confessions re President McCain

This week, all the channels reported that people felt about the death of John McCain the way they
did about the death of a very popular President. And briefly one guy asked: "Why is that? How can it be?"

One reason, of course, was McCain's honesty, integrity, basic friendliness and effective focus on what he focuses on. All of these are refreshing qualities we should think more about. But I must confess... I believe there is more to it than that.

I still remember the moment in 2014 when I was startled to realize that **WE** -- all of us humans -- are what they call "macroscopic Schrodinger cats." For several years, I came to understand much better what this really means, both in mundane technical terms, and at the level of psychic or spiritual experiences. But just a few months ago, my psychic/spiritual exploration of that came to a very abrupt end. In a way, I was like the folks that Greeley and McReady talk about ("Are we a nation of Mystics?", reprinted in Goleman's book Consciousness), who have an intense experience but then recoil in fear. Sometimes we are not ready yet. 

The abrupt end: a very convincing "assumption dream" in which I visited my alternate self in the earth in which McCain was elected instead of Obama. (Yes, I believe that there is a kind of leakage between the alternate earths, really, by way of the noosphere, whose evolution created a level of intelligence using quantum effects which we haven't had time to reach yet here on mundane earth.)

My alternate self was doing a lot better than my self here and now in some ways. The integrity and support in that environment let me reach further in some important ways. I could learn unique things from that alternate self. But there was this little problem of war putting an abrupt end to what had been better. I think. Not a message from the end point yet. But yes the end point for our McCain has been reached, and what can HE see from where he is now? He was aware of a few mistakes he would regret... and maybe he had some inner sense of his real other life?

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Just a few more of the thoughts which got me thinking of McCain this week...

I may be one of the few people who ever compares Trump to Augustus Caesar and family. That comes from a visit to Cartagena (and Rome), and I'll skip that for now. (Though I do remember Julius had comments about Marc Anthony similar to what some would say of McCain: "He wasn't such a genius. He was such a formidable foe just because of how uniquely honest he was.")

Lots more people wonder about Trump and Hitler, in part because issues of race really are out there in the noosphere. My immediate knee-jerk reaction last week was: "Isn't Trump more like Hindenburg, that silly old wealthy class guy who got swept away by the flood he enabled?"
So I looked up Hindenburg, who was discussed only very briefly in the classes I took at Harvard. To my surprise -- he sounded a lot more like McCain than like Trump.

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More scientifically (sort of); both McCain and Trump have strong elements of being right-brained people, not the folks lost in a world of low affect and formal dry words. We have more and more troubles with people lost in the world of empty BS, and this is seriious science.
(I still remember a few years ago when I had a plenary talk at an international conference primarily for research psychiatry, where Laurie Granit also had a plenary. If you don't know the name, it is worth looking up. I agree with her that we have a real problem with the patients running the asylum.
But Trump and McCain were both different, both willing to eject the BS... though they throw it in different directions.)

Einstein was also heavily right-brained, but comparing Einstein, McCain and Trump, we can see that it's not ENOUGH to know how right-brained a person is to describe what they are like. (By the way, as a proper follower of Von Neumann, I am 50-50 myself, not right or left.)

Dedicatoin to the spirit of truth is another very crucial variable. Ability to FOCUS is another; some high esoteric Japanese Buddhists even define "samadhi" in terms of a kind of focusing ability. McCain was phenomenal in his ability to focus, to penetrate through illusions in his area.
(Hey, guys, I know exactly how that feels myself, especially after the paper I submitted yesterday to a physics journal. A kind of being in the zone...) HOWEVER: folks who are good at focus sometimes have a problem with tunnel vision. As in, "If your only tool is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a pile of nails." (A deep truth we need to keep remembering.) And McCain focused so well in front of his face that...  Levitin has a great best-seller about the need for BALANCE, not just focus but also control of focus and occasional relaxation of it.

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Having just a few minutes... I heard an interesting joke the other day.

"It's as plain as the nose on your face, and as hard for you to see yourself. Unless, like Trump or Pinnochio, your nose grows so big even you can't help seeing it..."