Biology of perception

We have been cultivated with beliefs in our culture that shape our entire civilization. We bought our belief in the Darwinian Theory that says that we got here through random mutations and genetic accidents. There is no purpose for us of begin here on this planet because we are an accident. We are in an eternal struggle for survival, competition of being the fittest. So we have to compete against each other in order to get our piece of life out of this. So this is where we are right now, when we destroy ourselves through wars, famine and even when we destroy our environment.

Another harmful thing that we are doing to ourselves is when we are under stress. There are three side effects when stress hormones are released and they are related to the blood flow.

1. the blood is concentrated more for the protection system and the immune systems is shut down
2. growth and regeneration systems are shut down because they are less important than dealing with the stress source
3. the blood vessels from the frontal lobes, that are responsible for thinking, or reasoning, are constricted and the blood is directed to the back of the head where instinctual behavior resides.

This is not saying that stress is not good. It's good when we have to deal with immediate threat like being chased by a tiger. Nowadays we are dealing more with other kind of stress. For example, when we are under stress at work, we have to work more, better and faster in order to get that thing done. People who loose their jobs and are in debt because they cannot longer pay the loan, their stress can even push them towards suicide. But this stress is superficial by it's nature. It's a stress that we are creating in our minds, but it has the same effects like the real one. This is the biology of perception and it's explained by PhD. Bruce Lipton.



We live in a world with 360 degree of stress and the only way to deal with it is just to step outside of it, don't engage to it and be disconnected. It's the way eastern thought of non-engagement to what we call "real world" but for them is Maya or the illusion. When one realize that the world is just an illusion your stress hormones that were supposed to protect are not triggered anymore in artificial situations.

Cells are like people. They have all the systems that we have: respiratory, digestive, reproduction, endocrine and even immune system. Cells are a community, they have jobs, cells get paid for their jobs, there is an economy, there is a politics and they leave in harmony. The answer lies within. We live in a fractal universe where patterns repeat themselves in a similar fashion at every level.

Genetic control is what we have been programmed, which literally means that we are controlled by genes that we inherited. This concept basically makes us somehow are a victim impotent of changing our biology, it's like sitting in a back sit of a car, where the car is our body and genes are the driver.

In epi-genetics, the body is not controlled by the genes, but is something else that is controlling the genes (that where the "epi" comes from, something external). And that something is nothing else except our mind. The genes control nothing, the genes are only the blueprint for our body. The DNA represents the blueprint and the nervous system is the contractor that constantly modifies the blueprint according to the environment in order to keep the body alive.

So with the new view from epi-genetics, the mind controls the biology of the body. If we are able to control our minds we would be able to control our body too. This idea relates to the "Law of Attraction" that says that whatever you are thinking you are attracting that thing if you truly believe in it. But this is like when you would have an endless supply of desire in you, and whatever happens you are not put down by any event until you will actually going to achieve or have that thing.

Buddha said that desire is the source of all sufferings in the world. So Buddhist monks went out and cut desire, eliminated desire from all of their being, thrown desire, killed all desire within them. After all this effort they went back to Buddha and but the Buddha said "No, now you desire not to desire". So it's like a vicious circle. There is nothing you can do about it.

But how can one be able to control his mind ? What does he must do in order to improve his mind so to be in control of it, when he is using as a tool his own mind ? The mind cannot be the subject and the object of the improvement at the same time. This is like biting your own teeth or feeling the tip of your finger with the tip of your finger. You simply cannot do it. Then you realize that you cannot do anything about it. There is only though meditation one can become aware of this and experience the world just like it is, with good and bad, accepting them as they come.

Where Do We Come From ?

"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" Paug Gaugin

One of the fundamental question that one has to answer for himself is the question about his origin. And for this, man has created theories about it. Of course the truth is that no one can come with an infallible theory because it's very hard to prove.

Until Darwin, the prevailed myth that answered the question of man's origin was the "Ceramic model of the Universe" provided by the church. Darwin was maybe the first to oppose this widespread idea when he introduced the "Theory of Evolution" which is based on a Newtonian model of the Universe.

Now it seems that this theory is starting to shake as many scientists argue that this century old theory has many flaws in it, many that couldn't have been predicted by Darwin. The debate started from the mid 1980's from a book entitled "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" by Michael Denton.



The "Intelligent design" theory is based upon the principle of "irreducible complexity". An irreducibly complex system is one composed of multiple parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. If even one part is missing, the entire system will fail to function. Every individual part is integral. So there has to be an intelligent design for all these parts to have been set up in the correct place. The probability of this to happen by mere chance is so small that is almost impossible.

This principle is not found only in the biology but even in astrophysics. The distance to our Sun is tremendously important for the life to exist as we know it. If we were a little closer to the Sun or further from it, the water, our essential vital substance, wouldn't be in the liquid form and we couldn't live. In Physics, we have what we call "Universal constants". If these constants were other than what we know today, the Universe wouldn't be like the way it's know, or it could have been destroyed.

We can conceive even a theory of evolution for the Universe, or Multiverse, in a higher dimensional plane in which all possible universes are created from the beginning (whatever that is) and maybe the laws of physics would differ and the universe with a wrong mixture of universal constants and laws could destroy itself. That's natural selection on a universal scale.

The Darwinians reply that given a considerable amount of time, and try every combination, without repeating it through natural selection, the nature can find it's way to evolve towards complexity.

In a recent 2008 documentary movie "Expelled: No intelligence allowed" we can see how this idea of "natural selection" can turn into a dangerous idea. It has feed Nazi's racist efforts to create the "Aryan race" throughout exterminating "inferior races".

On the other side, creationists argue that science is a form or religion of itself. No one know how the life started. How did all happen, how the first protein was conceived. The fairy story "that a lightning stroke the primordial soup" the life appeared it's a gimmick. Laboratory experiments showed this could never happened.

Today we live with the disastrous results of the ego, which, according to nineteenth century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature it will not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke. Therefore the geneticists and many others are now saying that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any further; he must intercede with his own intelligence and through genetic alterations breed the kind of people who will be viable for future human societies. This, I submit, is a ghastly error, because human intelligence has a very serious limitation. It is a scanning system of conscious attention that is linear, and it examines the world in lines [...] However, the universe does not come at us in lines. Instead, it comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once, and it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or other information, however fast it may be scanned. That is our limitation, so far as the intellectual and scientific life is concerned. The computer may greatly speed up linear scanning, but it is still linear scanning. - Alan Watts

So, man is tackling these fundamental problems but it has thousand year old weapons that never changed.
Using these tools, we designed what we call "intelligent robots" but these robots don't even have the intelligence of a drunken cockroach. For example, there is no definitive algorithm that can distinguish cats from dogs from a set of images. A tentacle-robot makes an impressive amount of computations for moving it's hand from one point to another using inverse kinematics, while most three year-old can do it in an instant. Efforts have being made in this area of research, on understanding how the brain work and Jeff Hawkings came up with an interesting approach called memory-prediction model. More on this subject in his ted talk or his book "On Intelligence".



With this approach, we could come to the realization that our complex intelligence can be reproduced by a machine that can safely pass the Turing test. Then what ? The philosophical implications of this is that life, like the matter, is not intelligent and it's just mechanical. That would be a great disappointment for mankind, for it's ego. An intelligent design would just lay out the matrix for all things and we are just a product of it. If we are going to find that design it won't be that intelligent for us when we'll think of it. Maybe we don't know what this concept of intelligence really means.

But there is another way to put it. Life it's not a fluke. The matter is just as intelligent as the human brain is or the cell. There is no need then for any intelligent design but there is no reason that it could not be at the same time. The matter itself is intelligent as it basic core. Alan Watts explains this principle in the following video.



All in all, the entry can be summed up into the following table. For me, the last two theories are correct and even if they contradict each other. They are saying the same thing, that the nature of life, is not separated from the nature of matter. So the matter is one with life, despite on what we call intelligent or not.

Theory	Matter	Process	Life
Creationism	Non-Intelligent	God	Intelligent
Darwinism	Non-Intelligent	evolved	Intelligent
Intelligent design	Non-Intelligent	is	Non-Intelligent
Tao	Intelligent	is	Intelligent

Paradigm shift

The metaphysical revolution of the paradigm shift has began. The foundations of the society in which we live is shaking and cannot sustain itself at the current pace and the results we are seeing today are disturbing.

Famine is the greatest killer in a world right now despite the fact that we have the technology of feeding over 7 billions of people, but we don't just because they don't have money. Also AIDS which is a curable disease makes millions of deaths in Africa because they are poor and they don't afford treatments like people in developed countries. Ghandi said "The deadliest form of violence is poverty".

1% of the population owns more than 40% of the planet wealth, 20% of the worlds population consumes 80% of its resources, more than 50% of the population is working under 2$ per day and more statistics can be depicted in the beautiful referential movie Home (which I invite to see if you didn't until now). So this gap between the rich and the poor is becoming increasingly larger with what it seems to be an exponential change.

One alternative to our society is expressed in the philosophy of the Jacque Fresco's Venus project, which for some is merely an utopia.

One argued on a blog:

I agree whole-heartily with it, but one question I've always had about the Venus Project is how it proposes to handle fair distribution of goods and services. One can't expect everyone to be all 'selfless' all of a sudden and if everything is free, there would be those who took unfair advantage. Controls would need to be put in place and then the whole cycle of crime starts again.
I feel that the problems we face now are not with political, economic and social systems, but with us, individually. We need a radical revolution (or evolution) of mind and spirit on a massive scale from which truly just systems will arise. I've also heard it said that once 10%-20% of humans wake up it would be enough of a shift to initiate real change, primarily by allowing awakened leaders (corporate and political) to emerge.

The change should also be along with one in consciousness in which one should not desire more than what it needs. This "waking up" that everyone is talking about, this paradigm shift is starting to emerge from within all fields, biology, neuroscience, astro-physics, philosophy... and will converge to what we are talking right now, to the revolution of the mind. This is going to be our revolution. And what we expect now? A leader, because no one has the guts to do it on his own. Some of us did it, but the change was small (like Christopher McCandless or Ghandi). In order this to work it must be at a global scale.

The Internet will play a big role and the best example is the recently Egyptian revolution (25 January). The upper elite knows that the power is at the people but they try to keep us as separated as possible. The roman method of "divide and conquer" is working even now. But we must remember that we are the pyramid and the upper elite will fall if the pyramid will crumble.

The revolution of consciousness is referring to the elimination of the ego (or the self) that has been fed with false concepts about the reality, about what our needs are and that is decaying in a general anxiety. This metaphysical revolution will basically create the ground of acceptance of the new radical ideas expressed in the Venus Project. Until then, these ideas will be regarded as a return of Marxism or Communism and they will be criticized and blamed of repeating the history.

Thomas Kuhn said that there are some phases that lead to a change of paradigm.

1. The existing paradigm encounters an anomaly
2. Initially the anomaly is ignored or rejected
3. People try to explain the anomaly with the existing paradigms
4. A new paradigm is proposed in which the anomaly is resolved
5. The solution is rejected often ridiculed (the creator and followers are seen as heretics)
6. The solution finally gains acceptance.

The social anomalies of this society paradigm are wars, famine, destroying mother nature, wasting resources, money... People lived in ignorance or they were eliminated because of their radical ideas (like Ghandi). We are in the phase 4-5 of the revolution or change of the current paradigm of consciousness. There is no one better than Peter Russel to explain this in his great talk, "The Primacy of Consciousness".



We have the power to change but the change must be with their own weapons first. The radical solution would be to try to be independent of money. But first of all, think at what you buy and how you can change the world. This may be the first non-violent step to take as expressed in the movie Home.

Quotes

"Your reverence", asked Huai-jang, "what is the objective of sitting meditation?"
"The objective," answered Ma-tsu, "is to become a Buddha."
Thereupon Huai-jang picked up a floor-tile and began to polish it on a rock.
"What are you doing, master?" asked Ma-tsu.
"I'm polishing it for a mirror", said Huai-jang.
"How could polishing a tile make a mirror?"
"How could sitting in meditation make a Buddha?"

"The perfect Way [Tao] is without difficulty,
Save that it avoids picking and choosing.
Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood.
A split hair's difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart!
It you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind." Seng-ts'an

"When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone recognizes goodness as good,
there is already evil.
"To be" and "not to be" arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are mutually sequence."

The illusion of significant improvement arises in moments of contrast, as when one turns from the left to right on a hard bed. The position is better so long as the contrast remains, but before long the second position begins to feel like the first. The vacuum arises because the sensation of comfort can be maintained only in relation to the relation of discomfort, just as an image is visible to the eye only by reason of a contrasting the background. The good and evil, the pleasant and the painful are so inseparable, so identical in their difference-like the two sides of a coin. [...]
Zen has no goal. A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only "getting somewhere" as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to. For points of arrival are too abstract, too Euclidean to be enjoyed, and it is as very much like eating the precise ends of a banana without getting what lies in between. [...]
In swordsmanship one must not first decide upon a certain thrust and then attempt to make it since by that time it will be too late. Decision and action must be simultaneous. [...]
In archery, the releasing of the bowstring had to be done "unintentionally", then the arrow would shoot itself." Alan Watts in "The way of zen"

Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

"How can one prevent a drop of water from ever drying up ?
By throwing it into the sea." Samsara (2001)

Change is driven by Gravity

A lot of change happened recently that stopped me of having enough time to blog something about anything. You must remember, that one of the fundamental point of Buddhism is the idea that the world is in a permanent flux of change. The sense of frustration arises from a person failure to accept this basic characteristic of life: the lack of permanent self and perpetual change of everything.

Everything in our universe is in constant change since the beginning, the Big Bang. From galaxies to simple sub-atomic particles, all things are in a constant flux. Also it's difficult to pin down anything because of this change. In quantum physics the uncertainty principle states that one cannot assign exact simultaneous values to the position and momentum of a physical system. These quantities can be measured only with uncertainty.

Moreover, for each particle physicists have assigned a wave making them inseparable. The duality of particle-wave is the result of the basic rule that governs our universe. But how something so palpable and solid as matter particles can easily be associated with a wiggly wave of energy, an ethereal moving substance ?

I believe the force of gravity is the driver of this constant change. From the beginning the gravity formed everything by organizing chaos. This is how atoms were formed, then planets and life itself. I cannot imagine this universe without gravity. The Secret shows that the Gravity works not only at the physical level. Gravity is the only force in the Universe that hadn't been united completely in the Theory of Everything due to it's strange nature despite the other four forces (electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces).

Only exotic theories like the string theory or E8 theory tried to unite these forces. Both of them are difficult to prove because they require the existence of higher dimensions in this universe and even parallel universes from which gravity can leak in our universe.

A rather new simple Theory of Everything states that atoms are mini black holes where protons are attracted to each other by gravitation rather than a mysterious strong force.



Also, there is the resistance to change. If there is no resistance to it, everything will go from beginning to the end in an instant. So there must be always some resistance to change for the wonderful manifestation of form to exist. This may be a good definition of time, as being this resistance to change.

The degree you are going with the stream, you are not resisting change, time will not affect you as much as it does to others. If you learn how to completely let go, you will experience nirvana but you must realize this without purpose, without intention.