The Mechanics of the Matrix

[Jeffrey]

Excerpt from Wikipedia:

In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a space or object is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it (for example, the point at 5 on a number line). A surface such as a plane or the surface of a cylinder or sphere has a dimension of two because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on it (for example, to locate a point on the surface of a sphere you need both its latitude and its longitude). The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional because three co-ordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces.

In physical terms, dimension refers to the constituent structure of all space (cf. volume) and its position in time (perceived as a scalar dimension along the t-axis), as well as the spatial constitution of objects within—structures that correlate with both particle and field conceptions, interact according to relative properties of mass—and are fundamentally mathematical in description. These, or other axes, may be referenced to uniquely identify a point or structure in its attitude and relationship to other objects and occurrences.

END EXCERPT -- source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensi...cs_and_physics)



My question is this: If there were such a thing as absolute direction then what would it be, what would it represent?

Absolute magnitude versus absolute direction. Scalar and dromic© (see origin).

What separates these two dimensions? What is between them?




Related post ---> https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542926

[Jeffrey]

Symmetry

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=415VX3QX4cU

EXCERPT FROM YOUTUBE:

"The world turns on symmetry -- from the spin of subatomic particles to the dizzying beauty of an arabesque. But there's more to it than meets the eye. Here, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy offers a glimpse of the invisible numbers that marry all symmetrical objects."

[Jeffrey]

Computer Viruses, Artificial Life and Evolution by Mark Ludwig


A few related posts in this thread:


https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post546576

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542238

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542395

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542418

[Jeffrey]

GUY MURCHIE

Exerpt from WIKIPEDIA:

However, one of his greatest contributions was in the concept of the superorganism. Murchie notes that often groups behave as an individual organism. He asks "Who runs an ant colony?" "How do ants decide to move their nest somewhere else?" Similarly, bees of a beehive communicate (at least as far as directing their fellow bees to food) with a language which is made of dance steps (including sounds and smells). The ant colony and the beehive behave like a single organism with its own mind: a beehive metabolizes, has a cognitive life (makes decisions), acts (it can move, attack) and so forth. In this scenario, language can be viewed from a different perspective, as the mechanism that allows the organism to be one. Where does language come from is a question that does not only apply to humans, but to all species, each species having its own "language". Murchie further envisioned the earth as a single organism. On his view, all living organisms, along with all the minerals on the surface of the Earth, compose one giant integrated system that controls its behavior so as to survive as a whole. Galaxies can be viewed analogously. After all, living beings are made of star dust. Life is inherent in nature. To this effect, Murchie describes sophisticated geologic phenomena such as sand dunes, glaciers, fires, etc. as living organisms, as well as the life of metals and crystals. The question is not whether there is life outside our planet, but whether it is possible to have "nonlife".

Murchie also expounded on the properties of mind. He states that memory is ubiquitous in nature. For example, energy conservation is a form of memory (an elastic band remembers how much energy was put into stretching it and eventually goes back to the original position). Thus, mind in this sense is a universal aspect of life and energy. Murchie believed that there is one huge mind, the "thinking layer" around the Earth, which corresponds to the noosphere. Individual consciousnesses are absorbed into the superconsciousness of a social group, which is part of a superconsciousness of the world. In Murchie's opinion, the world has a soul, analogous to Pythagoreans' "anima mundi" and to the Hindu concept that Atman equals Brahman.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Murchie

Related posts:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post544358

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post544384

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post546207

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post546704

[Jeffrey]

Source: http://www.dhushara.com/pdf/biocos1.pdf

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Vivek (here)
Source: http://www.dhushara.com/pdf/biocos1.pdf

That paper has a rather imposing Abstract:

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the non-linear quantum foundations of biogenesis in interactive bifurcations between the properties of the elements, sourced in the transitions induced by cosmic symmetry-breaking [King 1978]. The key interactions forming the biogenic pathway are modeled in terms of interactive quantum bifurcations explaining why the bioelements play the interactive role they do and why central biomolecules are cosmologically abundant products of the gas clouds forming young stars. RNA and related nucleotide molecules gain a plausible cosmic status, along with major features of the genetic code, and key features of metabolism, including ion and electron transport, the citric acid cycle and glycolysis.

I hope it's good .

[Jeffrey]

Posted by Paul (here)

Posted by Vivek (here)
Source: http://www.dhushara.com/pdf/biocos1.pdf

That paper has a rather imposing Abstract:

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the non-linear quantum foundations of biogenesis in interactive bifurcations between the properties of the elements, sourced in the transitions induced by cosmic symmetry-breaking [King 1978]. The key interactions forming the biogenic pathway are modeled in terms of interactive quantum bifurcations explaining why the bioelements play the interactive role they do and why central biomolecules are cosmologically abundant products of the gas clouds forming young stars. RNA and related nucleotide molecules gain a plausible cosmic status, along with major features of the genetic code, and key features of metabolism, including ion and electron transport, the citric acid cycle and glycolysis.

I hope it's good .

Hi Paul,

There is a lot of verbiage in that one for sure.

Below are a few excerpts from that document that I'm interested in.

As time passes, more and more evidence is accumulating that, the universe and its galactic gas clouds are abundant in organic
chemicals, from the simplest molecules to sugars, amino acids and nucleic acid bases. Since Fred Hoyle coined the term “wooden universe” based on infra-red spectral data indicative of carbohydrate emission, there has been an awareness of the potential of galactic gas clouds to be cosmically abundant sources of prebiotic molecules.

Radio-telescope data as early as 1974, [Buhl] demonstrated clouds of multiple-bonded HC≡N and H2C=O spanning the region in the Orion nebula where several new stars are forming, fig 6. These are key precursors of complex polymerization pathways discussed below. Glycine has also been found in interstellar gas and adenine is an abundant product in simulations of collapsing interstellar gas
clouds containing a dozen elements including hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen [Chakrabarti 2000]. Along with amino-acids, all of A, U, G, and C have been detected in carbonaceous chondrites [Hua et. al. 1986], such as the Murchison meteorite. These also contain amphophilic membrane forming products [Deamer and
Pashley 1989]. Cometary impacts are believed to have coated the Earth in a rich endowment of organics from the earliest stages of solar system evolution when impact rates were high.

Glycoaldehyde has recently been detected by Jan Hollis [2000] in a cloud of gas and dust 2 light years across of a type from which new stars are formed. He notes “Interstellar clouds are spread throughout the galaxy and you often find the same
molecule in many different clouds. Since these organic molecules are so widespread, it may mean that pre-biotic chemical evolution is an ongoing process.” Glycoaldehyde can combine with other carbohydrate molecules to produce ribose.

A team led by Jason Dworkin [Dworkin et. al. 2001] has also formed complex organic molecules under the harsh conditions of outer space. The main ingredients of interstellar ices are simple chemicals frozen together. Mostly water, some ammonia,
carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and methanol. The team froze a mixture of these chemicals into a thin solid ice at temperatures close to absolute zero (-441°F/ -263°C) under extreme vacuum and exposed this to harsh ultraviolet radiation
that mimics the radiation in space produced by neighbouring stars. Instead of finding a handful of molecules only slightly more complicated than the starting compounds, hundreds of new compounds were produced in every mixed ice studied. The
types of compounds produced are strikingly similar to many infalling meteorites and interplanetary dust particles. “Thus much of the organic material found on the Earth in its earliest years probably had an interstellar heritage”. [more on page 5]

Circularly polarized light has been reported [Bailey 1998] from a region of star formation in the constellation Orion with as much as 17% circular polarization. Such dusty regions probably contain organic molecules, including amino acids, a supposition based in part on
the discovery of extraterrestrial amino acids within the Murchison meteorite that fell on Australia in 1969. The handedness of life could be explained if circularly polarized
ultraviolet light bathed the dusty cloud that condensed into our own solar system and
preferentially destroyed the right-handed amino acids. The astronomers observed only circularly polarized infrared light (a wavelength that can pierce dusty regions), whereas ultraviolet light is needed to weed out chiral molecules, but computations showed that the scattering could also affect u.v. frequencies. Last year's discovery that even the non-biological amino acids in the Murchison meteorite tend to be left-handed argues that some extraterrestrial mechanism must have operated to create this imbalance. [more on page 9]

Far from being an improbable accident taking billions of years to find the right conditions, life may have become established on Earth as soon as the conditions permitted a liquid water ocean. Either Earth was richly bombarded with complex organic molecules which quickly found within the diversity of microclimates on Earth some which were directly conducive to the processes leading the to the genetic epoch, or life had already begun in the gas and dust cloud initially forming the solar system. [more on page 17]

Pages 8,9, and 10 of Part II.

Part III is of considerable interest to me.

ABSTRACT -
The conscious brain poses the most serious unsolved problem for science at the beginning of the third millennium. Not only is the
whole basis of subjective conscious experience lacking adequate physical explanation, but the relationship between causality and
intentionally willed action remains equally obscure. We explore a model resolving major features of the so-called ‘hard problem in
consciousness research’ through cosmic subject-object complementarity. The model combines transactional quantum theory, with
chaotic and fractal dynamics as a basis for a direct relationship between phase coherence in global brain states and anticipatory
boundary conditions in quantum systems, complementing these with key features of conscious perception, and intentional will. The
aim is to discover unusual physical properties of excitable cells which may form a basis for the evolutionary selection of subjective
consciousness, because the physics involved in its emergence permits anticipatory choices which strongly favour survival.

A few excerpts:

The conscious mind can also be described functionally as an internal model of reality. While such an explanation does not address
the basis of subjectivity, it does help explain some of the more bizarre states of consciousness and is supported by many actively
constructive aspects of sensory processing and the modular architecture of the cerebral cortex. Such an internal model can be
described functionally in terms of dynamical brain processes which undergo unstable transitions to and from chaos (Skarda and
Freeman 1987). Dynamical resonance and phase coherence also provide direct means to solve the ‘binding problem’, how the uni-
tary nature of mind emerges from distributed parallel processing of many brain states. [more on page 35]

The human brain has been described as the ‘three-pound universe’ (Hooper
and Teresi) because, along with some other mammalian brains, it is the sin-
gle most complex system so far discovered in the entire cosmological realm.
It is also the most mysterious. Although we have developed super-comput-
ers, their architecture remains that of a simplistic deterministic automaton
by comparison with the brain. Despite the vast increases of speed and mem-
ory capacity of modern computers, they remain trivial by comparison. Few
have more than a few processing units and the communication protocols for
parallel processing, outside simple matrix calculations, remain simple pro-
cedural farming out. The notion that a computer may some day also become
subjectively conscious is at this point a science fiction fantasy. [more on page 40]

Dreaming or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep in which cortical activation alternates with phases of deep sleep is both one of the most singular phases of conscious activity in which experiential feedback appears to be accentuated at the expense of external input, generating episodic subjective realities or ‘worlds within’. The nature and function of dreaming consciousness and its wealth of detail remain obscure although the experiences themselves are intense, sometimes in full sumptuous colour vision as evidenced in lucid dreaming (La Berge 1990). There is some indication that these two phases are complementary and involve reciprocal communication between the hippocampus and the cortex in consolidating long-term sequential memories (Winson 1992, Stickgold 1998, New Scientist 28 Jun 2003 29), but the subjective consequences, and the need for them to occur subjectively as well, as functionally remain enigmatic. Accounts of precognitive dreaming (Dunne c1935) challenge our very notions of causality.

A fundamental reason for any dynamical nervous system to enter chaos is that chaotic systems are arbitrarily sensitive on their initial or external conditions, so a system entering chaos is capable of being acutely responsive to its environment over time, while any stable process heads inexorably towards its equilibrium states or periodicities, entrapped by its very stability. While artificial neural nets invoke thermodynamic ‘randomness’ in annealing to ensure the system doesn’t get caught in a sub-optimal local minimum, biological systems appear to exploit chaos to free up their dynamics to explore the ‘phase space’ of possibilities available, without
becoming locked in a local energy valley which keeps it far from a global optimum. [more on pages 41 & 42]

The sense modes we experience are not simply biological as such but more fundamentally the qualitative modes of quantum interaction between molecular matter and the physical universe. They thus have plausible cosmological status. Vision deals with interaction between orbitals and photons, hearing with the harmonic excitations of molecules and membrane solitons or piezo-electric
excitons, as evidenced in the action potential. Smell is the avenue of orbital-orbital interaction, as is taste. Touch is a hybrid sense involving a mixture of these. The limits to the sensitivity of nervous systems are constrained only by the physics of quanta, rather than biological limits. This is exemplified in fig 13(c) by the capacity of retinal rod cells to record single quanta, and by the fact that membranes of cochlear cells oscillate by only about one H atom radius at the threshold of hearing, well below the scale of individual thermodynamic fluctuations and vastly below the bilayer membrane thickness. Moth pheromones are similarly effective at con-
centrations consistent with one molecule being active, as are the sensitivities of some olfactory mammals. [more on page 46]

Part III is good overall, albeit it smacked of the same information presented in the "Down the Rabbit Hole" documentary. The paper is very detailed and it was difficult to sift through -- as are many articles from the Journal of Neuroquantology I'm sure.

Here are some more posts related to this topic (the thread is peppered with them, and the information in them is great) ----->

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542325

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post545789

and most of page 4 from post #66 onward

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post544384

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542946

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542395

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542369

This is also what I want to keep digging into regarding consciousness versus what we consider "life" and the relationship/interaction between the two ...

Posted by Vivek (here)
... also the pineal gland is innervated with neurons. This fact coupled with the discovery of calcite micro crystals in the pineal gland makes me think of interferometry.

Interferometry makes use of the principle of superposition to combine waves in a way that will cause the result of their combination to have some meaningful property that is diagnostic of the original state of the waves. This works because when two waves with the same frequency combine, the resulting pattern is determined by the phase difference between the two waves—waves that are in phase will undergo constructive interference while waves that are out of phase will undergo destructive interference. Most interferometers use light or some other form of electromagnetic wave.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry

So we have information in the form of light, electrically transmitted via neurons into the pineal gland and it gets bounced around, refracted, reflected and all that by these calcite micro crystals (and water) then it is reabsorbed by the "rods and cones" in the gland. This "new" information is then interpreted by the brain. This is a closed loop system (with feedback) and it's cyclical. Information enters, it is divided, split, rearranged, and then reinterpreting by the brain (an organic computer) and contrasted with the original information or repeated and contrasted with previous reconstructions.

http://www.files.chem.vt.edu/chem-ed...s/mach-zen.gif

The light source is the neurons, the mirrors and beam splitters are the water and calcite crystals (respectively or vice versa), and the detector(s) are the rods and cones.

This could account for our ability to reflect (pun intended) and ponder by comparing and contrasting different ideas. After all, it is "the mind's eye".

EDIT/ADD

This idea is explored in more depth and detail [below]

Posted by Vivek (here)
I've been thinking about this the last week or so. I've read what other people think the pineal gland is, and it's great and all - but it still smacks of "beyond my grasp." I understand what they are saying about it, but the way the spiritual aspects about it are explained seems "magical" or too "mysterious" to be practical for me to understand how it interacts with the physics and biology of what we observe and experience as reality. It's difficult to relate to the these vague aspects of it's function without subjectively interpreting the phenomena as mystical. So, re-thinking about what it is and how it might function, I have some ideas.



Breaking it down into it's constituent parts

The pineal gland primarily consists of:

• Pinealocytes
• Glial Cells
• Calcite Microcrystals

The popular belief is that the pineal gland contains rods and cones, like the retina. This is not completely true. The pinealocytes in the gland have organelles called synaptic ribbons. The proteins that make up these synaptic ribbons are encoded by the CRX gene. This gene is only expressed in photoreceptor cells, bipolar cells, and pinealocytes. That's it. Ribbon synapses allow for the processing of complex electromagnetic information. In the retina the rods and cones receive an array of electromagnetic information from our environment, and the ribbon synapses "catch" this information effectively enough for us to be able to see the visible spectrum of light. Rods and cones are in the retina, not the pineal gland. Synaptic ribbons are a feature of rods and cones, and it's this characteristic that pinealocytes share with rods and cones.

Why would the pineal gland have cells with these "high-level processors" (ribbon synapses)? Here's where it gets cool. The gland is innervated by neurons from the sympathetic nervous system. They come from four ganglia: superior cervical ganglion, pterygopalatine ganglion ganglia, otic ganglia, and trigeminal ganglion. Those terms sound very technical, but crudely these ganglia relate to (among many other things, but this is for conceptual simplicity) touch, smell, hearing, and taste.

So now we have pathways of information between four senses, and the fifth sense is covered by these pinealocytes - a cousin of the photoreceptor cells in the retina.

Okay, now the calcite micro crystals.

Properties of Calcite

Calcite exhibits a property known as birefringence, or double refraction. It splits a beam of light. Calcite crystals act as beam splitters.



Beam splitters are also used in [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_interferometry"]holographic interferometry[/URL and laser interferometry (usually with glass and silver film).



Scientist use this technique to analyze information about a beam of light. The beam is split into two parts and those parts are superimposed on each other, creating an interference pattern.



The pattern is examined and compared with the other patterns of the beam, and information is then garnished about the light.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=obhMMsY6v6I

That's laser interferometry. There's also electronic speckle pattern interferometry.

Calcite crystals are also piezoelectric. This means that under mechanical stress, they will produce an electric charge.



Quartz crystal is also piezoelectric. Quartz watches take advantage of this feature, and push button ignitors in gas stoves utilize quartz as well to create an electric spark.

Piezoelectric crystals are used in crystal oscillators.

Another possibility for the pineal gland is that it could function similar to a capacitor.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=t9Qwx75eg8w

The micro crystals would act as insulators and the synaptic ribbons would be the conductors. After a days worth of thinking we need to sleep to "recharge".

Another factor is DNA, it acts as an antenna (see links in 2nd half of this post) and it is a dielectric, and of course it is present in the pineal gland. It is tightly coiled in the cell so could it act as an inductor?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9kQpYdCnU14

If so there would be all of the parts (crystals, inductors, capacitors) necessary for an oscillator circuit. I mean, how cool is that?

Another very interesting feature is that the orientation of micro crystals, when in a liquid medium, is highly sensitive to electromagnetic fields. This property is utilized in Liquid Crystal Diode (Display) televisions.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=O3aITfU_UvE

Tying it Together

The brain produces an electromagnetic field (see also Shumann Resonance). When we have a certain thought or experience there are little EM fields in our brain. This could effect the phase (orientation) of these calcite micro crystals in our pineal gland. Now they are in a unique orientation and when information from the neurons enter the gland they are split and refracted in ways unique to that orientation. The resultant interference patterns (very complex) are picked up by the synaptic ribbons of the pinealocytes and sent back to other parts of the brain where it is processes the uniquely reconstructed information. People interpret things in different ways, right?

This loop could be what makes us able to reflect and think for ourselves. It's a feed back loop.

The thought or experience would have a very subtle, unique electromagnetic signature. This signature could be packaged as a memory in the hippocampus. When it is "unpacked" the micro crystals assume that specific orientation, and the data is "seen" in the minds eye, and, because of the sympathetic "sensory" neural innervations of the pineal gland, the memory is "re-experienced". Certain smells or sounds trigger different memories. Cool to think about anyway.

Holographically, a thought - being an orientation of micro crystals diffracting light in a unique manner - may actually imprint the aether (just like light imprints a film in holography) and it could be stored in the earth's plasmosphere.

Esoterically, this would be the Akashic Records.

These mechanisms could also provide the basis for a scientific explanation of phenomena like telepathy. The phase of certain people's pineal crystals could be sensitive enough to pick up another persons EM field.

There is also something called brain sand in the pineal gland. It's calcification. Could account for degenerative memory (not wholly) with age and you know when people are "stuck in their ways" - well that could be the equivalent of "screen burn". The liquidity of the medium the micro crystals are "suspended" in becomes more and more calcified and less able to shift phases.

See also ---> DNA forms liquid crystal phases

[Jeffrey]

Our Helical Solar System

Very cool (thanks Chris) --->

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jHsq36_NTU

[Jeffrey]

Posted by Vivek (here)
Well, that was quick. I kept running into gyroscopes while searching for information.



Check out this video: http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hows...work-video.htm

There are devices called piezoelectric gyroscopes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrati...tric_gyroscope

Still have to read more to see if it could tie in. If not, it's still really cool, especially how gyroscopes display "anti-gravity" properties while spinning.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UiTUiop9etk

[Jeffrey]

Pendulum Waves

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7_AiV12XBbI

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FuqAHhSRmbY

[Jeffrey]

Water has a memory

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ILSyt_Hhbjg

Related posts:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542946 (particularly the portion about DNA)

and post #127 on this page

[Jeffrey]

Posted by Vivek (here)
Complex Systems Theory

Information Theory

Chaos Theory

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1biuNl90380

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7NCpdLKhY04

Plants and Intelligence (I also think there are distinctions to be made between sentience, intelligence, consciousness, and being self-aware).

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KLhgtqd1M2g

Posted by Vivek (here)
I guess the follow up question to consider is: If this exotic form of life could hypothetically exist, would it be intelligent? Or would it be no more intelligent than any other animal (there are some pretty smart animals).

Check this theory out. There's a biophysicist named Dr. Levengood who studies the formation of crop circles.

Here is a synopsis of Plasma Vortex Theory copied and pasted from http://kentheberling.com/CropCircles...smavortex.html

Atmospheric-associated plasma formations may plausibly originate in regions where t here are clear indications of energy exchange between the ionosphere (60-100 km) and electrical storms in the upper atmosphere (Franz et al. 1990). Currently under consideration are ion plasma vortices which form in unstable regions and act as heat and angular momentum transporters. In fluid dynamics, gases, including air, are considered as having liquid properties (Prandtl and Tietjens 1957). In such a scheme the descent of a vortex through a liquid produces unstable secondary products which form complex, symmetrical patterns such as circles, rings, triangles, double lines and ovals with tubes or 'paths' extending from them (Levenoood 1958). In its descent to the crop surface the shaping of these features of vortex instability would be guided by variations in the Earth's magnetic field (Rossi and Jastrow 1961). At the crop surface the heat, ionization, associated electric fields and angular momentum would be transferred to the living plants. Taken as a whole, ionized air plasmas are electrically neutral, although internally, charge separation takes place and t hey can have high concentrations of positive ions and free electrons (Lehnert 1961), which in contact with plant tissue might produce transient heating and account for a number of the plant transformations.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_L6xGfe_a1s

Orbs = balls of plasma?

Here's a link with more information on Dr. Levengood's research: http://www.ourstrangeplanet.com/the-...als/high-heat/

There's a book by Keven J. Anderson entitled, Hidden Empire. The concept is about exotic life forms (like the ideas discussed above) that never had a need to communicate with the "organics" as the humans are called in the series. Humans only discover these forms of life when they develop the technology to ignite gas-giant planets and turn them into stars. Basically, the humans became enough of a nuisance for the "alien/exotic" life forms environment that they had to step in and establish contact.

See also: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post546240 and https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post546704

Then there's this --->

Posted by Vivek (here)


The following article was copied and pasted from http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/primer/lightning/ltg_tle.html

Transient Luminous Events

Large thunderstorms are capable of producing other kinds of electrical phenomena called transient luminous events (TLE's). The most common TLE's include red sprites, blue jets, and elves.

Red Sprites can appear directly above an active thunderstorm as a large but weak flash. They usually happen at the same time as powerful positive CG lightning strokes. They can extend up to 60 miles from the cloud top. Sprites are mostly red and usually last no more than a few seconds, and their shapes are described as resembling jellyfish, carrots, or columns. Because sprites are not very bright, they can only be seen at night. They are rarely seen with the human eye, so they are most often imaged with highly sensitive cameras.

Blue jets emerge from the top of the thundercloud, but are not directly associated with cloud-to-ground lighting. They extend up in narrow cones fanning out and disappearing at heights of 25-35 miles. Blue jets last a fraction of a second and have been witnessed by pilots.

Elves are rapidly expanding disk-shaped regions of glowing that can be up to 300 miles across. They last less than a thousandth of a second, and occur above areas of active cloud to ground lightning. Scientists believe elves result when an energetic electromagnetic pulse extends up into the ionosphere. Elves were discovered in 1992 by a low-light video camera on the Space Shuttle.



*END ARTICLE EXCERPT*

Here is an article with more information about the Transient Luminous Event phenomena from National Geographic: Huge Mystery Flashes Seen In Outer Atmosphere



Next up - Noctilucent Clouds and Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes.

Posted by Vivek (here)


Excerpts from Wikipedia -

Polar mesospheric summer echoes

Polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE) is the phenomenon of anomalous radar echoes found between 80-90 km in altitude from May through early August in the Arctic, and from November through to February in the Antarctic. These strong radar echoes are associated with the extremely cold temperatures that occur above continental Antarctica during the summer. Rocket and radar measurements indicate that a partial reflection from a multitude of ion layers and constructive interference causes at least some of the PMSE.
Generally PMSE exhibits dramatic variations in height and intensity as well as large variations in Doppler shift. PMSE exhibit strong signal power enhancements of scattering cross section at VHF radar frequencies in the range 50 MHz to 250 MHz, at times even to over 1 GHz, that occur in summer at high latitudes.

PMSE occurs in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, and is sometimes accompanied by noctilucent clouds.

Noctilucent cloud

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the "ragged-edge" of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. Noctilucent roughly means night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can only be observed when the Sun is below the horizon.

They are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently-discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885.

Noctilucent clouds can form only under very restrictive conditions; their occurrence can be used as a sensitive guide to changes in the upper atmosphere. They are a relatively recent classification. The occurrence of noctilucent clouds appears to be increasing in frequency, brightness and extent. It is theorized that this increase is connected to climate change.

*END EXCERPTS*

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=i9_8_2nL6Vo

These next two paragraphs where taken from this study - Dusty plasma in Earth’s mesosphere: formation and evolution of polar mesospheric clouds

One important feature of the polar ionosphere un- der summer conditions is the presence of dust layers (very thin on the atmospheric scale) located at alti- tudes of 80 to 85 km (noctilucent clouds, or NLC) or about 90 km (polar mesospheric summer echoes, or PMSE). NLC consist of submicron-sized parti- cles. They can be seen by the naked eye at sunset, whereas PMSE (apparently consisting of charged nanometer-sized particles) cannot be observed by optical methods and manifest themselves by strong radio reflections observed with radars at frequen- cies between 50 and 1000 MHz. In the literature, NLC and PMSE are frequently grouped together under the common term polar mesospheric clouds (PMC).

Interest to the description of dusty structures in the ionosphere has significantly increased since the 2000s owing to the development of the methods of investigation of dusty plasmas. Furthermore, the great interest to these structures is due to their possible connection with climate change and, in particular, with the Earth global warming process.

*END EXCERPT*

So, now we have dusty plasma here, in our atmosphere. This is called dirty plasma. We know about dusty plasma crystals being able to self organize, replicate, and "survive". We know about the relationship between electromagnetic fields and consciousness. We know about complex systems theory. These are all ingredients for the big question. Is there another form of life living "on" earth in the upper reaches of our atmosphere? Ever heard of sky fish, or rods?

See also this post: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post545789

More to follow in the next post about the Schumann Resonance ...

[Jeffrey]

The following article was copied and pasted from http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/0...ne-exoplanets/

BEGIN EXCERPT

Lightning induced Schumann Resonance may help divine exoplanets



Every second, lightning flashes some 50 times on Earth. Together these discharges coalesce and get stronger, creating electromagnetic waves circling around Earth, to create a beating pulse between the ground and the lower ionosphere, about 60 miles up in the atmosphere. This electromagnetic signature, known as Schumann Resonance, had only been observed from Earth’s surface until, in 2011, scientists discovered they could also detect it using NASA’s Vector Electric Field Instrument (VEFI) aboard the U.S. Air Force’s Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System (C/NOFS) satellite.

In a paper published on May 1 in The Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe how this new technique could be used to study other planets in the solar system as well, and even shed light on how the solar system formed.

“The frequency of Schumann Resonance depends not only on the size of the planet but on what kinds of atoms and molecules exist in the atmosphere because they change the electrical conductivity,” says Fernando Simoes, the first author on this paper and a space scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “So we could use this technique remotely, say from about 600 miles above a planet’s surface, to look at how much water, methane and ammonia is there.”

Water, methane and ammonia are collectively referred to as “volatiles” and the fact that there are different amounts on different planets is a tantalizing clue to the way the planets formed. Determining the composition of a planet’s atmosphere can be done with a handful of other techniques – techniques that are quite accurate, but can only measure specific regions. By looking at the Schumann Resonance, however, one can get information about the global density of, say, water around the entire planet. Simoes and his colleagues believe that combining this technique with other instruments on a spacecraft’s visit to a planet could provide a more accurate inventory of the planet’s atmosphere.

“And if we can get a better sense of the abundance of these kinds of atoms in the outer planets,” says Simoes, “We would know more about the abundance in the original nebula from which the solar system evolved.”

Accurate descriptions of planetary atmospheres might also help shed light on how the evolution of the solar system left the outer planets with a high percentage of volatiles, but not the inner planets.

Detecting Schumann Resonance from above still requires the instruments to be fairly close to the planet, so this technique couldn’t be used to investigate from afar the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system. Instead, scientists imagine something much more dramatic. After a spacecraft is finished observing a planet, it could continue to detect Schumann resonance as it begins its death dive into the atmosphere. During the process of self-destruction, the spacecraft would still provide valuable scientific data until the very last minute of its existence.

END EXCERPT

This looks like an interesting documentary ...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MQ7YUbnxsyg

See also:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post542395

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post545791

[Jeffrey]

Posted by Vivek (here)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wop91_Gvwos

Alright, so in this video Jung gives the statement, "We are the origin of all coming evil."

This is a very powerful statement, because when we break it down we can see that the origin of evil is something internal. There is no supra-physical evil entity with the freewill to rationalize it's future actions in order to maximize it's malevolence.

Don't ask me to prove it because I can't. What I can do though is ask you to entertain some of the following ideas.

Let's look at a thought. There is the tangible brain, made up of fleshy matter; then there is the mind, not so tangible.

When I think of an apple, an MRI could show which area of neurons is firing, but what about the visualization I'm seeing in my head of the apple?

What about our mind's eye, what about our imagination?

Esoterically there are two types of manifestations of energy - the gross and the subtle.

Strictly speaking, the gross is all of the aspects that we can quantitatively measure and physically observe.

The subtle is the energy that isn't manifested in a way we can observe physically. It is fine as opposed to gross.

According to Physics there is observable, visible matter and then there is dark matter (and dark energy). Don't equate dark with 'not light', you could have an x-ray light bulb on in a room and it would still be dark (even though x-rays are a form of light). Physicists call it 'dark' because they can't see it, but they know it's there because they can indirectly measure it by it's effects on familiar matter.



Are you seeing the correlation yet? Esoterica versus Physics?

Gross and subtle, visible and dark.

Brain and mind.

Below is the Freudian model of the psyche.



I initiate a thought. Apple. A gross, physical process takes place consciously. This is the neuronal synapses taking place in the brain - above water in the Freudian model. Also, below water - subconsciously - the intangible subtle thought of the apple emerges (submerged).

Now, according to Jung there are two basic substrata underlying consciousness. These are the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.





In the personal unconscious are complexes. The apple becomes a complex when certain emotions and feelings are tied to it. Take Snow White for example, she has a bad apple complex. Whenever she sees an apple she becomes hysterical. On a personal unconscious level, her experiences have molded and attached certain things to the thought of an apple that when ever she sees a physical apple her thoughts color the reality with her thought complex of an apple.

Then there is the collective unconscious.

Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, coined by Carl Jung. It is proposed to be a part of the unconscious mind, expressed in humanity and all life forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche autonomously organizes experience. Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious, in that the personal unconscious is a personal reservoir of experience unique to each individual, while the collective unconscious collects and organizes those personal experiences in a similar way with each member of a particular species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious

According to Jung, in the collective unconscious there are archetypes.

The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back as far as Plato. In the seventeenth century Sir Thomas Browne and Francis Bacon both employ the word 'archetype' in their writings, Browne in The Garden of Cyrus attempts to depict archetypes in his citing of symbolic proper-names. Jung himself compared archetypes to Platonic ideas. Plato's ideas were pure mental forms that were imprinted in the soul before it was born into the world. They were collective in the sense that they embodied the fundamental characteristics of a thing rather than its specific peculiarities.

The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung's psychological framework, archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex ( e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype). Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archetype

So in our Snow White example, she may also have an evil stepmother complex. This complex along with her bad apple complex may associate themselves with the Mother Archetype. If Snow White ever gets a good mother her complexes may color the experience for her and she would be living in the perverted version of how her mind is interpreting reality.

Let's pretend these archetypes are real (I didn't say alive). They would exist in the field of the physicists dark energy, the yogis subtle realm, and the psychologists subconscious world. They would have to be made up of something, some stuff (i.e. subtle or 'dark'). A construct of this energy - the same energy your thoughts are made up of in your mind.

Esoterically I think this would be in the astral plane.

So there are these archetypes in the astral plane. I'm going to throw in thought-forms, egregores, angels, demons and yes - souls.

Picture all of those I just mentioned floating around as lifeless shells, with programming and no free will. That sounds too mystical, so let's instead say that the shell is wired like an open loop control system. They are wired for a specific function. Similar to Sri Aurobindo's typal beings - they play a part, they serve a purpose.

Picture these lifeless shells as spiritual solenoids. Very advanced solenoids, but unconscious. Solenoids convert energy into motion.

If our conscious thought is a form of energy and we direct it at one of these solenoidal energy constructs then it converts that thought energy into movement - which we subjectively would interpret as will power and through the lens of our personal subconscious we project agenticity onto this now animated shell.

The lifeless rope becomes a dancing snake.

So what about evil? What was Jung saying in the video at the beginning of this post?

There's a saying - guns don't kill people, people kill people. Same concept with this. The potential for evil exists, we make it real - we collapse the wave function.

There is a scene in The Matrix when Neo gets unplugged and wipes the blood from his lip after fighting Morpheus in a simulation program. Neo is puzzled and says, "I thought it wasn't real", to which Morpheus replies, "Your mind makes it real."

It's not a matter of whether the devil or God exists, it's a matter of buying into your beliefs. This means that by giving the energy of your thoughts away you sell yourself out, if you really believe it. This isn't about believing though it's about understanding better and claiming your power back. There is a middle ground without all of the shades of grey.

There is evil in the world, but maybe instead of executions we should be giving out exorcisms and education on these matters.

These are just ideas. Not statements of fact.

Here is Philip Zimbardo on The Psychology of Evil:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg

Cross posting!

EXCERPTS FROM WIKIPEDIA

Bicameralism (the philosophy of "two-chamberedness") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human brain once assumed a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind. The term was coined by psychologist Julian Jaynes, who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind only as recently as 3000 years ago.

Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American psychologist, best known for his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), in which he argued that ancient peoples were not conscious.

Jaynes defines "consciousness" more narrowly than most philosophers. Jaynes' definition of consciousness is synonymous with what philosophers call "meta-consciousness" or "meta-awareness" i.e. awareness of awareness, thoughts about thinking, desires about desires, beliefs about beliefs. This form of reflection is also distinct from the kinds of "deliberations" seen in other higher animals such as crows insofar as Jaynesian consciousness is dependent on linguistic cognition.

Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1000BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas. Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the "dominant" (left) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" (right) hemisphere (particularly the right temporal cortex), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

Jaynes wrote, "[For bicameral humans], volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey." Jaynes argued that the change from bicamerality to consciousness (linguistic meta-cognition) occurred over a period of ten centuries beginning around 1000 BC. The selection pressure for Jaynesian consciousness as a means for cognitive control is due, in part, to chaotic social disorganizations and the development of new methods of behavioral control such as writing.

Sources (with critical responses):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

This makes me think of archetypes, consciousness, dusty plasma (EM fields, Persinger, etc), the evolution of the human brain (also, it's relationship with the subconscious and the astral) and well, this thread.

See also:

Bicameralism and Theology

and

The Hypothetical Evolution of Hallucinatory Self-Regulation

Interesting ...

[Jeffrey]

Upstream in this thread (and on this very page) is information on the possible functions of the pineal gland and the brain.

There are also an article entitled "Holographic Archetypes" by Iona Miller here.

Then there is the post directly before this one (#134).

Okay, now then. I just stumbled upon this. It's called Holonomic Brain Theory, and it's seems extremely relevant (and awesome) to the aforementioned posts.

EXCERPT FROM WIKIPEDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holonomic_brain_theory)

The holonomic brain theory, originated by psychologist Karl Pribram and initially developed in collaboration with physicist David Bohm, is a model for human cognition that is drastically different from conventionally accepted ideas: Pribram and Bohm posit a model of cognitive function as being guided by a matrix of neurological wave interference patterns situated temporally between holographic Gestalt perception and discrete, affective, quantum vectors derived from reward anticipation potentials.

Pribram was originally struck by the similarity of the hologram idea and Bohm's idea of the implicate order in physics, and contacted him for collaboration. In particular, the fact that information about an image point is distributed throughout the hologram, such that each piece of the hologram contains some information about the entire image, seemed suggestive to Pribram about how the brain could encode memories. Pribram was encouraged in this line of speculation by the fact that DeValois and DeValois had found that "the spatial frequency encoding displayed by cells of the visual cortex was best described as a Fourier transform of the input pattern." This holographic idea led to the coining of the term "holonomic" to describe the idea in wider contexts than just holograms.

An analogy of holonomic brain theory is the way sunlight illuminates objects in the visual field of an observer. It matters not how narrow the beam of sunlight is, it always contains all the information of the object, and when conjugated by a lens of a camera or the eyeball, produces the same full three-dimensional image. The Fourier transform formula converts spatial forms to spatial frequencies and vice versa, as all objects are at root vibratory structures. Different types of lenses can alter the frequency nature of information that is transferred. All of the information contained in some region of space can be represented as a hologram, where all parts reflect the whole on a smaller scale. This is referred to as “non-locality.” This can also explain why some children retain normal intelligence when large portions of their brain—in some cases, half—are removed. It can also explain why memory is not lost when the brain is sliced in different cross-sections. Memories, like cognitive neuronal functions—such as those produced by Gabor wavelets—are diffused throughout the brain in holographic form. Memories and intelligence can be non-local, where the holonomic brain theory crops up. Space-time patterns are transformed into spectrum-based waveforms that encode amplitudes, frequencies, as well as the relationships among their phases. The holonomic brain can process this type of cognition because it can process holographic wave-interference patterns and store information in beams of light.

In the lens-defined model of brain function, a sub-definition of the holonomic model, the human sensory system plays the role of a powerful lens, refocusing and redirecting wave patterns which are transmuted into a language of light the brain can understand; the question of whether the brain understands this by itself or that a higher cognitive apparatus (such as the soul) understands this holonomically through the brain is a matter of metaphysical conjecture. More specifically, sensory systems can be singled out to further apprehend the role of the lens-defined model. Visual images projected in the occipital lobe are a result of the tuning of wave frequencies in cells situated in the primary visual cortex. Pribram and his cohorts also evince that such tuning occurs in the somatosensory and motor cortexes. According to Pribram, "What the data suggest is that there exists in the cortex, a multidimensional holographic-like process serving as an attractor or set point toward which muscular contractions operate to achieve a specified environmental result.” Memories, or prior experiences, are stored in holographic-like form and retrieved through cognition—“free will”—in order to activate the transmutation of thought into reality (e.g. “I think, therefore I am” –Descartes).

END EXERPT

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EK3ILQmyIis

This is great!

See also: DNA forms liquid crystal phases

[Jeffrey]

Regarding the Electric Universe, Plasma Cosmology, Thunderbolts of the Gods and the like ...

Glass Castles & Fire from the Sky



See also: The Squatter Man petroglyphs and high energy plasma discharges



A Brief Introduction to Plasma Cosmology

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=E7oPdXN_gt4

The "Thunderbolts of the Gods" documentary is on the second page of this thread (and in my signature for quick access) ...

[Jeffrey]

Part I - Mind, Memory, and Archetype Morphic Resonance and the Collective Unconscious
Psychological Perspectives (Spring 1987), 18(1) 9-25
by Rupert Sheldrake


In this essay, I am going to discuss the concept of collective memory as a background for understanding Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious only makes sense in the context of some notion of collective memory. This then takes us into a very wide-ranging examination of the nature and principle of memory-not just in human beings and not just in the animal kingdom; not even just in the realm of life-but in the universe as a whole. Such an encompassing perspective is part of a very profound paradigm shift that is taking place in science: the shift from the mechanistic to an evolutionary and wholistic world view.

The Cartesian mechanistic view is, in many ways, still the predominant paradigm today, especially in biology and medicine. Ninety percent of biologists would be proud to tell you that they are mechanistic biologists. Although physics has moved beyond the mechanistic view, much of our thinking about physical reality is still shaped by it-even in those of us who would like to believe that we have moved beyond this frame of thought. Therefore, I will briefly examine some of the fundamental assumptions of the mechanistic world view in order to show how it is still deeply embedded in the way that most of us think.

MECHANISM'S ROOTS IN NEO-PLATONIC MYSTICISM
It is interesting that the roots of the 17th-century mechanistic world view can be found in ancient mystical religion. Indeed, the mechanistic view was a synthesis of two traditions of thought, both of which were based on the mystical insight that reality is timeless and changeless. One of these traditions stems from Pythagoras and Plato, who were both fascinated by the eternal truths of mathematics. In the 17th century, this evolved into a view that nature was governed by timeless ideas, proportions, principles, or laws that existed within the mind of God. This world view became dominant and, through philosophers and scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo and Newton, it was incorporated into the foundations of modern physics.

Basically, they expressed the idea that numbers, proportions, equations, and mathematical principles are more real than the physical world we experience. Even today, many mathematicians incline toward this kind of Pythagorean or Platonic mysticism. They think of the physical world as a reification of mathematical principles, as a reflection of eternal numerical mathematical laws. This view is alien to the thinking of most of us, who the physical world as the "real" world and consider mathematical equations a man-made, and possibly inaccurate, description of that "real" world. Nevertheless, this mystical view has evolved into the currently predominant scientific viewpoint that nature is governed by eternal, changeless, immutable, omnipresent laws. The laws of nature are everywhere and always.

MATERIALISM'S ROOTS IN ATOMISM
The second view of changelessness which emerged in the 17th century stemmed from the atomistic tradition of materialism, which addressed an issue which, even then, was already deep-rooted in Greek thought: namely, the concept of a changeless reality. Parmenides, a pre-Socratic philosopher, had the idea that only being is; not-being is not. If something is, it can't change because, in order to change, it would have to combine being and not-being, which was impossible. Therefore,. he concluded that reality is a homogenous, changeless sphere. Unfortunately for Parmenides, the world we experience is not homogenous, changeless, or spherical. In order to preserve his theory, Parmenides claimed that the world we experience is a delusion. This wasn't a very satisfactory solution, and thinkers of the time tried to find a way to resolve this dilemma.

The atomists' solution was to claim that reality consists of a large number of homogenous, changeless spheres (or particles): the atoms. Instead of one big changeless sphere, there are a great many small, changeless spheres moving in the void. The changing appearances of the world could then be explained in terms of the movements, permutations, and combinations of the atoms. This is the original insight of materialism: that reality consisted of eternal atomic matter and the movement of matter.

The combination of this materialistic tradition with the Platonic tradition finally gave rise to the mechanical philosophy which emerged in the 17th century and produced a cosmic dualism that has been with us ever since. On the one hand we have eternal atoms of inert matter; and on the other hand, we have changeless, non-material laws which are more like ideas than physical, material things. In this kind of dualism, both sides are changeless-a belief that does not readily suggest the idea of an evolutionary universe. In fact, physicists have been very adverse to accepting the idea of evolution precisely because it fits so poorly with the notion of eternal matter and changeless laws. In modern physics, matter is now seen as a form of energy; eternal energy has replaced eternal matter, but little else has changed.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY PARADIGM
Nevertheless, the evolutionary paradigm has been gaining ground steadily for the past two centuries. In the 18th century, social, artistic, and scientific developments were generally viewed as a progressive and evolutionary process. The Industrial Revolution made this viewpoint an economic reality in parts of Europe and America. By the early 19th century there were a number of evolutionary philosophies and, by the 1840's, the evolutionary social theory of Marxism had been publicized. In this context of social and cultural evolutionary theory, Darwin proposed his biological theory of evolution which extended the evolutionary vision to the whole of life. Yet this vision was not extended to the entire universe: Darwin and the neo-Darwinians ironically tried to fit the evolution of life on earth into a static universe, or even worse, a universe which was actually thought to be "running down" thermodynamically, heading toward a "heat death."

Everything changed in 1966 when physics finally accepted an evolutionary cosmology in which the universe was no longer eternal. Instead, the universe originated in a Big Bang about 15 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. So we now have an evolutionary physics. But we have to remember that this evolutionary physics is only just over 20 years old, and the implications and consequences of the Big Bang discovery are not yet fully known.

Physics is only just beginning to adapt itself to this new view, which, as we have seen, challenges the most fundamental assumption of physics since the time of Pythagoras: the idea of eternal laws. As soon as we have an evolving universe, we are confronted with the question: what about the eternal laws of nature? Where were the laws of nature before the Big Bang? If the laws of nature existed before the Big Bang, then it's clear that they are nonphysical; in fact, they are metaphysical. This forces out into the open the metaphysical assumption that underlay the idea of eternal laws all along.

LAWS OF NATURE, OR JUST HABITS?
There is an alternative, however. The alternative is that the universe is more like an organism than a machine. The Big Bang recalls the mythic stories of the hatching of the cosmic egg: it grows, and as it grows it undergoes an internal differentiation that is more like a gigantic cosmic embryo than the huge eternal machine of mechanistic theory. With this organic alternative, it might make sense to think of the laws of nature as more like habits; perhaps the laws of nature are habits of the universe, and perhaps the universe has an in-built memory.

About 100 years ago the American philosopher, C. S. Pierce, said that if we took evolution seriously, if we thought of the entire universe as evolving, then we would have to think of the laws of nature as somehow likened to habits. This idea was actually quite common, especially in America; it was espoused by William James and other American philosophers, and was quite widely discussed at the end of the last century. In Germany, Nietzsche went so far as to suggest that the laws of nature underwent natural selection: perhaps there were many laws of nature at the beginning, but only the successful laws survived; therefore, the universe we see has laws which have evolved through natural selection.

Biologists also moved toward interpreting phenomena in terms of habit. The most interesting such theorist was English writer Samuel Butler, whose most important books on this theme were Life and Habit (1878) and Unconscious Memory (1881). Butler contended that the whole of life involved inherent unconscious memory; habits, the instincts of animals, the way in which embryos develop, all reflected a basic principle of inherent memory within life. He even proposed that there must be an inherent memory in atoms, molecules, and crystals. Thus, there was this period of time at the end of the last century when biology was viewed in evolutionary terms. It is only since the 1920's that mechanistic thinking has come to have a stranglehold upon biological thought.

HOW DOES FORM ARISE?
The hypothesis of formative causation, which is the basis of my own work, starts from the problem of biological form. Within biology, there has been a long-standing discussion of how to understand the way embryos and organisms develop. How do plants grow from seeds? How do embryos develop from fertilized eggs? This is a problem for biologists; it's not really a problem for embryos and trees, which just do it! However, biologists rind it difficult to find a causal explanation for form. In physics, in some sense the cause equals the effect. The amount of energy, matter, and momentum before a given change equals the amount afterwards. The cause is contained in the effect and the effect in the cause. However, when we are considering the growth of an oak tree from an acorn, there seems to be no such equivalence of cause and effect in any obvious way.

In the 17th century, the main mechanistic theory of embryology was simply that the oak tree was contained within the acorn: inside each acorn there was a miniature oak tree which inflated as the oak tree grew. This theory was quite widely accepted, and it was the one most consistent with the mechanistic approach, as understood at that time. However, as critics rapidly pointed out, if the oak tree is inflated and that oak tree itself produces acorns, the inflatable oak tree must contain inflatable acorns which contain inflatable oak trees, ad infinitum.

If, on the other hand, more form came from less form (the technical name for which is epigenesis), then where does the more form come from?

How did structures appear that weren't there before? Neither Platonists nor Aristotelians had any problem with this question. The Platonists said that the form comes from the Platonic archetype: if there is an oak tree, then there is an archetypal form of an oak tree, and all actual oak trees are simply reflections of this archetype. Since this archetype is beyond space and time, there is no need to have it embedded in the physical form of the acorn. The Aristotelians said that every species has its own kind of soul, and the soul is the form of the body. The body is in the soul, not the soul in the body. The soul is the form of the body and is around the body and contains the goal of development (which is formally called entelechy). An oak tree soul contains the eventual oak tree.

IS DNA A GENETIC PROGRAM?
However, a mechanistic world view denies animism in all its forms; it denies the existence of the soul and of any non-material organizing principles. Therefore, mechanists have to have some kind of preformationism. At the end of the 19th century, German biologist August Weismann's theory of the germ-plasm revived the idea of preformationism; Weissman's theory placed "determinants," which supposedly gave rise to the organism, inside the embryo. This is the ancestor of the present idea of genetic programming, which constitutes another resurgence of preformationism in a modern guise.

As we will see, this model does not work very well. The genetic program is assumed to be identical with DNA, the genetic chemical. The genetic information is coded in DNA and this code forms the genetic program. But such a leap requires projecting onto DNA properties that it does not actually possess. We know what, DNA does: it codes for proteins; it codes for the sequence of amino acids which form proteins. However, there is a big difference between coding for the structure of a protein-a chemical constituent of the organism-and programming the development of an entire organism. It is the difference between making bricks and building a house out of the bricks. You need the bricks to build the house. If you have defective bricks, the house will be defective. But the plan of the house is not contained in the bricks, or the wires, or the beams, or cement.

Analogously, DNA only codes for the materials from which the body is constructed: the enzymes, the structural proteins, and so forth. There is no evidence that it also codes for the plan, the form, the morphology of the body. To see this more clearly, think of your arms and legs. The form of the arms and legs is different; it's obvious that they have a different shape from each other. Yet the chemicals in the arms and legs are identical. The muscles are the same, the nerve cells are the same, the skin cells are the same, and the DNA is the same in all the cells of the arms and legs. In fact, the DNA is the same in all the cells of the body. DNA alone cannot explain the difference inform; something else is necessary to explain form.

In current mechanistic biology, this is usually assumed to depend on what are called "complex patterns of physio-chemical interaction not yet fully understood." Thus the current mechanistic theory is not an explanation but merely the promise of an explanation. It is what Sir Karl Popper has called a "promissory mechanism"; it involves issuing promissory notes against future explanations that do not yet exist. As such, it is not really an objective argument; it is merely a statement of faith.

WHAT ARE MORPHIC FIELDS?
The question of biological development, of morphogenesis, is actually quite open and is the subject of much debate within biology itself. An alternative to the mechanist/reductionist approach, which has been around since the 1920s, is the idea of morphogenetic (form-shaping) fields. In this model, growing organisms are shaped by fields which are both within and around them, fields which contain, as it were, the form of the organism. This is closer to the Aristotelian tradition than to any of the other traditional approaches. As an oak tree develops, the acorn is associated with an oak tree field, an invisible organizing structure which organizes the oak tree's development; it is like an oak tree mold, within which the developing organism grows.

One fact which led to the development of this theory is the remarkable ability organisms have to repair damage. If you cut an oak tree into little pieces, each little piece, properly treated, can grow into a new tree. So from a tiny fragment, you can get a whole. Machines do not do that; they do not have this power of remaining whole if you remove parts of them. Chop a computer up into small pieces and all you get is a broken computer. It does not regenerate into lots of little computers. But if you chop a flatworm into small pieces, each piece can grow into a new flatworm. Another analogy is a magnet. If you chop a magnet into small pieces, you do have lots of small magnets, each with a complete magnetic field. This is a wholistic property that fields have that mechanical systems do not have unless they are associated with fields. Still another example is the hologram, any part of which contains the whole. A hologram is based on interference patterns within the electromagnetic field. Fields thus have a wholistic property which was very attractive to the biologists who developed this concept of morphogenetic fields.

Each species has its own fields, and within each organism there are fields within fields. Within each of us is the field of the whole body; fields for arms and legs and fields for kidneys and livers; within are fields for the different tissues inside these organs, and then fields for the cells, and fields for the sub-cellular structures, and fields for the molecules, and so on. There is a whole series of fields within fields. The essence of the hypothesis I am proposing is that these fields, which are already accepted quite widely within biology, have a kind of in-built memory derived from previous forms of a similar kind. The liver field is shaped by the forms of previous livers and the oak tree field by the forms and organization of previous oak trees. Through the fields, by a process called morphic resonance, the influence of like upon like, there is a connection among similar fields. That means that the field's structure has a cumulative memory, based on what has happened to the species in the past. This idea applies not only to living organisms but also to protein molecules, crystals, even to atoms. In the realm of crystals, for example, the theory would say that the form a crystal takes depends on its characteristic morphic field. Morphic field is a broader term which includes the fields of both form and behavior; hereafter, I shall use the word morphic field rather than morphogenetic.

MIGRANT BEARDED CHEMISTS
If you make a new compound and crystallize it, there won't be a morphic field for it the first time. Therefore, it may be very difficult to crystallize; you have to wait for a morphic field to emerge. The second time, however, even if you do this somewhere else in the world, there will be an influence from the first crystallization, and it should crystallize a bit more easily. The third time there will be an influence from the first and second, and so on. There will be a cumulative influence from previous crystals, so it should get easier and easier to crystallize the more often you crystallize it. And, in fact, this is exactly what does happen. Synthetic chemists find that new compounds are generally very difficult to crystallize. As time goes on, they generally get easier to crystallize all over the world. The conventional explanation is that this occurs because fragments of previous crystals are carried from laboratory to laboratory on beards of migrant chemists. When there have not been any migrant chemists, it is assumed that the fragments wafted through the atmosphere as microscopic dust particles.

Perhaps migrant chemists do carry fragments on their beards and perhaps dust particles do get blown around in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, if one measures the rate of crystallization under rigorously controlled conditions in sealed vessels in different parts of the world, one should still observe an accelerated rate of crystallization. This experiment has not yet been done. But a related experiment involving chemical reaction rates of new synthetic processes is at present being considered by a major chemical company in Britain because, if these things happen, they have quite important implications for the chemical industry.

A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE
There are quite a number of experiments that can be done in the realm of biological form and the development of form. Correspondingly, the same principles apply to behavior, forms of behavior and patterns of behavior. Consider the hypothesis that if you train rats to learn a new trick in Santa Barbara, then rats all over the world should be able to learn to do the same trick more quickly, just because the rats in Santa Barbara have learned it. This new pattern of learning will be, as it were, in the rat collective memory-in the morphic fields of rats, to which other rats can tune in, just because they are rats and just because they are in similar circumstances, by morphic resonance. This may seem a bit improbable, but either this sort of thing happens or it doesn't.

Among the vast number of papers in the archives of experiments on rat psychology, there are a number of examples of experiments in which people have actually monitored rates of learning over time and discovered mysterious increases. In my book, A New Science of Life, I describe one such series of experiments which extended over a 50-year period. Begun at Harvard and then carried on in Scotland and Australia, the experiment demonstrated that rats increased their rate of learning more than tenfold. This was a huge effect-not some marginal statistically significant result. This improved rate of learning in identical learning situations occurred in these three separate locations and in all rats of the breed, not just in rats descended from trained parents.

There are other examples of the spontaneous spread of new habits in animals and birds which provide at least circumstantial evidence for the theory of morphic resonance. The best documented of these is the behavior of bluetits, a rather small bird with a blue head, that is common throughout Britain. Fresh milk is still delivered to the door each morning in Britain. Until about the 1950s, the caps on the milk bottles were made of cardboard. In 1921 in Southampton, a strange phenomenon was observed. When people came out in the morning to get their milk bottles, they found little shreds of cardboard all around the bottom of the bottle, and the cream from the top of the bottle had disappeared. Close observation revealed that this was being done by bluetits, who sat on top of the bottle, pulled off the cardboard with their beaks, and then drank the cream. Several tragic cases were found in which bluetits were discovered drowned head first in the milk!

This incident caused considerable interest; then the event turned up somewhere else in Britain, about 50 miles away, and then somewhere about 100 miles away. Whenever the bluetit phenomenon turned up, it started spreading locally, presumably by imitation. However, bluetits are very home-loving creatures, and they don't normally travel more than four or five miles. Therefore, the dissemination of the behavior over large distances could only be accounted for in terms of an independent discovery of the habit. The bluetit habit was mapped throughout Britain until 1947, by which time it had become more or less universal. The people who did the study came to the conclusion that it must have been "invented" independently at least 50 times. Moreover, the rate of spread of the habit accelerated as time went on. In other parts of Europe where milk bottles are delivered to doorsteps, such as Scandinavia and Holland, the habit also cropped up during the 1930s and spread in a similar manner. Here is an example of a pattern of behavior which was spread in a way which seemed to speed up with time, and which might provide an example of morphic resonance.

But there is still stronger evidence for morphic resonance. Because of the German occupation of Holland, milk delivery ceased during 1939-40. Milk deliveries did not resume until 1948. Since bluetits usually live only two to three years, there probably were no bluetits alive in 1948 who had been alive when milk was last delivered. Yet when milk deliveries resumed in 1948, the opening of milk bottles by bluetits sprang up rapidly in quite separate places in Holland and spread extremely rapidly until, within a year or two, it was once again universal. The behavior spread much more rapidly and cropped up independently much more frequently the second time round than the first time. This example demonstrates the evolutionary spread of a new habit which is probably not genetic but rather depends on a kind of collective memory due to morphic resonance.

I am suggesting that heredity depends not only on DNA, which enables organisms to build the right chemical building blocks-the proteins-but also on morphic resonance. Heredity thus has two aspects: one a genetic heredity, which accounts for the inheritance of proteins through DNA's control of protein synthesis; the second a form of heredity based on morphic fields and morphic resonance, which is nongenetic and which is inherited directly from past members of the species. This latter form of heredity deals with the organization of form and behavior.

THE ALLEGORY OF THE TELEVISION SET
The differences and connections between these two forms of heredity become easier to understand if we consider an analogy to television. Think of the pictures on the screen as the form that we are interested in. If you didn't know how the form arose, the most obvious explanation would be that there were little people inside the set whose shadows you were seeing on the screen. Children sometimes think in this manner. If you take the back off the set, however, and look inside, you find that there are no little people. Then you might get more subtle and speculate that the little people are microscopic and are actually inside the wires of the TV set. But if you look at the wires through a microscope, you can't find any little people there either.

You might get still more subtle and propose that the little people on the screen actually arise through "complex interactions among the parts of the set which are not yet fully understood." You might think this theory was proved if you chopped out a few transistors from the set. The people would disappear. If you put the transistors back, they would reappear. This might provide convincing evidence that they arose from within the set entirely on the basis of internal interaction.

Suppose that someone suggested that the pictures of little people come from outside the set, and the set picks up the pictures as a result of invisible vibrations to which the set is attuned. This would probably sound like a very occult and mystical explanation. You might deny that anything is coming into the set. You could even "prove it" by weighing the set switched off and switched on; it would weigh the same. Therefore, you could conclude that nothing is coming into the set.

I think that is the position of modern biology, trying to explain everything in terms of what happens inside. The more explanations for form are looked for inside, the more elusive the explanations prove to be, and the more they are ascribed to ever more subtle and complex interactions, which always elude investigation. As I am suggesting, the forms and patterns of behavior are actually being tuned into by invisible connections arising outside the organism. The development of form is a result of both the internal organization of the organism and the interaction of the morphic fields to which it is tuned.

Genetic mutations can affect this development. Again think of the TV set. If we mutate a transistor or a condenser inside the set, you may get distorted pictures or sound. But this does not prove that the pictures and sound are programmed by these components. Nor does it prove that form and behavior are programmed by genes, if we find there are alterations in form and behavior as a result of genetic mutation.

There is another kind of mutation which is particularly interesting. Imagine a mutation in the tuning circuit of your set, such that it alters the resonant frequency of the tuning circuit. Tuning your TV depends on a resonant phenomenon; the tuner resonates at the same frequency as the frequency of the signal transmitted by the different stations. Thus tuning dials are measured in hertz, which is a measure of frequency. Imagine a mutation in the tuning system such that you tune to one channel and a different channel actually appears. You might trace this back to a single condenser or a single resistor which had undergone a mutation. But it would not be valid to conclude that the new programs you are seeing, the different people, the different films and advertisements, are programmed inside the component that has changed. Nor does it prove that form and behavior are programmed in the DNA when genetic mutations lead to changes in form and behavior. The usual assumption is that if you can show something alters as a result of a mutation, then that must be programmed by, or controlled by, or determined by, the gene. I hope this TV analogy makes it clear that that is not the only conclusion. It could be that it is simply affecting the tuning system.

A NEW THEORY OF EVOLUTION
A great deal of work is being done in contemporary biological research on such "tuning" mutations (formally called homoeotic mutations). The animal most used in the investigations is Drosophila, the fruitfly. A whole range of these mutations have been found which produce various monstrosities. One kind, called antennapedia, leads to the antennae being transformed into legs. The unfortunate flies, which contain just one altered gene, produce legs instead of antennae growing out of their heads. There is another mutation which leads to the second of the three pairs of legs in the Drosophila being transformed into antennae. Normally flies have one pair of wings and, on the segment behind the wings, are small balancing organs called halteres. Still another mutation leads to the transformation of the segment normally bearing the halteres into a duplicate of the first segment, so that these flies have four wings instead of two. These are called bithorax mutants.

All of these mutations depend on single genes. I propose that somehow these single gene mutations are changing the tuning of a part of the embryonic tissue, such that it tunes into a different morphic field than it normally does, and so a different set of structures arise, just like tuning into a different channel on TV.

One can see from these analogies how both genetics and morphic resonance are involved in heredity. Of course, a new theory of heredity leads to a new theory of evolution. Present-day evolutionary theory is based on the assumption that virtually all heredity is genetic. Sociobiology and neo-Darwinism in all their various forms are based on gene selection, gene frequencies, and so forth. The theory of morphic resonance leads to a much broader view which allows one of the great heresies of biology once more to be taken seriously: namely, the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Behaviors which organisms learn, or forms which they develop, can be inherited by others even if they are not descended from the original organisms-by morphic resonance.

A NEW CONCEPT OF MEMORY
When we consider memory, this hypothesis leads to a very different approach from the traditional one. The key concept of morphic resonance is that similar things influence similar things across both space and time. The amount of influence depends on the degree of similarity. Most organisms are more similar to themselves in the past than they are to any other organism. I am more like me five minutes ago than I am like any of you; all of us are more like ourselves in the past than like anyone else. The same is true of any organism. This self-resonance with past states of the same organism in the realm of form helps to stabilize the morphogenetic fields, to stabilize the form of the organism, even though the chemical constituents in the cells are turning over and changing. Habitual patterns of behavior are also tuned into by the self-resonance process. If I start riding a bicycle, for example, the pattern of activity of my nervous system and my muscles, in response to balancing on the bicycle, immediately tunes me in by similarity to all the previous occasions on which I have ridden a bicycle. The experience of bicycle riding is given by cumulative morphic resonance to all those past occasions. It is not a verbal or intellectual memory; it is a body memory of riding a bicycle.

This would also apply to my memory of actual events: what I did yesterday in Los Angeles or last year in England. When, I think of these particular events, I am tuning into the occasions on which these events happened. There is a direct causal connection through a tuning process. If this hypothesis is correct, it is not necessary to assume that memories are stored inside the brain.

THE MYSTERY OF MIND
All of us have been brought up on the idea that memories are stored in the brain; we use the word brain interchangeably with mind or memory. I am suggesting that the brain is more like a tuning system than a memory storage device. One of the main arguments for the localization of memory in the brain is the fact that certain kinds of brain damage can lead to loss of memory. If the brain is damaged in a car accident and someone loses memory, then the obvious assumption is that memory tissue must have been destroyed. But this is not necessarily so.

Consider the TV analogy again. If I damaged your TV set so that you were unable to receive certain channels, or if I made the TV set aphasic by destroying the part of it concerned with the production of sound so that you could still get the pictures but could not get the sound, this would not prove that the sound or the pictures were stored inside the TV set. It would merely show that I had affected the tuning system so you could not pick up the correct signal any longer. No more does memory loss due to brain damage prove that memory is stored inside the brain. In fact, most memory loss is temporary: amnesia following concussion, for example, is often temporary. This recovery of memory is very difficult to explain in terms of conventional theories: if the memories have been destroyed because the memory tissue has been destroyed, they ought not to come back again; yet they often do.

Another argument for the localization of memory inside the brain is suggested by the experiments on electrical stimulation of the brain by Wilder Penfield and others. Penfield stimulated the temporal lobes of the brains of epileptic patients and found that some of these stimuli could elicit vivid responses, which the patients interpreted as memories of things they had done in the past. Penfield assumed that he was actually stimulating memories which were stored in the cortex. Again returning to the TV analogy, if I stimulated the tuning circuit of your TV set and it jumped onto another channel, this wouldn't prove the information was stored inside the tuning circuit. It is interesting that, in his last book, The Mystery of the Mind, Penfield himself abandoned the idea that the experiments proved that memory was inside the brain. He came to the conclusion that memory was not stored inside the cortex at all.

There have been many attempts to locate memory traces within the brain, the best known of which were by Karl Lashley, the great American neurophysiologist. He trained rats to learn tricks, then chopped bits of their brains out to determine whether the rats could still do the tricks. To his amazement, he found that he could remove over fifty percent of the brain-any 50%-and there would be virtually no effect on the retention of this learning. When he removed all the brain, the rats could no longer perform the tricks, so he concluded that the brain was necessary in some way to the performance of the task-which is hardly a very surprising conclusion. What was surprising was how much of the brain he could remove without affecting the memory.

Similar results have been found by other investigators, even with invertebrates such as the octopus. This led one experimenter to speculate that memory was both everywhere and nowhere in particular. Lashley himself concluded that memories are stored in a distributed manner throughout the brain, since he could not find the memory traces which classical theory required. His student, Karl Pribram, extended this idea with the holographic theory of memory storage: memory is like a holographic image, stored as an interference pattern throughout the brain.

What Lashley and Pribram (at least in some of his writing) do not seem to have considered is the possibility that memories may not be stored inside the brain at all. The idea that they are not stored inside the brain is more consistent with the available data than either the conventional theories or the holographic theory. Many difficulties have arisen in trying to localize memory storage in the brain, in part because the brain is much more dynamic than previously thought. If the brain is to serve as a memory storehouse, then the storage system would have to remain stable; yet it is now known that nerve cells turn over much more rapidly than was previously thought. All the chemicals in synapses and nerve structures and molecules are turning over and changing all the time. With a very dynamic brain, it is difficult to see how memories are stored.

There is also a logical problem about conventional theories of memory storage, which various philosophers have pointed out. All conventional theories assume that memories are somehow coded and located in a memory store in the brain. When they are needed they are recovered by a retrieval system. This is called the coding, storage, and retrieval model. However, for a retrieval system to retrieve anything, it has to know what it wants to retrieve; a memory retrieval system has to know what memory it is looking for. It thus must be able to recognize the memory that it is trying to retrieve. In order to recognize it, the retrieval system itself must have some kind of memory. Therefore, the retrieval system must have a sub-retrieval system to retrieve its memories from its store. This leads to an infinite regress. Several philosophers argue that this is a fatal, logical flaw in any conventional theory of memory storage. However, on the whole, memory theoreticians are not very interested in what philosophers say, so they do not bother to reply to this argument. But it does seem to me quite a powerful one.

In considering the morphic resonance theory of memory, we might ask: if we tune into our own memories, then why don't we tune into other people's as well? I think we do, and the whole basis of the approach I am suggesting is that there is a collective memory to which we are all tuned which forms a background against which our own experience develops and against which our own individual memories develop. This concept is very similar to the notion of the collective unconscious.

Jung thought of the collective unconscious as a collective memory, the collective memory of humanity. He thought that people would be more tuned into members of their own family and race and social and cultural group, but that nevertheless there would be a background resonance from all humanity: a pooled or averaged experience of basic things that all people experience (e.g., maternal behavior and various social patterns and structures of experience and thought). It would not be a memory from particular persons in the past so much as an average of the basic forms of memory structures; these are the archetypes. Jung's notion of the collective unconscious makes extremely good sense in the context of the general approach that I am putting forward. Morphic resonance theory would lead to a radical reaffirmation of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.

It needs reaffirmation because the current mechanistic context of conventional biology, medicine, and psychology denies that there can be any such thing as the collective unconscious; the concept of a collective memory of a race or species has been excluded as even a theoretical possibility. You cannot have any inheritance of acquired characteristics according to conventional theory; you can only have an inheritance of genetic mutations. Under the premises of conventional biology, there would be no way that the experiences and myths of, for example, African tribes, would have any influence on the dreams of someone in Switzerland of non-African descent, which is the sort of thing Jung thought did happen. That is quite impossible from the conventional point of view, which is why most biologists and others within mainstream science do not take the idea of the collective unconscious seriously. It is considered a flaky, fringe idea that may have some poetic value as a kind of metaphor, but has no relevance to proper science because it is a completely untenable concept from the point of view of normal biology.

The approach I am putting forward is very similar to Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. The main difference is that Jung's idea was applied primarily to human experience and human collective memory. What I am suggesting is that a very similar principle operates throughout the entire universe, not just in human beings. If the kind of radical paradigm shift I am talking about goes on within biology-if the hypothesis of morphic resonance is even approximately correct-then Jung's idea of the collective unconscious would become a mainstream idea: Morphogenic fields and the concept of the collective unconscious would completely change the context of modern psychology.

Source: http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Pa...ic1_paper.html

EXCERPTS FROM WIKIPEDIA

Morphic field

"Morphic field" is a term introduced by Sheldrake. He proposes that there is a field within and around a "morphic unit" which organizes its characteristic structure and pattern of activity. According to Sheldrake, the "morphic field" underlies the formation and behaviour of "holons" and "morphic units", and can be set up by the repetition of similar acts or thoughts. The hypothesis is that a particular form belonging to a certain group, which has already established its (collective) "morphic field", will tune into that "morphic field". The particular form will read the collective information through the process of "morphic resonance", using it to guide its own development. This development of the particular form will then provide, again through "morphic resonance", a feedback to the "morphic field" of that group, thus strengthening it with its own experience, resulting in new information being added (i.e. stored in the database). Sheldrake regards the "morphic fields" as a universal database for both organic (genetic) and abstract (mental) forms.

That a mode of transmission of shared informational patterns and archetypes might exist did gain some tacit acceptance when it was proposed as the theory of the collective unconscious by renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. According to Sheldrake, the theory of "morphic fields" might provide an explanation for Jung's concept as well. Also, he agrees that the concept of akashic records, term from Vedas representing the "library" of all the experiences and memories of human minds (souls) through their physical lifetime, can be related to "morphic fields", since one's past (an akashic record) is a mental form, consisting of thoughts as simpler mental forms (all processed by the same brain), and a group of similar or related mental forms also have their associated (collective) "morphic field". (Sheldrake's view on memory-traces is that they are non-local, and not located in the brain.)

Morphic resonance

Essential to Sheldrake's model is the hypothesis of morphic resonance. This is a feedback mechanism between the field and the corresponding forms of morphic units. The greater the degree of similarity, the greater the resonance, leading to habituation or persistence of particular forms. So, the existence of a morphic field makes the existence of a new similar form easier.

Sheldrake proposes that the process of morphic resonance leads to stable morphic fields, which are significantly easier to tune into. He suggests that this is the means by which simpler organic forms synergetically self-organize into more complex ones, and that this model allows a different explanation for the process of evolution itself, as an addition to Darwin's evolutionary processes of selection and variation.

Morphogenetic field

For the concept in developmental biology, see Morphogenetic field.

Morphogenetic fields are defined by Sheldrake as the subset of morphic fields which influence, and are influenced by living things.

The term [morphic fields] is more general in its meaning than morphogenetic fields, and includes other kinds of organizing fields in addition to those of morphogenesis; the organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.
—Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past (Chapter 6, page 112)

END EXCERPTS

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

Related posts: nearly all of page 7

[Jeffrey]

Rupert Sheldrake - The Morphogenetic Universe

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=2Dm8-OpO9oQ

[Jeffrey]

Magnetic Crystals, Guides for Animals, Found in Humans
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE

An intriguing claim that human brain cells possess crystals of a highly magnetic mineral known as magnetite was described today by Dr. Joseph Kirschvink, a professor at the California Institute of Technology.

The 38-year-old geobiologist said he believed that magnetite crystals enabled animals from bees to whales to navigate by using the earth's magnetic field. He said he doubted that they supported any sensory capability in humans, although he suspected that they might account for the possible influence of strong electromagnetic fields on human health.

Other scientists are likely to withhold belief until Dr. Kirschvink's finding has been confirmed in independent laboratories. His article describing his work was rejected by three leading research journals: Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Dr. Kirschvink says it has been accepted, however, by another journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and will appear in a future issue. Dr. Kirschvink elaborated on his results today at a news conference at Caltech.

That magnetite, one of the hardest metals on earth, is synthesized by the human brain "is sure to astound most scientists," Dr. Kirschvink said, but what it is doing there is a "total mystery." It might be a vestige from evolution and serve no purpose, he said. Or it could play a role in biology, explaining why electromagnetic fields have been associated with brain cancer and leukemia and why certain odd blips, called spin echoes, show up on magnetic resonance images of the brain.

Dr. Kirschvink is at present a lonely voice because of the rarity of his research field. He has built what he says is the only laboratory in the world dedicated to finding biomagnetic materials in animal tissue. It is a tiny clean room, shielded from the earth's magnetic field by six tons of transformer steel, in the basement of the geology building at Caltech. It houses one of the world's most powerful superconducting magnetometers, an instrument for measuring the faintest magnetic moments in rocks -- or animals.

In this laboratory, Dr. Kirschvink has already measured and extracted microscopic magnetic crystals from bacteria, salmon and tuna. He could not get financing to try the same in homing pigeons, turtles, monarch butterflies, shrimps, barnacles, bats and rodents.

The National Institutes of Health and other agencies that finance research have balked at supporting the work, he said, "because they can't understand what a geologist is doing fooling around with human brain tissue."

To be rejected by financing agencies and leading journals is the common fate of scientists with profound but radically new insights, as well as of those who are merely wrong. It is too early to tell which category Dr. Kirschvink's work falls into. But within the small group of perhaps a dozen researchers worldwide who study biomagnetism, he is highly regarded. Opinions on Researcher:

"Joe is the only person who has tried to carefully isolate these materials," said Richard Frankel, a leading expert on magnetic bacteria who is a physics professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. "If something is in low concentrations in tissue, you have to be ultra careful about contamination. He goes the extra mile."

Kenneth H. Nealson, an expert on biomineralization who is a professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, said: "Joe is a young, ambitious, very good person at Caltech who is at the top of his field. But whenever you put out a new hypothesis, you step on important toes. This makes it hard to get funding when money is tight."

Dr. Mitchell Sogin of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, a leading authority on molecular evolution, about which Dr. Kirschvink has published several papers, said, "I've never heard of the guy."

Lynn Margulis, a leading authority on the evolution of life who is a professor of botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said: "Kirschvink is a very clever researcher who tends to be in too much of hurry, and therefore requires other scientists to follow up on his pioneering work." Origin of Concept

Dr. Kirschvink's interest in biomagnetism began 20 years ago when he was an undergraduate at Caltech with a double major in biology and geology. In geology class, he was taught that magnetite is formed by geologic processes. One day his adviser, a biologist, handed him a primitive mollusk whose teeth contained large amounts of biologically formed magnetite. "The entire tongue plate will stick to an ordinary hand magnet," Dr. Kirschvink said. "It was the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen."

Soon afterward scientists stumbled on a family of bacteria that contain magnetosomes -- chains of biological bar magnets wrapped in a membrane. The bacteria use the earth's magnetic field to move up and down in the mud, searching for the right level of oxygen, Dr. Kirschvink said. Bacteria in the Northern Hemisphere are north-seeking. In the Southern Hemisphere, they are south-seeking. At the Equator, both kinds exist. [How cool is that? -Vivek]

The young student was hooked. Animals have specialized cells for taste, smell, touch, vision and hearing, Dr. Kirschvink said. "I couldn't help wondering, do some also have a magnetic sensory system?" he said.

In the early 1980's, "researchers began throwing their favorite pets into magnetic detectors to see if they had magnetic properties," Dr. Kirschvink said, but the experiments were usually contaminated by magnetically charged dust. People could not prove that the extremely faint magnetic signals they were measuring came from their animals, he said.

After completing a Ph.D. in geology at Princeton University in 1981, Dr. Kirschvink returned to Caltech as an assistant professor and built his special laboratory for studying biomagnetism.

He developed the hypothesis that whales navigate using a magnetic sensory system, following the dips, angles and intensity of geomagnetic fields on the ocean floor as roadmaps. Whales beach themselves at geomagnetic anomalies, he asserted, where fields shift or drop off suddenly.

He and his wife trained honeybees to exit a maze following a north or south compass, then reversed the magnetic orientation in the bees' magnetite crystals with a strong magnetic field. Afterward, the bees flew in the opposite directions to those they had been trained to fly.

But it was a health controversy that drove his research toward exploration of the human brain. Epidemiological studies over the last decade have suggested a possible but inconclusive link between diseases like brain cancer and childhood leukemia and electromagnetic fields from power lines and certain household appliances.

Physicists rejected the idea that weak electromagnetic fields might induce any biological effect, saying the fields would slip and slide around cells like syrup poured on a balloon. Studies of Human Brains:

Dr. Kirschvink supposed this might not be the case if by any chance humans possessed substances capable of responding to magnetic fields. He obtained fresh brain tissue from seven corpses and dissected clumps of cells using Teflon-coated instruments.

Some samples were frozen and put in the magnetometer, which found unmistakable evidence of a ferromagnetic mineral -- compounds that interact strongly with magnetic fields. None of the body's iron, which is bound up in biological molecules, is ferromagnetic, Dr. Kirschvink said.

Other samples were dissolved and put into special test tubes fitted with magnets. After a week, magnetite crystals stuck to the glass.

Magnetite, in minuscule amounts, was found all over the brain, said Dr. Kirschvink and his co-authors, his wife, Atsuko Kobayashi-Kirschvink, and Dr. Barbara J. Woodford of the University of Southern California. Most regions of the brain had five million magnetite crystals per gram of tissue. The tough membrane that covers the brain had 100 million crystals per gram. Each human brain on average contains seven billion particles of magnetite, weighing a total of one-millionth of an ounce.

Half of the brain tissue samples came from patients with Alzheimer's disease and half did not; Dr. Kirschvink believes these circumstances had no effect on his findings.

Magnetite interacts over a million times more strongly with external magnetic fields than any other biological material, Dr. Kirschvink said, including the iron in red blood cells. If only one cell in a million contains magnetite, he said, magnetic fields could exert an effect on the tissue.

For instance, if the magnetite were coupled to channels that let substances pass through cell membranes and the crystals began to oscillate during exposure to an external magnetic field, Dr. Kirschvink said, one could imagine all sorts of biological effects, including the promotion of cancer.

"It's very interesting work," said Dr. Charles Rafferty, who is in charge of studying health effects of magnetic fields at the Electric Power Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. "It does provide a possible link for biological effects."

The presence of magnetite in the human brain might also account for the unexplained blips seen on MRI scans.

It is tempting to invoke magnetite crystals to explain many other mysteries of the human brain, Dr. Kirschvink said. First of all, do people with a good sense of direction possess a magnetic sensory system? It could even be asked if people who claim to have extrasensory perception or the ability to find water with a divining rod have a better than average magnetic sense.

But every carefully controlled experiment designed to prove that such abilities exist has failed dismally, Dr. Kirschvink said. There is not a shred of evidence so far that these microscopic magnets mediate any sensory capability in humans, he said. His work, if confirmed, is likely to stimulate a new round of research into these old questions.

Meanwhile, Dr. Kirschvink is exploring an older question -- the origin of the eukaryotes. This is the name given to all cells that have visible nuclei, and includes those of all higher forms of life on earth from fungi to humans.

Dr. Kirschvink believes the first eukaryotic cell may have been a bacterium that had evolved the trick of storing iron in the form of magnetite crystals. When the earth developed its magnetic field about 2.8 billion years ago, the magnetite-storing bacteria were able to exploit their sensitivity to it, using the field to move up and down in the mud to find the right oxygen gradient. The magnetic bacteria were large enough to engulf and permanently incorporate the other, once free-living bacteria that now serve as the chloroplasts and mitochondria of eukaryotic cells. They also probably possessed some kind of internal skeleton to hold the magnetite crystals, just as eukaryotes have internal scaffolding to support the mitochondria and other organelles.

The fossil record indicates that the magnetic bacteria lived for at least 400 million years before the first eukaryotic cells, Dr. Kirschvink said, making them suitable candidates as precursors.

Dr. Kirschvink has published this idea in several geological journals, but these are not much read by biologists. Experts in evolution are not unanimously enthusiastic about his hypothesis.

"It's a just-so story," Dr. Frankel said. There's no evidence that magnetic bacteria can swallow other bacteria, he said. "It's not one of Joe's finer pieces of work." Dr. Margulis says the idea makes sense in principle but is weak is detail.

The identity of the first eukaryotic cell is hotly contested, said Dr. Sogin of Woods Hole. "It would have to be something very special," he said. "There is no consensus on what it was."

"My ideas can be tested," Dr. Kirschvink said. If the biochemical pathway for making magnetite is the same in bacteria, bees, birds and humans, he said, it will prove an evolutionary link. If the proteins that envelop magnetosomes are the same as those that make scaffolding in animal cells and if magnetic bacteria older than 2.8 billion years cannot be found in the fossil record, the link would be stronger.

"If I'm right," Dr. Kirschvink said, "higher life will not evolve on planets without a steady geomagnetic field."

With so many ideas to test, it is a good thing Dr. Kirschvink is relatively young. He works closely with his wife, an engineer who shares his passion for biomagnetism. When their two sons were born, the couple looked for distinctive Japanese names. The eldest is called Jiseki, which means magnet stone, and the youngest Koseki, or mineral stone.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/12/sc...ted=all&src=pm

More information here: http://web.gps.caltech.edu/~jkirschv...vinkBEMS92.pdf

[Jeffrey]

The following article was copied and pasted from www.universetoday.com

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Listen to the Music of the Spheres
by NICHOLOS WETHINGTON on JANUARY 20, 2010

Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician and philosopher, is credited with saying, “There is geometry in the humming of the strings. There is music in the spacing of the spheres.” This idea of the “Music of the Spheres” has endured over the centuries, ultimately informing how Kepler visualized the movements of the planets, which led him to formulate his laws of planetary motion. The notion that the stars, planets and galaxies resonate with a mystical symphony is a rather appealing one.

If you’ve ever been curious about how this music would sound, I’d invite you to watch and listen to The Wheel of Stars. Jim Bumgardner, a software engineer specializing in visualizations who consults out of his home in Los Angeles, created this visualizer that utilizes data from the Hipparcos mission. The program puts the stars in the sky to an ethereal music of their own making.

As he describes on the site:

To make this, I downloaded public data from Hipparcos, a satellite launched by the European Space Agency in 1989 that accurately measured over a hundred thousand stars. The data I downloaded contains position, parallax, magnitude, and color information, among other things.

I used this information to plot the brightest stars, and cause them to revolve about Polaris (the North Star) very slowly, as the stars appear to do. Like the night sky, this is a sidereal time clock — it takes nearly 24 hours for the stars to fully rotate. You’ll notice some familiar constellations, such as the Big Dipper in there. As the stars cross zero and 180 degrees, indicated by the center line, the clock plays an individual note, or chime for each star. The pitch of the chime is based on the star’s BV measurement (which roughly corresponds to color or temperature). The volume is based on the star’s magnitude, or apparent brightness, and the stereo panning is based on the position on the screen (use headphones to hear it better).

Other projects that Bumgardner has developed include a music box that generates sound using trigonometry and harmonics and a camera that renders everything in ASCII code (yes, of course you can make yourself look like you’re in The Matrix). He also designed Coverpop, a program to which a user can give criteria that it uses to collects images and make a mosaic. All of these programs are more easily viewed and listened to than described, and are available on the Wheel of Stars site.

I interviewed Bumgardner about The Wheel of Stars via email. Here is what he had to say about the making of what he calls a “software toy”.

UT: What gave you the idea to make the Wheel of Stars?

JB: I’ve been interested in methods of producing automatic music since I studied music composition at CalArts. Among my interests are self-playing instruments like wind chimes, aeolian harps, player pianos and music boxes. A previous project which led directly to this one was my Whitney Music Box, based on the visual motion graphics of John Whitney.

So, already having the basic idea of using mathematical and random sources to trigger notes, in the style of a disc music box, it occurred to me that the stars themselves might make an interesting generator, and such a music box would make a very literal kind of “music of the spheres.”

UT: After looking at some of your other projects, I’m hard pressed as to exactly what to call the “Wheel of Stars.” It’s a toy, but more. It’s not really “just a software program,” or music visualizer, either. So, what do you call it?

JB: It’s a lot of things: It’s an aleatoric music composition which uses astronomical data for the “chance” element. It’s a software toy. It’s a work of art. It’s a musical clock. I think “software toy” is probably the best description from the above — a description I’ve applied to a lot of my projects. We hesitate to use the word “toy”, because we fear it belittles the project, but I think it imparts a healthy amount of playfulness in the description, and ultimately, these are works of play for me. I wrote a blog post which addresses this issue to some extent.

UT: I have to admit thinking, “This sounds what I have always imagined the “Music of the Spheres” to sound like.” You mention this in your description of the Wheel. This is probably a question you’ve had before, but I have to ask: was there any sort of influence from that age-old concept of the “Music of the Spheres” for the Wheel of Stars?

JB: Absolutely. My “Whitney Music Box” is another kind of music of the spheres, based as it is on basic trigonometry and harmonics. A lot of my work is concerned with circles, and I imagine I could go on making other kinds of “Music of the Spheres” for a long time to come.

I should also mention that the ethereal quality of the music is very much affected by my choice of audio sample. If I had used a Banjo sound, the effect would be quite different. I chose that particular sound because of my own preconceived notions of what a star should sound like. Probably a similar mental process to what Alexander Courage went through when he chose the opening notes for Star Trek.

UT: What would you like viewers/listeners to take away from the program/toy/visualizer?

JB: A little wonderment. A little more interest in the stars. Maybe do some research on Wikipedia, or pick up a good starter book like H.A. Rey’s “The Stars”. A very few listeners might be tempted to teach themselves how to program computers and make their own software toys. The “Processing” language is good place to start (processing.org).

UT: Have you had many planetariums or schools contact you to get it incorporated into their shows or curriculum?

JB: A couple nibbles, but nothing serious yet. I’d love to set up a large scale version of this piece — I think it would have a significant impact on the viewer.

UT: Did you design it with schools/planetariums in mind, or was it more for the pleasure of doing so?

JB: I made the piece because I was curious what it would sound like. Would it be totally random? Would there be hidden melodies or a secret message hidden in the stellar arrangement? Ultimately, I think I found a little bit of both. It’s quite different in character from what I would have gotten if the points where laid out with a number generator (and of course my choice of parameter mapping has a big effect on the outcome), but it’s not exactly morse code.

I also wanted to share it with people. The first version I made, in Processing, wasn’t easily sharable, so I ported it to Flash, so I could put it on the website.

UT: Any screen saver software planned for the future?

JB: I’ve prepared a stand-alone version which I email to folks upon request. It can be converted to a screen-saver with the right software. In my opinion, screensavers aren’t ideal for this kindof piece, because you don’t want your computer emitting sounds when you walk away (and can’t turn it off). But I think a stand-alone program that doesn’t require internet access, and which has higher quality sounds would be great.

UT: Do you plan to make any other astronomy-related programs like the Wheel of Stars?

JB: Yes. It occurs to me that a series of (8 or 9) short pieces based on astronomical data about the planets (their motions, and composition) might be interesting. However, at the moment, I’m pretty busy with other things.

UT: What other projects are you working on, astronomy-related or otherwise? I’ll cover the ASCII cam, Whitney Music Box and Coverpop and others in the article.

JB: I’m working on facilitating a showing of James Whitney’s extraordinary films “Lapis” and “Yantra” in Los Angeles next month (February 10th at the Silent Music Theater in Hollywood). We wlll be showing new digital transfers of these films, with live musical accompaniment. I also host and play piano at an Open Mic at Jones Coffee in Pasadena every month.

A couple of computer-related projects of interest: my recent music piece “Kasparov vs. Deep Blue” in which I programmed a chess computer to produce musical feedback showing what it is “thinking”, [See the video here] and my work simulating the automatic music algorithms of Athanasius Kircher. [a link to the paper can be found here].

Source: email interview with Jim Bumgardner. Cycling helmet nod to The Bad Astronomer

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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/51468/l...f-the-spheres/

Posted by Vivek (here)
Evan Grant on Cymatics

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CsjV1gjBMbQ

Here is the link to the Journal of Cymatics webpage: http://cymatica.com/

The sound of the sun visualized from the new Cymatics exhibit at the Smithsonian.

The following article was copied and pasted from www.cymatica.com

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New Cymatics Exhibit At The Smithsonian
by JODINA MEEHAN on JULY 25, 2012

A new cymatics exhibit at the Smithsonian, which runs through to December 9th 2012, features a “Star Station” in which visitors can see the “songs of stars.”

John Stuart Reid, co-creator of the world’s first CymaScope, was asked by Deborah Stokes, curator for education at the Smithsonian Institute, to image four ’songs of stars’ for their African Cosmos Stellar Arts Exhibition.

The star sound files, which include the sound of the sun, were fed into a CymaScope, which makes the star sounds visible by imprinting them on the surface of ultra pure water, transcribing the sounds to periodic wavelets, effectively rendering the sounds visible.

The CymaScope imagery was captured on-camera and sent to James Stuart Reid, John’s son, who provided colorization and titles.

The completed videos were then sent to the Smithsonian where Michael Briggs used them to create the “Star Station,” a booth where visitors can experience the stars-sounds-made-visible for the first time.

“This is an important milestone for the CymaScope and for cymatics in general,” Reid says. “It will help cymatics gain acceptance in the world as a useful scientific technique.”

Initial visitor reaction to the Star Station has been very positive and children, in particular, love it.

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Source: http://cymatica.com/2012/07/25/new-c...e-smithsonian/