Polls Archive 28 - Ever Seen an Aura?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF3aiPWIgXI

Poll 28 - "Some suggest that an 'aura' might be a way of seeing a part of a person that exists outside of their body, and possibly connects to other planes or dimensions. Have you ever seen a person's aura?" Poll ended December 1st, 2008.

I have to presume that any regular visitors to this blog have an open mind, and even a certain willingness to embrace ideas which are outside of the mainstream. Nonetheless, I have to admit I was surprised to see that 44% of the visitors responding to this poll say they have seen a person's aura, that is higher than I would have expected. Poll 30, on the other hand, asks if visitors have ever had an experience which led them to believe in ghosts, or spirits of the departed that carry on after death and somehow have contact with our world: on that poll, 43% of the respondents said "Yes", and that's a number that's lower than I expected. Why? Because I only know a few people who have seen auras, but I have lots of family and friends who at some point in their life have had some kind of a supernatural experience which led them to at least be willing to consider the possibility that some part of a person carries on after death.

Here's the logic I've worked through with this project, and some of the past blogs where I've explored these ideas, which of course are also central to the book this project is based upon.

In Information Equals Reality, we discussed how this phrase which is being used by quantum physicists also relates to the more metaphysical concepts we're talking about here: ultimately, genes, memes and spimes are all ways of thinking about our reality from outside of our limited space-time viewpoint.

In entries like Magnets and Souls and Daily Parrying we looked at projects like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight, and the general problem projects like mine can run into: centuries of training have encouraged scientists to reject anything that acknowledges our participation within the reality we are part of. Science, they will tell you, needs to remove spirit and the soul from the discussion, otherwise you are back in the world of alchemists intoning incantations over their experiments to ensure their success: look up "magick" in wikipedia for more about this.

In entries like I Know You, You Know Me, and You are Me and We are All Together, we took these ideas even further, into a way of using concepts from quantum physics and Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation to show how we are all connected together. And most recently, in Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, we made the bold suggestion that patterns each of us senses within our reality are always part of a continuum - "pareidolia" is the word used to describe patterns our minds perceive within randomness, but since the main function of our minds is to make sense of the disorientingly large amount of input coming into our senses, we should never be too quick to dismiss those perceived patterns.

To finish, here's the video for Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


A direct link to this video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=qZkTVhzBgNk

Next - Polls Archive 29 - Do Electrons Have No Size?

Crossed Wires in the Brain

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=VGbIgllpUUA


The above video is connected to a recent New Scientist magazine article about "synaesthesia" (click here for the article).

This is one of the things I have talked about here from other perspectives: each of us has our own unique grid of awareness - a way of observing that makes us each who we are. In my book I talked about the difficulties this causes for science fiction stories of mind-melds and personality transplants:

Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind” shows how many small processes can be linked together in hierarchies and feedback loops to create what we think of as “the mind”. These processes start in the womb and become increasingly multi-layered and intricate as we approach adulthood. But there are many, many ways to achieve that network of mental processes that becomes a functioning individual.

A common fallacy, then, is to presume that everyone sees and hears the same way you do. The fact is, each person has different ways of processing the data that is entering through their senses. What would it be like to drop into the mind of the dinosaurs we saw in the film Jurassic Park who (as explained in the movie) could only see things that are moving? The science fiction idea of dropping into someone else’s mind or trying to download someone else’s memories (ideas explored a number of times in the writing of Philip K. Dick) could be just as alien as trying to enter the mind of a T-Rex. For instance, some humans have a great deal more difficulty processing foreground sounds if there are too many simultaneous background sounds. Others will focus to the point where they may not even be aware that other sound sources (or echoes of the foreground sounds from surrounding reflective surfaces) are there. Some people experience a condition called synaesthesia, where their senses are mixed in surprising ways: they taste textures, or they see sounds, for instance.

In my book I also talked about the marvelous book by Dr. Oliver Sacks, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For His Hat", which chronicles various examples that show us just how strange and complex the process of consciousness and "mind" can be. Recently in my blog entry David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, we talked a bit about the idea that hallucinogens might also be able to reveal information about how our consciousness and the underlying patterns of reality are inter-related. And in blog entries like Magnets and Souls and Daily Parrying I've talked about Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book "My Stroke of Insight", which reveals some fascinating truths about how our interface with reality is so strongly mediated by separate and distinctly different patterns or grids of awareness that co-exist within what we've traditionally called "the mind".

Here is a link to a story from the UK's Daily Mail a few weeks ago about some other exotic examples of crossed wires in the brain. Persons mentioned in the article:

- Richard Murray of Birmingham, England, who 3 years ago suffered a stroke, had to re-learn how to speak, but mysteriously now finds that he speaks with a French accent.
- James Wannerton, a synaesthete who can taste words.
- Tommy McHugh, a builder who suffered a massive brain hemorrhage in 2001 and suddenly became a prodigious artist.

Looks go back to where we started. Here's that opening animation again, all by itself:

As it suggests at this CalTech page about this animation, just try clicking the animation over and over, and see if you think you hear a sound (obviously this test is best done in a quiet environment, free from other distractions). For that small percentage of the population who actually have some forms of synaesthesia, the effect should be immediate and obvious. For others like myself, they might be able to convince themselves that they hear a faint "hissing sound" associated with the motion after repeated viewings, but this is where the line between imagination and perception can become very tricky. In the above New Scientist article, it's suggested that synaesthetes who hear sounds associated with visual input might even have a certain advantage because of their blending of the senses: the article reports that most of us are better at remembering sound patterns than visual patterns. In a test that compared persons known to have sound/visual synaesthesia with a control group, everyone was about 85% accurate on the sound trials. With visual patterns, however, the control group remembered only 55% of the visual patterns correctly, while synaesthetes remained steady at 85%. Clearly, people who can "hear" visual patterns can actually be helped by their unusual ability in certain situations.

In items like Music and the Dance of Creativity, The Geometry of Music, and Information Equals Reality, I've tried to tie all these ideas into what the power of music reveals about how our brains are so finely tuned to memes that connect across time and space. "Crossed wires in the brain" give us another way of thinking about the patterns that create our reality, and how important our participation as quantum observers is in that process.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, September Report

Magnets and Souls

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p21KA8JL9qU



A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbTHExJzJXs


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmEStxGgsI


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKxKVpHZe5Q

Rupert Sheldrake had some more to say in David Jay Brown's book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse that I thought was useful to add to the ideas we've looked at in entries like Being More Fifth Dimensional, Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, and Are Animals and Kids More Fifth Dimensional?:

The reason animals are called animals is because the word "animal" comes from the Latin word, anima, meaning "soul". So, what the soul did, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas--who were the main authorities for the medieval view--was to act first as the form of the body, to shape the developing organism as it grew. In animals the soul also underlaid the instincts, the movements, and the organization of the sensations and behavior. In human beings the soul also included the intellect, the rational mind, the conscious mind.

So the human soul had three levels, or layers. One was the conscious mind, second to the animal soul, which was largely unconscious, and we shared with animals. And thirdly there was the vegetative soul, or the nutritive soul, which shaped our bodies and gave rise to the form of our bodies, helped maintain them in health and in healing from injury and disease... Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.

I've used "corn starch monster" videos before (which is what we're looking at in the three short youtube clips that start this entry) to demonstrate how a simple action like a low frequency vibration can impart something to a corn starch and water mixture that reminds us of life, and how the reverse is also true: most of us have seen the astonishing difference between a living creature and what that same creature appears as when the spark of life has departed. Some of us have also seen what's it like when a person's soul has left their dying body before the body is dead: even when the physical body continues to struggle on with that most basic desire to continue, it can be clear to us that the "vibration"that made that person who they were is no longer there. Would it really be such a stretch for us to think that a magnet had "died" if one day it ceased to attract and repel other magnets?

From the most primitive beginnings of life on the planet, to human beings and beyond, all life shares the same trait - a desire to continue, an interest in "what happens next". Do corn starch monsters and magnets desire to continue? That's like asking whether my car desires to move forward after I step on the gas pedal. Animation (movement), is not the same as anima (life, soul): so, while things that are alive move, things that move are not necessarily alive. Still, it's interesting to think about a time not very many centuries ago when it was believed that magnets had souls, and to apply that idea to what I've been talking about here: how something as simple as a meme-based vibration pattern across dimensions could be what imparts, using constructive interference with physical reality, the anima to living things.

All of this also strongly relates to the current bestseller I've just finished reading, My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. After a left hemisphere stroke removed Dr. Taylor's ability to plan and think linearly, she spent time thinking only with her right brain, where she reports that she felt an intimate connection to the one-ness that we all share within the universe. I recommend this book highly because it touches upon so many of the things I have talked about with this project - how "souls" can be thought of as coming from different energy/vibration/meme patterns, interlocking together to create what we each of us thinks of as a unique "me", and how some people create energy which other people are drawn to and inspired by, while other people seem to suck the energy out of a room. The corn starch videos, I think, are good starting points for discussion - thinking about how different patterns and waves really could be interacting to create what we know of as life and consciousness. Books like Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life add more pieces to the puzzle as we think about how different waveforms can entrain one another, and ultimately this is all part of the path towards seeing how everything fits together to create our reality.

We'll close this entry with a video for one of the 26 songs that are part of this project. This one is about the soul, the mysterious spark of life that each of us carries within, and it's called "Burn the Candle Brightly".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydru-VYfybU

Enjoy the journey, one planck length at a time.

Rob Bryanton

Related entries:
Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Vibrations and Energy
Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions
Music and the Dance of Creativity

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, June Report