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SMN Member in new BBC Radio Slot.

Members of this SMN Blogsite may be interested to know that I have been offered a regular slot on BBC Merseyside.

I will be broadcast live every second Monday starting on the 9th November (next Monday). This will be for half an hour starting at 1500 (UK time). The show will then be available on "Listen Again" for seven days.

In my first slot I will be discussing "Deja Vu". The station actively requests calls and emails so if you have a spare few minutes do listen in. I intend to mention my membership of the SMN (and this site) if I get the chance. Full details of how listeners outside of the Greater Merseyside area can listen in can be found on my FORUM at:

http://www.anthonypeake.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=945&sid=06c3bfc54cffaf2c8f6cfd690281907f#p8966

You can also listen-in on line at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/liverpool/hi/tv_and_radio/

The reason I have been asked to do this is that the station has long been looking for somebody who takes a scientific, and rational, approach to the ongoing mysteries of consciousness, PSI and other "paranormal" phenomena.

With the help of others of a similar attitude, such as my fellow members of the SMN, I am hoping to make this spot an oasis of rational discussion and considered opinions.

I will be delighted to have the involvement of any SMN members via the phone lines, text messages or emails. The more responses the more likely it will be that the BBC will continue to allow me this facility.

Return to the Eden Project

I have been aware of this Eden concept drifting in and out of my consciousness for some time and find perhaps synchronicity in the article by Michael Crichton in that the relationship between ourselves and the planet is reaching another critical phase.

I found some interesting psychological aspects on the emotions linked to the mythical Eden and our motives in becoming more environmentally aware in James Hollis’s book “The Eden Project: in search of the Magical Other.”

As a Jungian analyst, Hollis’s book delves into the intricate and sometimes archetypal aspects of human relationships. I see similarities in our relationship with the planet.

After eating from the Tree of Knowledge, the fledgling human race develops consciousness and is split from Paradise. “Once the dream-time is truncated, the shock of separation is so systemic ... that it remains imprinted on the neurological pathways, abiding in the unconscious as lost connectedness”. In our childhood years if we are not held or reassured, “we may suffer anaclitic depression resulting in being more prone to mental and physiological retardation and to life-threatening illnesses, than those who are emotionally nourished”.

The parallel between the current Western social structure and this interpretation is striking.

Oliver Robinson et al., in edition 100 of the Network Review, expressed similar opinions;

“There is a crisis in the social fabric, shown by the gradually decreasing level of trust and cohesion in the UK over the past 50 years. The uneven distribution of income across society is worse than at any time in history, with Britain being one of the most extreme cases in the developed world. There is also a psychological crisis, as rates of depression and anxiety continue to rise, while reported levels of well-being are in decline. Despite advances in recuperative medicine, physical health is declining as levels of obesity, diabetes, liver disease, alcohol abuse, heart disease, stroke, cancer and other lifestyle-related disorders increase, leading to intolerable demands on the NHS and other health systems.”

Hollis’s sub-title, in search of the Magical Other, perhaps evokes our innate need for nurturing from the planet and our inability to rationalize our fate, our mortality and the “great false idea that drives humankind, the fantasy of the Magical Other, the notion that there is one person out there who is right for us, will make our lives work ... meets those deepest needs, protect us from suffering and, if we are lucky, spare us the perilous journey of individuation.”

As Stuart Kauffman has pointed out in his recent book,Reinventing the Sacred, consciousness brings with it agency, meaning, and value. These qualities are real in the universe but cannot be predicted by reductionist science. Kauffman emphasises that evolution proceeds not only by natural selection but also by events which are inherently unpredictable and outside natural law. Our culture desperately needs to restore morality to a proper place in our communities and institutions but seems unlikely to do so unless science itself changes to allow a nonmaterial aspect as part of reality.

So why is there such enmity between science and alternative thinkers? Why is the middle road so unacceptable?

I would see the Return to Eden as an opportunity for science to express its creativity in sustainable development, architecture and engineering using new and exciting raw materials. Structures of previously impossible design made possible through software and innovative use of material; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatics_Centre_(London) there are vast new fields in cosmology and biology as a result of technological development.

Is it simply that science has sold out to corporate funders and doesn’t have the infrastructure of management to determine its own path and is it because, like the child who having been abused and “senses its powerlessness in the presence of the ubiquitous Other and wishes to survive, then its psyche will generate personality strategies based on the survival of the organism and the management of angst?”

Is this deep sense of almost primal emotion entwining humanity and a relationship with the planet just too unfathomable for the reductionist thinking of science?

I don’t see a problem in the elements of the discussion, only in the approach of some of the participants and the overarching influence of global capital, which till now has not yet seen a way to extract sufficient profit from the situation.

David Peake’s post regarding David Bohm’s concept of implicate and explicate order is now very relevant in that the unfolding of the intrinsic elements of the universe are now emerging into our reality at a rate which is increasing as explained by Keith Wakelam in a recent post and although this is not the first radical climate event in the planet’s history, it may be the only one where someone will be around to record it.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist master has described the situation very succinctly in his piece entitled Interbeing.

“There is a cloud floating on this sheet of paper that you are holding in your hand. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either; so the cloud and paper inter-are.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there. the forest cannot grow.

In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper; the paper and the sunshine inter-are.

And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat.

We know the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper.

And the logger’s father and mother are in it too.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too, because when we look at a sheet of paper; the sheet of paper is part of our perception.

So everything is in this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here - time, space, the Earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper.

“To be” is “to inter-be”. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is.

As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe within it.

Robert de Vos, Cape Town, South Africa.

“The Eden Project-in search of the magical other.” 1998, Inner City Books. James Hollis.

**My apologies if I have not acknowledged any other sources in this article. I have drawn them from various internet newsletters like SMN and Resurgence Magazine’s online edition.

David Bohm and "Enfoldment"

Whilst in New York on a short lecture tour recently I spotted this image outside the HQ of the Pfizer Corporation. I am hoping that my using this image is okay with them (if it is not please could a representative of that company contact me and I will take it down).

The image is of a Pfizer employee called Joe who works in the Bioinnovation Center in Massachusetts. If you look closely you will see that the image is made up of pictures of all his co-workers in this unit. A couple of nights ago I was awake in the middle of the night and I started thinking about ways in which David Bohm's concept of the "Enfoldment" could be explained in a simple and graphic way. This image suddenly appeared in my mind.

In my latest book The Daemon - A Guide To Your Extraordinary Secret Self (due to be reviewed in the next edition of the Network Review) I suggest that when we are in these semi-awake states (Hypnogogia/ Hypnopompia) our "Higher Self" or Daemon as I term it, can communicate more effectively. It is as if the Huxlian "Doors of Perception" are slightly ajar and ideas can filter through to the semi-conscious eidolonic (everyday) personality. My Daemon had given me the answer.

Imagine a picture similar to the Pfizer image of yourself. This picture is composed of micro-images of every human being on the planet. When looked at from a distance it is just a very detailed image of you. However, and this is the important point that I suspect the Pfizer image designer has not done, is that contained within the micro-images will be an image identical to the larger one .... in every respect. As such this image of yourself will, again, contain images of everybody else on the planet.

But it gets even more interesting.

Imagine that each of all the other images were designed in the same way (containing the micro-images of everybody else).This is exactly what David Bohm was trying to get across in his dual concepts of the "Implicate Order" and "Enfoldment"- the idea that the whole contained the parts and that each part contains the whole. He used the analogy of a holographic image (smash a holographic image then look at the parts of the image under laser light and it will be seen that each part contains a denuded version of the original image not, as would be expected, the part).

I need to give this idea more thought but I did present it to the audience at a lecture yesterday and it was received very well. I may acquire the software that generates these images and see what can be done.

On Saturday 21st of November 2009 I will be attending the SMN "Open Dialogue" meeting at Queen Mary College in London. As you will be aware lumimaries as Prof. Basil Hiley, Prof. Bernard Carr and Dr. F David Peat will be discussing the scientific philosophy of this great man.

I am hoping to discuss this analogy with my fellow SMN members at this event.

Anthony Peake

Faith and Climate Change?

A very interesting editorial by Jeremy O'Grady in The Week this week:

"Just as the world's scientists and politicians assemble in Pittsburgh and now Bangkok in a belated attempt to save the planet from global warming, word comes to us that the crucial data underwriting the entire theory of man being responsible for climate change have disappeared into thin air (see page 19). That at least is the claim being made by environmental scientist Patrick Michaels in an article in the National Review titled The Dog Ate Global Warming. What on earth to make of this? Is Michaels exaggerating the significance of the lost data? Is he lying? It would be rash, idolatrous even, to use his strictures as a pretext to join the ranks of the global-warming sceptics. But one thing we may conclude: for the vast majority of us, there is no difference between religious and scientific belief.

Consider beliefs on global warming. Do you know or care how the historical data on global surface temperature were collected? I doubt it. Most of us rely on ex cathedra pronouncements of the high priests of the IPCC. As for those experts who do query the data, we take it on faith that these are heretics with sinister designs against the established church. Even so, said my wife when I put this to her, there is something intuitively plausible about the idea that we've fouled our own nest - thereby revealing yet another basis for our scientific belief: an ingrained puritanism, a retread of the Garden of Eden story, the fall from grace. The scientists tell us to ditch religion, but it is faith, not rationality, that tells us not to leave the TV on standby."

extract from editorial by Jeremy O'Grady
The Week, Issue 735
October 3rd 2009
www.theweek.co.uk

O'Grady's points reminds me of Michael Crichton's essay on environmentalism and religion:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html

Worth a read. We must work hard to keep the environmental movement free of dogma and free of our extremely strong penchant for storytelling and emplotment.

Olly Robinson

Awakening from Dreams - review of The Conscious Mind and the Material World by Douglas Stokes (2007)

Douglas Stokes is the author of The Nature of Mind: Parapsychology and the Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, which I reviewed ten years ago. Here he turns his attention to the nature of the self in the light of psiand arrives at some rather unusual conclusions. As he explains in his introduction, the first awakening is from what he calls the dream of matter: self cannot be identical with the body, since its components are constantly changing. The next awakening involves the dream of the person with the discovery that we are not the content of our consciousness and memories. Finally, if we thought we were formless and pure consciousness itself, we need to wake up from the dream of Atman and Brahman to realise that we are multiple selves which are constantly transformed and recycled like other components of the universe. Death is understood as 'the rope that frees us from the quicksand of current identities.' Hence, he suggests that our true selves are both much less and much greater than we think. He claims that he finds this conclusion as uncongenial as it may seem to the reader but that it can grow on one. I am not so sure.

The main body of the book consists of a number of chapters about mind and matter, mind and the quantum, spontaneous phenomena as evidence of psi, experimental investigations of psi phenomena and the implications of both spontaneous and experimental work. The book moves on to discuss death and the mind, and the nature of the self in relation to the Self. It is exceptionally well-informed, and contains a long bibliography of sources. The main interest for readers of this journal will be its assessment of psi phenomena and their implications, and the issue of the nature of the conscious self.

Readers will agree that current scientific knowledge is far from complete, and should address psi phenomena; also that spontaneous and experimental work both have a role to play. However I found a number of individual areas unsatisfactory. For instance, Rupert Sheldrake's staring experiments were questioned on the basis that 'the subject could be responding to differences in the starer's breathing patterns and bodily movements between staring and non­staring trials.' In addition, there is no counter criticism of Richard Wiseman's article about dogs who know their owners are coming home, which Rupert himself published. At the end of his chapter on experimental investigations, Stokes concludes that the sceptics are probably ahead on points - a highly questionable judgment. The discussion of the well-known Chaffin Will case supposes that the dreamer might have picked up cues from his father's behaviour before death, a suggestion which has absolutely no basis in the published accounts. Similar implausible speculations are made about the work of Grof and even Ian Stevenson, including the criticism that the child may have acquired information about previous life through normal means and used this information to construct a past life fantasy or hoax. Stevenson himself investigated and ruled out this possibility in cases where it might have been advanced. The section on survival also omits all references to the Scole Experiment and the cross-­correspondences.

The discussion of the nature of the self is less contentious, and covers all well-known positions. Stokes develops the 'Shin' or mini-self theory of Thouless and Wiener, partly because he thinks that split brain research indicates that we have at least two others as sub-personalities. He goes as far as to claim that 'we may be constantly recycled, awakening in a new body each morning with no memories of are real adventures the day before.' I can't say that this corresponds to my own experience. The reader may or may not agree that the findings of modern cognitive neuroscience to make it more doubtful that major portions of self could survive the death of body - this question is not addressed with direct reference to the evidence. However, it is intriguing to think through the implications of the universe as one of conservation, 'of rearrangement, not destruction' whereby components at all levels are recycled from system to system. There is much with which to agree and disagree in this provocative book, which provides a comprehensive overview of a wide range of issues, along with competing explanations.

David Lorimer