Category Archives: Outside the Box

Masaru Emoto, the water genius — attention should be paid

March 30, 2011 admin

My Thoughts on the Catastrophe in Tohoku-Kanto Area is such a moving communication by Masaru Emoto, about being in the earthquake and about how he hadn’t been able to get a go-ahead for working with water to predict them. If you know the beyond-the-beyond work Emoto has done, you will appreciate what he has to say and might want to respond to his call to help with his work.

: 1.The picture of water crystal before the quake

: 2. The picture of water crystal right after the quake

: 3. The picture of water crystal one day after the quake

Masaru Emoto has put out a prayer request for Thursday at noon in every time zone. One of the things I think about is that there may be real power in collective thought, and what a good idea it would be for every government to promote that when something has the world’s attention, so that massive participation would result. Just think of the impact it would have on our worldview if that produced results. It would be a new game – to be able to affect the world and to be working together to do it. With everything to gain and nothing to lose, how to get the world to try such a thing?

Outside the Box, This and That

What’s so great about Brian Swimme?

March 3, 2011 admin 2 Comments

As anyone who has been tracking with me knows, Brian Swimme is at the top of my list of contemporary thinkers. I just came across this, which will give you a sense of why:

Awakening to the Universe Story is Part 1 and The Divinization of the Cosmos is Part 2 of an interview from What Is Enlightenment? that came to be after
I heard the editor do a talk and told him about Brian.

This, from the Intro to the interview, is why Brian can matter so much:

In this interview with Brian Swimme, and through the research undertaken for that issue of What Is Enlightenment?, our understanding of the deep time evolutionary perspective that Swimme espouses was profoundly enriched and expanded.
And that helped to shift the philosophical ground here.

There does not seem to be any link to this highly recommended intro,
but here’s my saved text:

Two centuries ago, the German idealist Friedrich Schelling wrote: “History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self- disclosing revelation of the Absolute.” A forerunner of evolutionary theory, Schelling’s philosophical project was
to reconcile the fundamental dualities of life into an all- encompassing and evolving unity. Though he was addressing evolution in the context of human culture, two hundred years later, as a result of the recent discoveries of astrophysics and astronomy, evolution has been elevated to the cosmic realms of the galaxies. It is now commonly known that we live in a vast and evolving universe. While many of us are aware of this, according to mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme,
our awakening to the truth of that fact may actually represent the most significant shift in human consciousness in two million years.

Swimme is a leading proponent of the “Universe Story,” the deep time developmental perspective that he brings forward in this two-part interview on both his own work and that of French Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The far-reaching significance of this cosmological perspective is why I’ve selected the spring 2001 interview with Swimme for our fifteenth anniversary issue of What Is Enlightenment?

A specialist in the evolutionary dynamics of the cosmos, Brian Swimme is on a mission to make us aware of the miraculous fourteen-billion-year evolutionary process of which we are a part. He is calling us to “reinvent” ourselves, to redefine what it means to be human in an emergent universe. The paradigm shift we must make, he believes, may be more challenging and more significant than any that has occurred in the course of human history. Evoking the vast panorama of cosmic becoming, he arcs back through deep time and then forward again, dissolving everything we know as real and relatively permanent into
a morphing, unfolding, infinitely creative process. In that,
he challenges us to cognize the fact that we are citizens not just
of our communities or of our nations or even of planet earth. We are citizens of an evolving cosmos. And our conscious awareness of that places us in a far more implicated relationship to ourselves, to the entire web of life on this planet, and to the future.

For Brian Swimme, whose understanding has been deeply influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955),
the interface between science and spirituality holds a particularly potent significance. Teilhard believed that the evolving universe and the Divine are one. All dualities and traditional antipathies—between science and religion, matter and spirit, the physical and the metaphysical, God and the universe—are ultimately reconciled and subsumed into the scientifically verifiable reality of cosmic evolution. And that objective reality applies to us human beings as well. As Teilhard said, “I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is in process of becoming.”

In this interview with Brian Swimme, and through the research undertaken for that issue of What Is Enlightenment?, our understanding of the deep time evolutionary perspective that Swimme espouses was profoundly enriched and expanded. And that helped to shift the philosophical ground here at WIE.
It became increasingly apparent to us that the spirituality of
the twenty-first century has everything to do with the cosmic evolutionary process that we are part and parcel of. Indeed,
as we comprehend our place in a swirling, unfurling universe,
it makes sense that the spiritual quest, the quest to understand who we are and why we are here, would be seen in an entirely new light. But what exactly is that new perspective? And how might it affect the way we relate to our own lives and to human life itself? Those were the questions driving us as we stepped into a fast-moving evolutionary current for Issue 19 and began to peer a little more deeply into what the future of the spirit, and the spirit of the future, might hold.

Here’s my affiliate link to buy The Universe is a Green Dragon,
my favorite book: http://tinyurl.com/28uql4b

Outside the Box

The Trap We Are In

February 18, 2011 admin 2 Comments

I came across Graham Stewart online, trying to galvanize some serious transformational activity. He is partnered in School of Consciousness, which is in development to give courses, and I’ve been enjoying reading essays on his site. This is an excerpt from Science of the Whole, by Graham’s partner, Chris Thomson. It’s a clear statement of the worldview we hold, the perspective that impels me to work with the crop circles as a way to loosen us from it.

From The Dominant Paradigm:

In theory, science does not have a worldview, a set of beliefs, because it is supposed to be based on evidence only. In practice, it is fair to say that the core beliefs of science today are:

The universe and everything in it, ourselves included, is physical, and only. Science may talk about a universe that consists only of “energy”, but they leave little doubt that they believe this energy to be physical

For science, there can be nothing beyond this physical universe

The universe has no intrinsic meaning or purpose

Science has become so powerful and influential that all metaphysical, religious and philosophical claims that contradict it tend to be rejected. This worldview persists despite profound discoveries in physics and biology that suggest that the universe is anything but a machine, that “chance” may lie only in the eye of the beholder, and that the universe is rich in intrinsic meaning. Yet if, as science continues to insist, the universe began suddenly for no reason (the “Big Bang”) and life on this planet emerged by chance, then the world that science wants us to believe in must itself be totally meaningless.

This set of beliefs has become the dominant paradigm of our time. This is causing all kinds of problems. For example, it has pushed spiritual and esoteric knowledge into a box labeled “Interesting, but strange. Can probably ignore.” And it has led to the widespread belief that the universe and all its contents, human beings included, are basically physical in nature, that the universe is little more than a sophisticated machine and that we, too, can best be understood as machines. However, what we believe strongly determines what we value. If our core beliefs are that the universe is little more than a highly complex machine, that it consists entirely of physicality, and that we, too, are little more than complex machines, then our values will reflect these beliefs. They will be mechanistic/material values, which means that we will tend to give high priority to material things and technology. It can be no accident that shopping and new technologies are now the world’s main activities, and that financial pundits and technical experts are the new high priests. And it can be no accident that most discussions about the future are, in effect, discussions about the future of technology.

If, as many scientists insist, we and the universe are merely physical mechanisms, that the universe began suddenly for no reason, and that life emerged by chance, then the whole show must be meaningless. The fact that this statement, being part of the universe, must also be meaningless is little consolation! A life without meaning is a bleak life indeed. That is probably why, in today’s world, there is nothing like a good crisis or tragedy to give people a sense of meaning. In this context, it is interesting to reflect on the growing status of the emergency services and security industry over the last 20 years. Crises, emergencies, and our current obsession with security are the modern substitutes for deeper meaning and purpose.

And yes to this little piece from a section called “Our Inner Senses.”

If, however, we had the use of our inner senses, we would see that there are very different things to be serious about, very different sources of meaning and purpose, which have nothing to do with problems. I believe that we would then cease to be a problem-creating race, and become a life-enhancing race.