Consciousness Cafe - Entheogens and Psychedelic Cultural Transmissions

The physical is just very, very, very slow moving spiritual. Its so slow,

in fact, that if it slowed down any more we would find ourselves at the

absolute highest point of spirituality of the order of reality just below

this one.

Information like that doesn't help, but here's some more.

In the old days music use to come on various sized disks of vinyl, a type

of plastic. These disks had a continuous etching carved into them

spiraling from the outer edge of the disks inward to the center. The

etching was of such a precise nature that when it was placed on a flat

revolving surface and an appropriately sized needle was gently rested

within the grooves of the etching the faint sound of the music could be

heard. Those of the appropriate age group or those familiar with media

history will remember this as "The Record Player" and "The Record".

One of the more important aspects of both the record and the record player

was the relationship of the speed that the record was supposed to be

played at, the revolutions per minute or rpm. There were standard rpm(s)

in use, 45, 33 and 78. The better record players used motors that allowed

for fine tuning through the use of another interesting bit of technology,

the strobe.

This is a light that is able to pulse on and off at a precise frequency.

Along the side of the record player's platter, the part that the record

was set on, there were verticle hash marks of varying thickness and

spacing. Next to the platter, a strobe was pointed at the hash marks.

Now comes the one of the more amazing points of this analogy. When the

speed of the the motor was adjusted to the point where it was revolving at

precisely the same number of revolutions per minute that the strobe was

pulsing at, the blurred hash marks appeared to "freeze"!

For the techs, the strobe was always pulsing at a constant number, the

hash marks were in relations of whole number multiples to the

pulse/desired rpm.

...and this has to do with Spiritual vs. Physical... how?

A lot of our process of understanding is a process of mapping analogies.

Happiness is....., Love is.... etc. Some analogies bind tighter than

others, love is like a burning ring of fire... love is like chocolate.

The mileage on both the analogies and their bindings vary from person to

person and analogy to analogy. I get a lot of mileage out of this one in

the following ways.

I map the physical to the record player, the record, the strobe, the

strobe light, the sound of the music, i.e. all of the physical items in

the analogy. I map the spiritual to what I would interpret as the music,

what I "see" when I get the strobe bars to line up, etc.

Wait, I cheated! Suddenly there is something in the analogy that wasn't

talked about before, namely, me and my interpretation. Well, not exactly

true. Back up there, "the blurred hash marks appeared to "freeze"! Just

"Who" did those hash marks appear to freeze to? Let's say that I go back

and I try to eliminate "The Who" in the analogy that was "seeing" the hash

marks, and that I was successful. Well,..."Who" did that eliminating?

... Ok, let's eliminate the eliminator. This could go on for a long time.

epilogue: There was another version of this. I wrote the whole thing and

then hit the delete key.

But remember, we're only pretending, so take what I said with a big grain

of salt.

GW wrote:

and immediately followed with this:

My last response was rather esoteric and abstract to the point that I felt

a little guilty. Guilty to the point that I felt the need to send a less

esoteric, less abstract response.

What I was trying to do was set up an "experience" of *if one truly went

all the way, they would end up exactly where they are right now*, but with

this information added to their mindset.

As pointed out by you, that can lead to a whole range of actions

including, but not limited to, ignoring the physical in pursuit of the

spiritual.

I wanted to give a model which illustrated that balance had a lot to due

with reference point and point of view. That was the reason for the

different speeds of the record and the self which had to decide if the

hash marks had "frozen".

The analogy had a lot of hidden mappings, for instance, while I said that

the physical was represented by the player, the record, etc, I never

talked about *where* the player was located or the possibility of

*different records*.

I think that many people who live on the street are literally, living in a

slightly different physical reality than me. They are, at the very

minimum listening to a different record. Ok, too abstract and esoteric

again.

If you spend enough time with street people, your view of the world, what

you think of as *real*, changes. When what you think is *real* changes,

then for you, what *is real* changes. We could go on and on about

semantics vs. reality and blah, blah, blah but I'm choosing the homeless,

street person because the set of material comforts and quality of life

that we view them as lacking targets our core structures of reality.

If you want to know what you believe about spiritual vs. physical just

take a quick review of the homeless. Now this is here in the United

States that I'm talking about. It might be the same everywhere but I'm

only talking about here. In fact, I'm probably restricting it to urban

homelessness in the Midwest.

I know that I don't want to be out on the street with no food right now.

I also know that if my head was sufficiently immersed in the spiritual

that that wouldn't matter. THAT WOULDN'T MATTER! But,... that's not were

I'm at right now, and this gets to the other part of my analogy. Where

I'm at is, and I have to use the analogy to say it, is that I'm adjusting

the speed of the record player to make sure that the hash marks are lining

up. After I do that I can then sit back and enjoy the music.

It would probably take me a couple of volumes to deconstruct those last

two sentences but the gist of it is that I stay engaged in refining the

relationships of the physical components of my world while referencing and

staying in the knowledged that I can move up or down the spiritual chain

at will.

The absolute most immediate and concrete manifestation of that is my

participation in *this* community at this *time*.

Ok, I think I've absolved myself of my abstract esoteric guilt for a while.

J wrote:

Getting into your comments which in turn were in response to something Ora had wrtten, I try not to see any difference between the physical and the spiritual.

A theme which recurs for me is the danger of dualism. Believing that there are separate "spiritual" and "physical" worlds would cause problems for me.

I feel that there is really only one megaverse, and that we don't see its boundaries, but if we did we would see that ALL is all there is. What we refer to as "physical" and "spiritual" are actually modes of manifestation of the sapient mind within that universe. We have a different mode of consciousness when we are with our child; yet another when we are watching TV; yet another when I have to fight off ninjas in order to rescue buxom young maidens who are in possession of elixirs of eternal life, and so on. These are all modes of engaging the universe while caught temporarily in the temporary tidal eddy we call life.

So Greg yes I agree it is a record player with various speeds. We may think it is 3 different record players when it is run at 3 different speeds. But it is really just one record player operating in different modes.

As my own hazy concepts evolve, about how my own consciousness evolves, it seems more likely that the evolution of consciousness is not a single path that we all follow. It is rather like a brambly, but not terribly overgrown woods in which you can cut through the bush in many different ways. And not just that you can, you must. Gaia needs us to be flexible and be able to change modes of consciousness easily. Anyone who is "stuck in the spiritual" as Ora describes is not adapting well. We need to not get "stuck" anywhere. So therein lies the key to avoiding the stagnation she describes so well.

I think what Greg says makes perfect sense, if you substitute his comment that the physical is the spiritual really slowed down - to the idea that the physical is the consciousness itself really slowed down. The "spiritual" is just consciousness expanded to a much bigger time/space/reality envelope because it doesn't have to deal at the moment with keeping the monkey alive, fed and breeding. I think the consciousness always wants to expand from the limited monkey agenda, and will if we give it a chance. It's all just the universe, how we perceive it and at what scope we observe it is what makes it physical or not.

JS wrote:

On Thursday, December 14, 2006, at 06:33 PM, J wrote:

the physical is the consciousness itself really slowed down.

A passage from one of Kurt Vonnegut's books, forget which, about the death of a character:

In line with his belief that the body is merely slowed down light, John Paul Ziller accelerated.

AT wrote:

I seriously like this.

I'm looking at Northwestern to finish our my education. I am discussing mysticism with the lady there I"m hoping will be my mentor. I believe the left brain scholar has a hard time accepting myticism as valid form of understand information. This seems to be a real problem when the scholar tries to see mysticism through his own logic, instead of accepting the vision of the mystic he's studying.

As I think about it, maybe for me it's the mystical that is celebrated in every man. I believe my use of drugs when I was younger (over 35 years ago) was to find some mystical point to life. There was a wonderful self indulgent opportunity to do this in the 60s and early 70s to "find ourselves" which I exploited in any way I could.

As I look at my three children, I see a mystical point manifesting 3 entirely different ways. They each manifest their divine mystical selves in three different ways. When I say different, I mean that whatever talents or the foibles as Marilyn said in an earlier post when she was talking about how by judging Mel's work through his foibles we're demonstrating graphically our own work through our own shadow. I think this is genetically mystical.

When I was a member of the Theosophical Society during my adolescence, there was a man who said to me if a pickpocket looked upon a prophet, all he'd see were pockets. I think that's a wonderful way to illustrating "shadow."

I believe our mystical point manifests our talents and foibles in different ways and how we do that is dictated through our genes. The great challenge we have as divine cognitive beings is to see past this "shadow" and be able to communicate our mystical point to another while honoring their mystical point. If one person defines his mysticism as a scholar and another defines their mysticism through their art, then its the mystical point they might have in common to commune together. The method of expression might be irrelevant because (as so succinctly put by J) of the different dimensions innate within consciousness of the whole.

I think possibly that's why LOVE is so important. Since communication is so dependent on perspective, at least the recognition of each talent no matter how differently expressed, can be seen through a warm perspective rather than the feeling of judgment or criticism.

Accepting the fact that Truth comes in so many voices is a big step. My life and how it manifests in the world is certainly not the only expression. Whatever I am experiencing can be expressed differently and from a different perspective in someone else. Even if the way we both see something seems mutually exclusive, I think the word "and" instead of "or" is very helpful. Because I am finite, I will never have a grasp of every possibility or of understanding and expressing every aspect of THE mystical point.

New recordings of electrical activity in the brain may explain a major part of its function, including how it consolidates daily memories, why it needs to dream and how it constructs models of the world to guide behavior.

The recordings capture dialogue between the hippocampus, where initial memories of the day’s events are formed, and the neocortex, the sheet of neurons on the outer surface of the brain that mediates conscious thought and contains long-term memories.

Such a dialogue had been thought to exist, but no one had been able to eavesdrop on it successfully. The new insight has emerged from recordings of rat brains but is likely to occur in much the same way in the human brain, which has analogous structures and the same basic principles of operation.

The finding, reported on the Web site of the journal Nature Neuroscience by Daoyun Ji and Matthew A. Wilson, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories — in repeated simultaneous bursts of electrical activity — of a task the rat learned the previous day.

The researchers could interpret the memories through electrodes inserted into the rats’ brains, including into special neurons in the hippocampus. These neurons are known as “place cells” because each is activated when the rat passes a specific location, as if they were part of a map in the brain. The activation is so reliable that one can tell where a rat is in its cage by seeing which of its place cells is firing.

Earlier this year Dr. Wilson reported that after running a maze, rats would replay their route during idle moments, as if to consolidate the memory, although the replay, surprisingly, was in reverse order of travel. These fast rewinds lasted a small fraction of the actual time spent on the journey.

In the findings reported today, the M.I.T. researchers say they detected the same replays occurring in the neocortex as well as in the hippocampus as the rats slept. The rewinds appeared as components of repeated cycles of neural activity, each of which lasted just under a second. Because the cycles in the hippocampus and neocortex were synchronized, they seemed to be part of a dialogue between the two regions.

The researchers recorded electrical activity only in the visual neocortex, the region that handles input from the eyes, but they assumed many other regions participated in the memory replay activity. One reason is that there is no direct connection between the visual neocortex and the hippocampus, suggesting that a third brain region coordinates a general dialogue between the hippocampus and all necessary components of the neocortex.

Larry Squire, a neuroscientist who studies memory at the University of California, San Diego, noted that the replay system in the neocortex had not been seen before. The fact that it occurred during sleep “would certainly provide one clue that part of the function of sleep is to let us process and stabilize the experiences we have during the day,” Dr. Squire said.

Because the fast rewinds in the neocortex tended to occur fractionally sooner than their counterparts in the hippocampus, the dialogue is probably being initiated by the neocortex, and reflects a querying of the hippocampus’s raw memory data, Dr. Wilson said.

Brain researchers have long assumed that immediate memories are laid down in the hippocampus and later transferred to the neocortex for long-term storage. Dr. Wilson said the process was not just a transfer of memory, however, but more probably a sophisticated processing of data in which the neocortex learned selective information from the hippocampus.

“The neocortex is essentially asking the hippocampus to replay events that contain a certain image, place or sound,” he said. “The neocortex is trying to make sense of what is going on in the hippocampus and to build models of the world, to understand how and why things happen.”

These models are presumably used to direct behavior, Dr. Wilson said. They are able to generate expectations about the world and plausibly fill in blanks in memory.

Though the neocortex learns from the hippocampus, the raw memory traces, from childhood onward, are not transferred and are probably retained in the hippocampus, Dr. Wilson said. If so, the forgetfulness of age would arise because of problems in accessing the hippocampus, not because the data has vanished.

The subject matter of the neocortex-hippocampus dialogue in rats seems mostly to concern recent events. This is consistent with what people report when awoken from nondreaming sleep — usually small snatches of information about recent events. Dr. Wilson also said that the new findings, by showing activity in the visual neocortex, confirmed that rats had humanlike dreams with visual imagery, a possibility some researchers had doubted.