Three threads of thought on habituation, ultimate laws of physics and space technology which came to me in meditation this morning,,,
It is fascinating to think how these three threads actually combine, and also how they combine with threads coming to me this morning. Some are central to staying alive when you get to age 70, among other things.
=============== MORGENSDENKEN
Morgensdenken? Maybe that is a better term than samadhi or cosmic consciousness. A crucial reality in MY life, which I need to be aware of, is the gap or relation between the higher level of consciousness I experience almost every morning and the normal levels I move into, stage by stage, until I get to this laptop or to breakfast.
A major job for that "ME" of early morning consciousness, connected "spiritually" beyond my normal personal self, is to engrave a
few key points into my mundane brain to act as signs of important things I should act on or think about. I might compare it to Sesame Street, where they begin by saying "This episode is brought to you by..." That starting overview does not directly contain all that is addressed, but it connects in a way that helps us stay integrated, keep it together. On a good morning, I share enough with my wife that there is a stage combining her thoughts and mine in a way which gets still higher.
THIS MORNING -- the three "Sesame Street" themes were dark matter, psychohistory and habituation, each pointers to VERY large topics worthy of an entire lifetime of research, each full of important aspects humanity would benefit from getting deeper into. But five minutes of morgensdenken often has more content than normal consciousness could handle in an entire day. So where to begin?
========= HABITUATION: neuroscience and survival after 70
Some neuroscientists would say "Habituation? That's old hat, as exciting as knowing what EEG is. If anyone is so sheltered that they don't know how basic it is, tell them to BUY Bear, Connors Paradiso, or at least that older standard text you used to cite all the time." (https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/fundamental-neuroanatomy/author/nauta-walle-j-h-feirtag-michael/.
Dover should reprint that!)
Ah, but is it really so simple?
A key part of my morgensdenken months ago was consciously remembering .. a kind of conscious affirmation, the phrase "Light, love and life" (LLL), which is almost like a prayer in many streams of Western mysticism.
WHEN YOU START an engineering project, it is usually incredibly important to start (each day?) with a formulation of a goal, of what you are really trying to accomplish, so that you won't be distracted. For me, the LLL affirmation is really a way of maintaining full awareness of what I am trying to do OVERALL, what the overall larger utility function or value is which energizes and motivates me, at all levels. (I deeply respect the friend who prefers FFF, faith family and friends, but these are connected. LLL is like U , and FFF like J, and Don knows what I mean... too much to explain within this paragraph.)
One morning, I thought of it as "LLL and hope express where we must put most of our energy, but fear and doubt are equally fundamental, to be seen and managed but not accepted too far."
However, here is a key aspect of this kind of practice. WORDS like LL can lose power and energy when we repeat them too often.
HABITUATION really is a central reality in human mental and spiritual growth. Optimal, full growth requires that we be as aware as possible of habituation, how to use it and yet keep IT under control so that it does not sap our energy.
Habituation -- e.g., as in "familiarity breeds contempt." Certainly in human relations, like husband and wife, there is a very real and serious danger that the phenomenon of "familiarity breeds contempt" can cause errors in thought which exact a real price.
When we repeat words too often, we may start losing sight of their meaning.
Even in morgensdenken, there is a risk in letting LLL (or other affirmations or prayers or whatever) echo in our minds, in a way which causes habituation and regression to an overly formal ego verbal level of thought. So... simple solution... REMEMBER to evoke not just the words, but augment awareness of what the words STAND for. Remember to FEEL -- to become fully aware --
of the actual flows of .. energy, qi, feeling, sensation, even connections and images.. which the words are intended to represent.
In the brain, "J" (and derivative signals of J and e and U) is IMPLEMENTED by nonverbal flows, like the chemical flows which Freud postulated in his early theory of psychodynamics. WE HUMANS learn to use words to point to these realities, and talk about them, but the flows themselves exist even in rat brains which do not even use words; first order sanity (1OS) includes
full awareness of that level of our consciousness, a level which is GREATER in a sane (1OS) human than in a rat. (Yesterday, Nancy told us about symptoms of humans who may have become inferior to rats in some ways. Excess formalism can do that to people. We debated what state Putin is in right now, and in near future.)
But how do we overcome the worst kind of habituation, where familiarity really does lead to blindness and a kind of unconsciousness?
My claim was that we CAN overcome it, that the brain DOES have natural ways to learn to keep habituation in its place, but ... in essence, they require using or even cultivating a certain level of awareness. In an ideal world, one of you would even
be interested in writing a serious paper on this (and maybe attaching me as a junior coauthor, to help give feedback as you write).
In addition, this has HUGE practical implications for examples like maintaining our health as we age. (Ludmilla and I also had a deep and intense conversation of a chapter Minsky wrote for Computers and Thought, by Feigenbaum and Feldman, which led to neurolinguistic programming and many other follow-on threads , some of which would be more useful if reinterpreted and regathered. I was aghast at SOME of the things Minsky later used to build his fame, but that entire book had a huge impact on my own understandings, and should be remembered.) EXAMPLES as a key tool for conscious, 1OS thought...
A practical implications...when we are children, the brains NATURAL way of learning habits and habituation is of huge value to us.
I will never forget my old neighbor from College Park, vice principal of a famous local Catholic K-8 (or K-12?) school, who put such great stress on teaching her children GOOD HABITS. We come much more capable and coordinated as we learn such habits... some of which are rigid stimulus-response patterns stored in hindbrain, some of which are "action schemata" stored in basal ganglia invoked as POSSIBILITIES by axons from neocortex to basal ganglia. These kinds of action schemata are modeled as "decision blocks" in my mathematical theory of mammal brain intelligence (aka mammal level consciousness).
(https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554).
At a certain level of child development, the circuits in neocortex and lower brain which invoke these schemata become automatic. We do not have to THINK about how to drink from a glass; we just DO it. It becomes unconscious (or should I say "subconscious"?). It takes up little space in the Global Workspace of Consciousness (which is part of the brain theory expounded in Werbos and Davis). Yet... it is a reminder that information can flow even at high levels of neocortex itself without echoing a lot in higher level awareness. That is habituation....
HOWEVER: for me, it was a huge change of life for me in 2019 when I had a severe fall and concussion, when visiting an unfamiliar place in Boston (where sheer habituation had NOT given me the habits to prevent a fall under certain novel circumstances). Later, my GP in Virginia told me: (1) you were lucky to live at all after that kind of fall; (2) you will be limited for the rest of your life now; and (3) MOST people your age have even worse things, which they don't talk about because they are so embarrassing.
Later that year, I had important plenary talks to give in Korea and Japan, and had great troubles walking without falling. The old system did not work any more. I have sent out photos of horrible bleeding I had from further falls in that period.
But I am very grateful that my wife Ludmilla found a way to GET US THERE, at zero net cost, by flying from Virginia to Vancouver, and taking a Holland American (HAL) cruise from there to Tokyo. That cruise happened to include a qi gong tai qi instructor, whose large open free class we attended every morning. I mention him, because I owe him my life. (I also owe it to Ed and to Ludmilla.) I agree with Ed's principle that we need to really express and feel gratitude when it is called for, as a very basic of spirit, of 2OS (or maybe 3OS, reflecting our deep spiritual connections to each other as part of our noosphere).
Thanks to him, I cultivated a new kind of awareness, very consciously connecting from my total higher self all the way down to feelings and actions in the depths of my body. The EXACT OPPOSITE of childlike habits.
I was even able to navigate efficiently up and down damaged trails so dangerous they were marked as verboten by the Japanese. (If you don't believe me, or if you want to see a movie of kami, see https://photos.app.goo.gl/rwkhfdcUN74jGrvx9 ).
BUT I HAD TO MAKE SURE TO BE FULLY CONSCIOUS AT EVERY MOMENT, the exact opposite of normal habituation.
The full story is much longer, of course, but here is the key point. The kind of neocortical level habits we learn in childhood can be replaced by a combination of new neocortical circuits AND SOUL circuits, which absolutely REQUIRE that key inputs be registered as higher level representations in the giant pyramid cell global workspace of consciousness. The older we get, the more important it is that the soul part of the circuit grow stronger and more unrelenting. Some core schools of qi gong and tai qi, in Taiwan and Nanjing for sure (and maybe also in more remote locations we have visited, like one depicted in early chapters of Journey to the West), assist that crucial aspect. I just pray that misuse of internet will not destroy the 2OS and longevity of millions of people who could be doing better....
In neuroscience terms, the life of sensitive people over 70 with 1OS sanity includes attention to the feedback on risks and errors which can result when vigilance is reduced even for a moment in awareness of the feedback which we can see protecting us. WE LEARN to maintain a stream of awareness which we do not habituate away.
And some of us also learn to learn NOT to fall into mindless habituation towards our spouse, on any of the relevant levels (there are many!). We learn to KEEP LEARNING, a very fundamental drive of our 2OS and 3OS selves, from morgensdenken to life after nightcap.
==============
OOPS! what about dark matter and psychohistory?
Psychohistory was supposed to be a major theme of the BPM list, the Cosmos and History (CH) thread, but I have seen more hope of that on another list, just emanating from Space Renaissance International
https://spacerenaissance.space/. I HOPE IT WILL PROVIDE A NEW CH discussion:
the group on the web: https://groups.google.com/g/
==================
For dark matter: I firmly reject the idea that any of us has the kind of visualization power which Deepak has hinted at at times.We do not just make up and change the laws of physics we experience in our lives as w e go along. Many on the SBOC list feel so happy with such assumptions, but for me it is a bit horrifying because too much acceptance of that as a possibility would be a threat to my sanity, because of how heavily it might fit.
I saw the first two "Bell's Theorem" experiments come out decisively differently in a way which no serious physics has ever explained even today. Via NSF, I also saw the final spreadsheets from the very most precise relevant experiments ever done, which the famous leading lab decided not to publish because of how utterly unhinging the results were (all fitting Deepak's idea). I chalk it up to PSI, which is a LOT easier for me to make sense of than utter cosmic solipsism threatening to point to ME..
But now... morgensdenken... IN MORGENSDENKEN, we can tune into higher intelligence ENOUGH that we can see an important window into what IT sees. It is not so crazy to imagine that IT might have the kind of power Deepak postulates.
We should not confuse being an avatar with being a "god" (whatever that means), or perception and empathy with choice and action.
So maybe now I can assimilate more of Deepak's thought without threatening my sanity TOO much.
But as a humble Chinese village scholar of ten centuries ago (with the solar system as my village, and Von Neumann as my Bible), I can still be honest about NOT KNOWING which is the ultimate truth, the HCER-based worldview defined in
http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm, something like the cosmos as a giant dimensionless neural network.
==============
IN ADDITION to those two coherent possibilities... this week, a discussion with three of you reminded me of THIRD possibility.
Parallel with that, Yeshua's last Sunday (whose link he will send you) included Hal asking why Yeshua and I never talk about topics like hierarchy and structure and recurrent decision networks on the list. BUT ACTUALLY WE DO!!! It is a central aspect even of things I cited above. But there are details we do not hammer into people here because... humanity is in danger of killing ITSELF by a fall worse than what I risked on Mount Fuji, even as we (and folks like Putin, Biden and even Xi) need to learn FAST how to tie our shoelaces before we lose our hope of learning ANYTHING higher than that. (I attach an overview of how we are in danger of killing ourselves "here and now", maybe this year or maybe within a century or so.)
In the higher levels I usually do not want to bother you with... Nancy and Shelley reminded me that I once was VERY active in experiments with highly conscious astral projection, ending at the end of 1978.
(https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.html).
NOTHING I have experienced since then pointed to anything like a hope to achieve FTL space travel(which Shelley mentioned in our SRI discussion), except maybe Alcubierre effects which might well fail forever. (Unknown.)
Not only general relativity but Einstein's more advanced later metric theories seem to say the same, and who else (besides two I bcc) knows about THEM?
BUT WHEN I GO BACK AND RELIVE A MEMORY of time threads I explored in that 1974-1978 period, I recall... a very tricky experience, which MIGHT be a typical astral illusion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Fox whose book I read closely back then) or might be real.
I recall having seen a space vehicle VERY similar to what I later saw in serious papers like the attached and like a drawing by McMoneagle in his book on remote viewing and time. I remember it had FTL capabilities. I was able to ask another person in Paris on the same time line what kind of physics they had discovered to make it possible. He said "eight dimensions and 16 pointer fields." So MAYBE that might be a possibility??? Or could the mind of the cosmos conjure it up?
Who knows...
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