not only on your face, but in your emotions. This way, we are lulled into thinking, “My body is me.”

The body is 70% water. Are you, then, 70%, water? If you fill the bathtub with several litres of water, would you say that you’re two thirds of the way to creating a human being? Let’s take it further. In the centre of your chest is a heart that pumps blood around your body. If your heart failed, and you received a heart transplant, are you any less you for having an organ from another person working in your body? No, you still exist. It’s no different from replacing a faulty component in a car engine. If you lose your your legs in a car accident and are in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, you still exist. In fact, a whole lot worse could happen, and you would still be here. Because the body is not you. It is the vehicle you are using to intereact with the physical world.

So, what am I? You know what I’m getting at by now. I am the awareness looking out from behind these eyes. I am the consciousness that is able to say, “I am me.” It seems so obvious to me now, and yet I’ve lived with the false understanding all my life that I am my body. “Body consciousness” seems to be the prevalent way of thinking in the world, because few people question the reality that is handed to them on a platter by the conditioning of human experience.

Okay, so I’ve identified myself as my consciousness. But what is consciousness? Is consciousness the brain? Am I still just a biological machine with the central part of me being my “grey matter”? Is self-awareness nothing more an electrical activity flowing through neurons? The atheist says, “That’s exactly how it is.” The spiritualist says, “No, we have a soul.”

To answer this dilemma, I would use the analogy of comparing the brain to the processor of a computer. Just like a brain, a computer can think. You can program a computer to perform a task, feed it data, and it will work its way through the task and produce results for you at the end. In fact, a computer can think much faster and more reliably than a human brain. It’s like a superbrain. Imagine yourself playing chess against a computer. The game is quite real, because your opponent’s thoughts are quite real. And let’s face it, unless you’re very good at chess, the computer is going to win. But here’s the thing: even though you’re playing chess with a computer, would you ever say that your computer is self-aware? Can your computer use its own volition to say to itself, “I am conscious”? No. It isn’t conscious. And this points to a very important truth that is sadly overlooked by science. Thinking and consciousness are not the same thing. (I’ve heard people use different words for these concepts, and there doesn’t seem to be any consenus. I’ve heard someone refer to “mind” and “consciousness” as the same thing, and referring to the other as “pure awareness.” For my purposes, if I refer to “mind,” I’m referring purely to physical brain-based thought. When I say “consciousness,” I’m referring to self-awareness.)

There’s no doubt that thinking is brain-based. After all, chemical substances affect how you think. Different animals, with different sizes of brains, have different levels of intelligence. People with brain damage have problems thinking correctly. All this makes the atheist rub his hands with glee and claim, “Look. You’re nothing more than a brain. Here’s the proof.” But this is only true if mind and consciousness are identified as one and the same. And the computer analogy shows they are not. Atheists don’t seem to realise that they are essentially reducing themselves to the level of robots. Robots are a facsimile of consciousness, incapable of self-awareness; we’re the real thing.

An important question to ask at this point is: “If consciousness is something that trancends brain-based thought, then does it die when the body dies?” It’s impossible to answer this question on purely rational, empirical grounds. If I say I have an immortal soul, something that transcends physical life and drifts off to who knows where after death, then how exactly do you measure and quantify that and say “Look, here is consciousness” using the science of the physical plane you’re claiming to transcend? Bit of a predicament, eh? If you’re of the strict mindset that dismisses everything outside of empirical investigation as untrue, then this is the point where some of what I say from here on will read like nonsense. You’ve decided never to believe in something you can’t grasp, even though there may be such a thing as the ungraspable. But as I see it, absense of proof does not necessarily mean proof of absense.

People commonly believe in one of two archetypes: you either have an immortal soul or you don’t. But the trouble with archetypes is that they are merely hand-me-down ideas that slip into your thinking without you realising it. I think the truth is far more amazing than the idea that the human race is a collection of disembodied souls floating around in some other realm. In choosing what to believe about the nature of consciousness, my own intuition is my guide, with rationality as its close cousin, providing clues and helping me avoid self-delusion.

When I was a Christian, I had the rather primitive understanding that when I die, my personality floats off into the ether to meet God. But if I identify my consciousness with my personality, I make another mistake. Personality is purely brain-based and this is easily provable. For instance, the personalities of teenagers are dictated by chemical changes in their bodies as they go through puberty. Alternatively, when a teenager drinks a can of Red Bull, you can watch a rapid change of personality unfold – at least temporarily. There are clear differences in the way that men differ from women in how they think, feel and act, and these differences are purely bio-chemical. Furthermore, imagine yourself shipwrecked on a desert island, completely alone. What happens to your personality when there is no one to interact with? It cannot be expressed, so it ceases to be. Yet you don’t cease to exist. I happen to like my personality (others may disagree!), and I feel quite attached to it, but I know it will undergo changes in later years, just as it has undergone changes up till now. Personality is not a constant that equates to consciousness. Science shows that there’s a lot about you that is provably physical in nature, and everything that is physical perishes. A mother who loses her teenage son in an accident will not find that same bubbly, quirky, mischeivous personality waiting for her on the other side, because all those things that made her son the person he was are physical in nature. When you die, say goodbye to your brain and everything you used it for. After death, we’re done with thought and emotion. Do you think you’ll continue to be a man or a woman, psychologically and emotionally, after you shuffle off this mortal coil? Why would you be, when everything that dictated those qualities has turned to dust?

My, doesn’t this cast a new light on our assumptions about what lies beyond death? I am left with the understanding that my awareness trancends physical reality, and yet there’s so much that I think of as me that I’ll be leaving behind. When I die, just what will I be? Because there doesn’t seem to be much left of me to be anything! The horror of this situation is simply a result of identifying who you are with the wrong thing: your personality, your ego, your sense of being a unique individual, different from everyone else around you. “But if I’m not my ego, what’s left?!” you cry. “If all I amount to when I shrug off this body is some bland, unthinking, unfeeling consciousness, then death might as well be oblivion, for all I care.”

Ah, but all is not quite as it seems. There are more pieces to this puzzle. But that’s a story for next time.

The knowledge of what we are is discovered by realising how we’ve been misdirected by our experience. We’ve been conditioned to think, “I am a human being having a spiritual experience,” when the underlying truth of it is “I am a spiritual being having a human experience.”

The 10-minute guide to telekinesis

Since I started putting videos of my telekinesis experiments on YouTube, I’ve been inundated with requests asking for advice. The most popular question is “What goes through your mind when doing telekinesis?” So I decided to make this video, condensing everything I know (or everything I’ve theorised) about the subject into ten minutes, as a guide for beginners who are struggling to get started.

Videogames demonstrate the holographic universe

Here’s another expansion of my recent essay “Unmasking the nature of reality.” This time I use videogames as a powerful example of how physical reality is a mathematical construct.

Hologram demonstration

Regular readers will know that I’m captivated by the theory of the holographic universe. Here’s a personal demonstration of a real hologram in operation, to show you that the theory is not as wacky as some might believe.

Interview at Self-Publishing Review

There’s a new interview with me up at Self-Publishing Review. Here’s a brief excerpt:

MR: The cover blurb of Chion poses a question – “How will you survive?”. By the end, I think that most readers will have asked themselves this question, because in Chion, there are no easy answers. Once the full effect of the disaster becomes apparent, survival depends on the result of some agonising decisions.

DS: I’m always fascinated by the grey areas of life, where our notions of right and wrong are put to the test and we face challenges and where there aren’t any easy answers.

MR: Do you think that you would make a good survivor in a post apocalyptic scenario?

DS: I think I would. First, it’s a big help if you’ve watched everything by Ray Mears! But more than that, you’ve got to have the sort of mind that can remain calm in a crisis and can see the big picture rather than just the danger right in front of you – to ask yourself not only where the next meal is going to come from, but how we’ll sustain ourselves indefinitely.

This was a big theme in Chion. Even the larger food supplies that everyone was clamouring over were merely postponing the inevitable. Most people were prepared to live in denial of what was coming, as long as they could see the next meal, when the real solution lay in facing up to the scale of the crisis and thinking outside the box.

[ Read Full Interview ]

Consciousness, perception, and the nature of reality

The following video is a free-form re-run of some of the material from my post entitled “Unmasking the nature of reality,” for those who are averse to reading large portions of text. It also contains some useful visuals to help you wrap your head around the concepts I’m discussing.

Unmasking the nature of reality

[A Christian friend recently asked me, "What is it that you believe now?" Tough question to give a short answer to. I could say, "I believe I am everything that exists, experiencing a state of separation from the full magnitude of what I am." Or I could say, "The universe is holographic in nature, like the Star Trek holodeck or The Matrix." I've tried those kinds of answers and I've seen eyebrows raise in an expression of bewilderment that seems to communicate, "How on earth did Darryl go from believing in Christ to this bizarre nonsense?" For what it's worth, I'm going to try and guide you step by step into my headspace.]

What is the true underlying nature of reality? What is my place in it? Does my life have meaning, or am I a cosmic accident? Are the answers to these questions found in religion, or is science where the real enlightenment lies? Is it even possible to know? What chance do I have of finding out? And where the hell do I even begin?

The first step is a willingness to unlearn what you’ve been taught, or more appropriately, what you’ve been conditioned to believe all your life. With hundreds of belief systems on Earth, the chances of you inheriting the right one, by virtue of geographical placement, are miniscule. If you were born in America, is Christianity true by virtue of the number of people around you who believe in it, or the number of times its ideas are repeated to you? If you were born in Iraq, is Islam true for the same reasons? Look around the world and you will find countless differing religions, each one confident of its superiority over all others, one generation indoctrinating the next. The thing that so few people dare to do is to step outside of the zeitgeist – the spirit of the age. But it’s what you have to do if you want to discover the real truth. No belief should ever be so sacred that we are not permitted to look critically at it and assess its worth.

The zeitgeist is not only religious in nature, but also infiltrates the arena of science. Science is concerned with what is definable and measurable. It’s all about weighing evidence and making rational deductions. When there is no evidence for something, it will not become a scientific fact. That is why science has little or nothing to say about ideas like God, or the soul, or the afterlife. And that’s fair. Those things seem to be outside the scope of measurement. I would guess this is why many scientists are atheists. They have decided that if there is no evidence for something, then they have no business believing in it. But therein lies the trap. Absence of proof is not necessarily proof of absence. And although science prides itself on making no assumptions, the entire discipline hangs on one colossal assumption – that the physical universe is the cornerstone from which we do our thinking. Matter is what matters. But if we’re willing to look closely at the presuppositions that shape our thinking, we might discover that we’ve been making deductions using the wrong set of presuppositions – that we have been unwary victims of the zeitgeist. One of the most important things I figured out was that the proper starting point for rational thought is not observation of the physical universe; first and foremost, it is observation of our own self-awareness, as I will attempt to show.

Having unlearned (or at least temporarily shelved) everything taught or imposed upon me by science and religion, I begin with the knowledge that I am a conscious being. I am self-aware. Let’s not even assume that I am a body. First and foremost, I am self-awareness. It appears that I have eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. Five senses in total, allowing me to receive information from outside of myself. But already I’m making too many assumptions. Do I really see with my eyes? No. On closer inspection, my eyes receive information, convert it into electrical signals, and pass these to the visual cortex at the back of my brain. I see with my visual cortex, experiencing a bright world of colour and motion inside the absolute darkness of my skull, which no actual light can penetrate. If I pick up a pencil, I feel the pressure of it in my fingers. But I don’t, really. The nerves in my fingers transmit signals back to my brain, and my brain tells me that my fingers are touching something. Meanwhile, my eyes relay signals to my brain, showing me visual information about the object I’m touching. The principle to remember here is that you cannot get beyond your brain in order to prove the existence of the physical world. All the information is second hand.

Perhaps you think it should be taken as a given that the physical universe exists, by virtue of the rich and repetitive nature of our perceptions. But let’s remember that every night in bed we experience a five-sense environment in our dreams. Dreams are so lifelike that we usually believe them to be real for the duration of their experience, yet they have no physical substance. When we are awake and when we are dreaming, it is our consciousness that does the perceiving, not our physical senses. In truth, when we awake, we simply have no way of knowing whether we are connecting to a real physical universe, or merely a longer dream – one whose rules are more concrete, perhaps because it is a dream-world held together by the collective unconscious of the all those who share it. Either paradigm is possible, and neither provable.

We are perceivers and we can never get past our perceptions to discover the actuality of the universe. You can look out of the window and say, “The grass is green.” Are you sure? Did you ever consider that a cat or a lizard might see the grass in a different manner, since the structure of their eyes are quite different from a human’s. What right have I to say, “The universe really is the way I see it,” when I am perceiving the universe through the machinery of my body. Consider the bat, which is almost blind and much more reliant on a form of radar. Or the dog, who experiences an exotic realm of smells that we humans can barely imagine. Bodies are biological machines that perceive the universe in differing ways. The grass is only green when the body-machine interprets the data it receives in a certain manner.

We cannot be certain what the actuality of the universe is; we can only see it through our own particular lens. We can’t even know that the universe is genuinely physical in nature. Consider the analogy of the modern videogame. We can take part in adventures across city-sized maps, with amazingly detailed roads, buildings, and countless nooks and crannies for exploration. We can make our game character turn his head in any direction and watch the real-world laws of geometry playing out in two-dimensional space on the flatness of our television screens, beaming out texture, light and shadow. Once, I had a moment of clarity when I stood on a hillside, gazing down through the trees at a lake and a castle on the opposite side (in a game, that is). It was a picturesque scene, and in the real world it might have made me reach for my camera. And I thought, “No one else has stood on this precise spot and looked down the hill at this exact angle. Not even the game’s creators. The game is just too vast.” It struck me as profound that something so artistic – something that was just for me in this moment – could spring to life from nothing more than a rapid series of mathematical equations being processed inside my computer. In videogames we experience an interactive world of sight, sound and touch – a limited but spectacularly detailed facsimile of the physical world. The big question, then, is this: if we mere mortals are able to create this 3D experience inside a computer, have we any business assuming that our universe is truly 3D in its deepest essence, in its actuality? The three-dimensionality of a videogame is nothing more than binary ones and zeros flowing through electrical circuits, and yet the laws of physics in a game are as solid and dependable as the laws of physics in the real world. A game’s vistas, although not nearly as detailed as the real world, use the same mathematics of geometry, the same understanding of light and shadow. Put simply: the universe is made of mathematics.

Some people simply will not enter into this manner of thinking, because it seems repugnant that the universe should be telling us fibs about itself. But this is exactly what has already happened and continues to happen. Without any knowledge of astronomy and geometry, we started off believing the Earth was flat. Why? Because our experience told us it was flat. The human form is so tiny in relation to the magnitude of the Earth that we have no conscious awareness of moving over a curved surface as we go from place to place. Only when we started getting our heads around geometry, and noticing things like how the stars travel up the sky as we move towards them, could we begin to deduce that we were sitting on a big ball. When a cat sees its reflection in a mirror for the first time, it thinks it is looking at another cat, one that mimics its every move – until it learns to see through the lie. We’ve invented the hologram – images that stand out from their photographic paper screaming, “I have substance!” Yet wave your hand through one and there’s nothing there. The key question is whether you want to trust your experience or try to see the bigger picture.

The universe lies until you figure out the lies. Its purpose is not to tell you its innermost secrets. Its purpose is to provide consciousness with an experience. It is up to us to probe its nature, except most of us have been doing so from the wrong standpoint. We’ve assumed that it’s all real, when that realness – that three-dimensionality – may be nothing more than a stream of data, a matrix, a frequency to which our consciousness is tuned. Is Betelgeuse six hundred light-years away from Earth, or is it sitting right next to us, just another point on the data stream?

You may ask, “What difference does it make which view I take? Life is the same either way.” On the contrary, life is vastly different. If we use the physical universe as the cornerstone of our rational thinking, we can easily lose sight of the importance of our own self-awareness. When you look in at yourself from the outside, through the eyes of science, and you begin to understand the brain, the tendency is to explain away your own consciousness in purely physical terms – as if your consciousness is little more than a computer program performing a task. And yes, there is something very computer-like about our minds. All creatures, humans included, possess behaviour patterns: appetite, sexuality, testosterone, predatory instincts, maternal and paternal inclinations, etc. These things, and more, make us predictable to a certain extent. Similarly, a computer programmer can create an autonomous game character, imbue him with behaviour patterns, and place him into the game environment, where he will interact with it and behave as if he is self-aware. However, you would never say that such a character is genuinely self-aware. And yet you know that you are, in a manner that transcends any form of artificial intelligence. Science has never distinguished mind from self-awareness. The two are not the same. Mind is a brain-based faculty used by self-awareness. Science has fundamentally lost touch with the wonder of consciousness that we all experience. It has no place for such a thing because it cannot seem to grasp it and measure it. “No,” says science, “you cannot be immaterial consciousness interfacing with a brain. You’re just a brain.” And yet, where is this thing called self-awareness on any map of the brain? Nowhere to be found.

If you start from the deeper standpoint of using self-awareness as the cornerstone of your thinking, you end up with a vastly different perspective on the universe. For a start, the one thing you can be sure of is that you exist. As Rene Descarte said, “I think, therefore I am.” Everything else is under suspicion, because everything else is a perception. What this means is, if you want to believe in a physical universe, you have to take it on trust. If you want to believe it’s all a matrix, you have to take it on trust. In this predicament, what do you do with the scientific approach, when you suddenly realise you can’t use it to get anywhere? My answer to that is you use an almost forgotten little thing called intuition.

What do you sense the truth to be? The two most fundamental questions you should ask yourself are “What am I?” and “Where I am?” In my experience, asking those questions starts you on a wonderful journey of self-discovery that brings an end all to the bewilderment of living in the zeitgeist. For the scientifically minded person, the understanding that consciousness transcends matter opens up the genuine possibility of life after death and the mystery of whether our physical birth was really the beginning of our life. For the religious among us, it presents spirituality free from imposed dogmas that must never be questioned. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

(I recommend watching the following documentary for an easy-to-understand visual look at the nature of reality.)