2-1 The human body
2-8 To sleep or not
2-2 The human brain
2-9 NDE
2-10 Ways to think
2-3 Not very smart
2-11 Happiness as guide
2-4 Alien opinion
2-5 World in layers
2-12 Puberty of soul
2-6 Glass ceiling
2-13 Homo sapiens UNITE
2-7 Plato's cave
2.1 The human body
To investigate the purpose of our life, we need to understand how our body, soul, and brain work together.
We are not human beings
having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings
having a human experience.
Teillard De Chardin
The human body is built to last around 120 years. Jeanne Louise Calment lived for 122 years and 164 days, from February 21, 1875, to August 4, 1997.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
We could say that medicine and better hygiene have increased our life expectancy from 40 to 80 years. We have 40 more years to go. We are halfway. The goal is to die in good health, like a candle burning all the way to the end. That’s not going to be easy!
Our body is way above our head -)
We don’t even fully understand what happens inside our own bodies. We don’t know all the chemistry needed to digest a simple meal. We don’t know what occurs to our bodies during the eight hours we are asleep.
What is happening is more than just regular maintenance. There is some creation at play.
Removing 75% of a liver enables the body to fully regenerate the entire liver.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPoqpeog2Wc&t=2s
The human body is much more complex than anything a human brain could imagine.
-
From 30000 to 50000 different proteins.
-
60000 different toxins.
-
From 75000 to 100000 genes.
-
More than one million different kinds of bacteria are in your mouth alone.
-
10 million different types of blood cells
-
The human body has 30 to 40 trillion cells.
-
Trillions of cells are organized in groups within groups and reacting with other groups.
-
Every second, our body makes about 500 trillion perfect copies of hemoglobin, a protein with 10,000 atoms in 574 amino acids.
-
The number of organisms in the digestive system is: 100 000 000 000 000.
It is so complex that we had to divide our medical field into over 100 specialties, including Urology, Neurology, Cardiology, Ophthalmology, Pathology, and many others.
How did we end up with such a complex body? Do we deserve it? Is it a mistake?
The human body is made of a detour in the cycles of atoms.
Our body cells are replaced about 10 times a year. Even the calcium in our bones is renewed every three months. Why do we keep discarding healthy skeletons and replacing them with weaker ones? It makes sense to build a strong skeleton when we are young and maintain it throughout our lives. Nobody is perfect! Who manages the traffic of all those cells moving in and out? Before becoming part of your skeleton, this calcium might have been in an eggshell. It could be headed to a sardine in the ocean. Have you ever wondered how your body manages to move all those atoms to the right places at the right times?
Calcium is just one of the 60 minerals our body needs. Our skin renews itself every 4 to 5 weeks. Every second, our bodies produce about 20 million new cells to replace the old ones. Without humans, these atoms would follow their natural cycles. There’s no reason to believe they would miss a detour in a human body! https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/cells-maintain-repair-liver-identified#:~:text=The%20liver%20has%20a%20unique,beyond%20the%20point%20of%20repair.
Everybody relates to the rest of the universe through the cycles of the atoms. We are never alone.
And there's more. We might need to rethink how we see our environment. A tree is more than a piece of wood. It is part of the carbon cycle. That takes time. We cannot isolate the tree from time. We cannot look at a tree like we would look at a picture of a film. That would be misleading. The image of a horse jumping over a fence doesn’t mean that horses can fly.
We don’t know where those atoms originate and where they are going.
That should keep us humble.
Scientists assume that atoms are immortal. You might want to question the experience our scientists have with immortality.
The human body is high maintenance.
It needs to be fed three times a day. It must always be kept at the proper temperature. It doesn’t smell good unless it is washed regularly. Hair and nails need to be trimmed periodically. We must take this body to the dentist, the doctor, and the eye doctor. All we can hope for after all this tender loving care is that it doesn’t hurt!
You might wonder why a soul would choose to connect with such a body - even if only briefly.
2.2 The human brain
The human body is incredible. Sadly, its brain can be a disappointment. You cannot compare a human brain with a body that makes 500 trillion perfect copies of hemoglobin, a protein made of 574 amino acids and 10,000 atoms.
Before claiming that humans will dominate the universe, it would be good to keep in mind that modern humans are 98.8% genetically similar to chimpanzees, 75% to chickens, and 60% to banana trees. Click here for details.
What is the origin of human thinking?
Let’s assume that the Big Bang released a certain amount of thinking. This is a limited genetic trait to be shared among humans. What do you think will happen as the world population increases? Every individual share would shrink. This is not a very popular subject of conversation because such a theory isn’t the best way to make friends.
Another possibility is that thinking on Earth increases proportionally with the human population. That would suggest we can generate thinking out of thin air. A middle ground between these two extremes is that human thinking arises from a complex process far beyond our understanding.
To evaluate our thinking, we compare ourselves with the thinking of other animals. That’s cheating. We should compare the development of our brain with the development of the rest of our body. That would make us very humble.
We hoped that mathematics could help. It can provide a shortcut around reasoning. At the core of mathematical logic, there is a formula. If you know the formula, you don’t need the reasoning. To find the surface of a rectangle, you only need to remember that it is multiplication. Nobody will ask you why. Mathematics can be used to avoid reasoning. Of course, someone had to find the formula. We called him a genius and put his name in the dictionary. This is our way of protecting our ego.
Puberty
Our love life begins at puberty. After years of preparation, the big moment arrives. The world around us hasn’t changed, but everything feels different. Our bodies are fully developed. We have broken free from our isolation. We have reached adulthood! There’s nothing more to discover. We are ready to vote and change the world!
We will soon see that puberty isn’t the final answer; it’s just the start. If something so vital can happen to the body, something equally important can happen in the soul. What turns a child’s soul into an adult’s soul? Is it an increase in awareness? We realize that the world’s population splits into two groups, and one feels more familiar.
There must be a way to explain the discrepancy between our mind and our body?
One explanation might come from our history. When an animal detects danger, it knows how to react. Birds fly away, zebras run, fish swim. When a human perceives a threat, he may hesitate between different responses. Should he hide? Run away? Call for help? Throw stones? Climb a tree? We insert thinking between the danger and our response. That takes time! A fraction of a second could mean the difference between survival and becoming a meal. The more you think, the lower your chances of survival. Eliminating the most capable thinkers for millions of years before they had a chance to reproduce lowers the average IQ of the population. We are the survivors because we are the ones who are less thoughtful. Homo sapiens survived because of their limited thinking!
Can we rely on human thinking?
Scientists admit that our thinking isn't always reliable. They insist that everything be confirmed through experiments. They require Nature's approval. They argue that we should examine the facts and use our reasoning. Why connect reliable facts with flawed thinking that might cause chaos? Does that make sense? We expect A.I. to improve human thinking. Is that reasonable? How can we be sure that we no longer need Nature’s approval?
The robots that we develop will be inspired by human thought. We might amplify both the good and the bad.
2-3 We are not as smart as we think
We cherish the idea that human thinking will allow us to dominate the universe, reaching even the galaxies we have never seen. This may be wishful thinking!
Let’s start with a simple question.
If Marie’s daughter has a son, what is Marie’s relationship to the father of this grandson?
No math. No calculations. This is a simple question about family relationships. How does that make you feel?
Another example of our limited thinking
-We take a series of coins. We line them up and number them 1, 2, 3, 4… all heads up.
-We flip the coins 2, 4, 6… and all the multiples of 2.
-We flip the coins 3, 6, 9, 12… and all the multiples of 3.
What are the coins that are still head up?
No need for complicated calculations. Some simple reasoning should do.
Slime molds
While walking through a forest, you might see old logs covered with a yellow coating. These are slime molds. They could change how we think about ‘intelligence’. They are at the limit between plants, animals, and fungi. They don’t have a brain or a head, yet they can solve some problems better than we can. We use their ‘intelligence’ to improve our computers. One day, they might become a crucial part of robots. Imagine robots without a brain doing things we can’t do ourselves. They could tell us in a millisecond that Marie is the stepmother of the son’s father.
Slime molds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8HEDqoTPgk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UxGrde1NDA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPOQQp8CCls
The lime molds could say:
“The way humans solve problems is by thinking about them. They build up ideas upon ideas. They end up needing the most powerful computers to handle a problem that we can solve very easily without even thinking about it.”
Should we accept the idea that there might be a better way to solve problems than relying on human thinking?
We, The People, won’t let a slime tell us what to do. We have an answer:
“Slimes don’t communicate with each other. They don’t understand writing or music. There are many things they can’t even imagine. They ignore everything outside their area of expertise. They are specialists in a certain field, but their scope is limited. Every plant and animal could be filling a slot within nature’s endless realm of knowledge. Why does nature make flowers grow on top of a mountain where no one can see them? The answer could be that “There was a place for a little domain of possibilities on top of that mountain.”
Every child is an artist
The problem is how to remain
An artist once he grows up
Pablo Picasso
Children seem to understand all of that. They don’t rely on logic. They are smart. They sing, dance, draw, paint, and shape objects with modeling clay. They know that what is important in life isn’t always visible. They could highlight the significance of certain parts of our lives that we tend to overlook.
We need schools where parents can go
and learn from their children how to reawaken their imagination!
Fortunately, mathematics offers more than just avoiding reasoning. It serves as a way to free your mind from the material world. After we learn to count, we can count anything—from our fingers to the number of people in a room, the stars in the sky, or particles so tiny that the eye cannot see them. Mathematics is a means of transcending the limitations of the physical body. It can expand the parts of nature that the human brain can understand.
Humans have a role in the world. They are fulfilling a natural purpose. The duck, the slime, humans, and the rest of creation share one thing: They underestimate what they are unaware of.
We built computers. This is an achievement we can be proud of. Could it be a
proof of our advanced thinking?
Maybe not! Computers are made of millions of simple ideas contributed by many different people. That doesn’t mean the human brain improved the day we started making computers. It only shows that we needed many people to put together a multitude of simple ideas.
Computers follow the general path of human evolution. Our ancestors started by making tools to hunt. Those tools were simple objects. The next step was to build machines with many parts. With computers, we continue to shift from the physical world to the digital one. With AI, we are moving even further in the same direction. Humans are distancing themselves from the material world. What could be our next step? The development of feelings?
Hypnotism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nqGsNdEI6s&t=236s
The hypnotists will say:
We knew it. We warned you, but you didn’t listen. When we hypnotize people, we bypass their thinking. We can make them believe that they are in the middle of the ocean, pedaling on their bicycle.
Most of the day, your thoughts stay on the back burner. You spend 60% to 70% of your time on autopilot. This is what causes you to miss your exit on the freeway. Ask someone a question they don't expect, and they will likely ask you to repeat it. He was on autopilot. He needed time to come back to Earth.
Not only is human thinking different from what we expected, but the way we use our brains also seems somewhat limited. It resembles demonstration software that lets us test before we get the password.
2-4 An Alien point of view
Let’s assume the first aliens we meet are friendly and understanding. They’re even willing to help. The conversation might go like this.
-
“You started by using stones to make tools to go hunting. That kept you busy for thousands of years. After trying to master the level of matter, you are now trying to master the level of the plants. You watched seeds falling to the ground and go to waste. You realized that you could get more food by collecting the seeds and planting them in the right spots. That was the beginning of your agriculture. It was a good idea, but it took you more than 200,000 years. Without your big ego, you would have said: “How come it took us so long to get such a simple idea! We must not be very bright!”
-
We have observed humans for many centuries. There is something about you that we do not understand. For example, you cannot accept the idea that something bigger than yourself can be alive. You don’t have an issue with viruses, microbes, bacteria, fish, cats, and dogs being alive. Yet, you cannot accept the possibility that life may also exist on planets, in solar systems, and in galaxies. You see nothing more than a collection of raw materials on other planets. How can you be so blind! We know that your vision is limited to the range between red and violet. This is not an excuse!
-
Something else: You don’t know which food is safe or which mushrooms will poison you. All animals instinctively know what to eat. This is basic. How come humans don’t have that?
-
We cannot understand that you want to live in society and remain isolated at the same time. How do you explain that you would rather have a cup of coffee in a busy place and use your computer to avoid real contact with others?
-
We cannot understand that you want to live in society and remain isolated at the same time. How do you explain that you would rather have a cup of coffee in a busy place and use your computer to avoid real contact with others?
-
What’s the matter with all the fights that you have all the time? We can understand that you must eliminate your microbes to stay healthy. That’s okay. Wherever there is life, species compete for survival. Changes and renewals are necessary. In spring, trees grow new leaves. They fall in autumn and grow again the following year. We can understand building cities and tearing them down before rebuilding new ones. But that doesn’t explain why you kill each other. Could there be a disconnect between your thinking and your feelings? Making atomic or biological weapons requires a lot of thinking but no feelings. On the contrary, feelings would get in the way. Don’t you know that thinking needs to be guided by feelings?
-
You are not the kind of neighbors we like to have. Not only do you pollute your air and water, but you also send your plastic all the way to the bottom of the oceans. There is no limit to your careless behavior. Before you arrived, planet Earth had blue skies, clear water, and no need for dumps. A little paradise! If you truly want to do something to save the Earth, you should consider moving to another planet. There are millions at your disposal. There must be some already covered with trash where you would feel at home.
2-5 The world comes in layers
We were taught in school that the world consists of matter, plants, animals, and humans. We naturally saw ourselves as being at the top and did not investigate any further.
Reality may be a bit more complicated. We are suspended between the infinitely small atoms and the vastness of the universe. This is not a very comfortable place to be for someone who pretends to dominate the universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CWb1NiLpPA&t=3s
Level 1: Matter:
These are our raw materials. Physicists began with a list of 60 elements. Today, they likely have around 100 basic elements, to which we add all possible combinations of different atoms. At the level of matter, there is no life, no feelings, no movement, nothing but eternity!
That can be misleading. Planet Earth is more than a collection of raw materials. We only see many combinations of basic elements. There is more to Planet Earth than matter.
Level 2: Plants:
You create plants by adding something essential to matter. Plants absorb energy from the sun to grow, produce seeds, and reproduce.
Without plants, there would not be food for animals and humans.
Level 3: Animals:
You reach the level of animals by adding movement to plants. Animals move by changing the shape of their bodies: some walk, some fly, some swim, and some run. That requires a brain, nerves, and muscles to change the shape of their body. We assume that there is life when we see movement. This is our criterion of life. That does not mean that everything that moves is alive. There is a lot of movement in the electrons of an atom. So far, we have not considered the electrons to be alive.
Level 4: Human beings:
They are made of matter. They have their own shape. They are moving. They also think. That does not mean that animals cannot think. The primary difference is that human thinking is more developed.
We move from one level to the next by adding something important.
It is tempting to assume that there is nothing between God and us. Reality may be different.
Above us are some things that are important but hard to describe. Click “List of Angels in Theology” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_angels_in_theology. You will find many levels above us that you didn’t expect. We named them Angels, Archangels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, and many others. What we know for sure is that the world around us is made up of many separate layers, and there could be many layers above humans. We should expect to find as much difference between us and the next level above as there is between us and animals. We are on the 4th rung of a tall ladder with many more rungs to go.
What might the levels above us consist of? You may notice that what we add becomes less physical as we move from one level to the next. The level above humans could be entirely immaterial.
What is most important in our lives are ideas, love, feelings, and consciousness. They do not have a shape or a weight. Could the level above us be made of energy? Heat? Consciousness? Love? Freedom? Could it be a level of souls without a body?
When searching for life on other planets, we look for a body. We search for water because here on Earth, the bodies are made of 80% water. We limit our investigation to levels below human existence. We should not use the sky as a screen on which we project our own film. How can we be sure that the levels above us do not consist of energy, heat, or souls without a body?
We stand at the intersection of material and immaterial worlds. We possess a body and a soul. The time has come to break free from the limits of the physical realm and reach the next level beyond humankind.
2-6 Our glass ceiling
Homo sapiens (that’s us) have been on planet Earth for over 300 000 years. During that time, we believed that “reality” was limited to our planet Earth, our solar system, our galaxy, and anything we could see in the sky. We thought the universe was confined to what we were aware of. Modern science is pushing us out of our comfort zone.
The only way scientists could explain the trajectories of distant stars was to accept that 27% of the universe is made of “Dark Matter” and 68% is composed of “Dark energy.” This is our dark side!
Our material world accounts for only 5% of reality.
Telling people that they are prisoners of a small jail isn’t the best way to make friends. The media did not run big headlines like: “Give me my 95% or give me death.”
How can we pretend to understand our place in the world when we are only aware of 5% of reality? How can we find our way to the level above us? Let’s try two extrapolations.
First extrapolation:
We start with the three levels below us: matter, plants, and animals.
-
Everything begins with matter. It is our basic material.
-
We move from the level of matter to the level of plants by adding the ability to grow, to take a particular shape, to make seeds, and to reproduce.
-
We move from plants to animals by adding the ability to move. That may require nerves, muscles, and a brain to use them.
-
We move from animals to humans by adding the ability to think.
You will notice that what we are adding becomes less and less material as we move to higher levels. We started by adding something that has a shape, such as seeds. The next step was adding a modification of the previous shape. The last step was adding something immaterial that has no shape. We continue to utilize the possibilities of the earlier levels and introduce a new one that must be significant.
To reach the next step above us, we must add something immaterial.
Second extrapolation:
To control one level, we need access to the level above it.
-
How can you explain that water in the ground can defy gravity, rise into the air, and take a specific shape? You need access to the level of the plants to understand what happens to matter.
-
How can you explain that fruit trees can reproduce? You need bees and their pollination. You need access to the level of animals to understand the level of the plants.
-
The cow does not know what will happen after her death. The farmer does.
To dominate the human level, we need to access the level above us.
To dominate one level requires access to the next level above it.
We can infer from our two extrapolations that understanding the purpose of our life on Earth requires access to a higher level beyond humanity. That would need something greater than human thinking.
Getting access to the level above us
requires something that we don’t have.
This is our glass ceiling.
There is hope.
The different levels are not sealed. The best example is heat. It lacks a shape, color, size, or weight. It does not belong to our material domain. However, it manifests itself in many aspects of our lives. Without heat, planet Earth would just be an icy rock. Heat belongs to the immaterial world. It manifests everywhere without attaching itself to our material world.
Another example is love.
We start with love at the highest level. It is the love of the universe. The next level is love embodied in a couple. At the lowest level, love is reduced to sexual attraction.
Another example is thinking.
Man isn’t the only one capable of thinking. The lion chasing a zebra must assess how fast, how long, and which way the zebra might run to escape. The lion might make smarter decisions than we do, even with our computers and GPS.
Another example is the molds. They seem to have access to a limited yet powerful way of thinking.
It seems that Mother Nature has provided everyone with a way to improve. At every level, you can find some implementation of the level above as a stepping stone.
Each of us already has something coming from a higher level above.
Each level shows some traits of the level above it, but in a more simpler way. Many animals are capable of some thinking. We could use love and thinking as stepping stones.
There is a current going through humanity.
There is a flow moving upward from matter to higher levels. This flow begins with the energy plants receive from the sun. We get this energy through our food and send about 20% of it to our brain. The sun’s energy reaches the physical level and cycles back to the human brain. This creates a cycle that starts above us and returns to that level. We can tap into this flow as we go upward.
2-7 Plato's allegory of the cave
Plato (428/347 BC) tells us that without philosophy, human life would be reduced to the life of a prisoner in a cave. We could go one step further by replacing philosophy with consciousness.
Allegory of the cave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWlUKJIMge4
It was 23 centuries ago that Plato wrote his allegory of the cave. His main concern was the importance of philosophy in our lives. He also claimed that he was the smartest man on Earth because he recognized how little he really knew. We can interpret this as an invitation to explore what can be discovered beyond his allegory of the cave.
Plato encourages us to go beyond our limitations and find freedom. He imagined people who spent their entire lives watching shadows on the wall in front of them. The shadows are their “reality.” One day, one of these people is set free and can leave the cave. He discovers the outside world and finds a new “reality,” a new freedom, and a new consciousness. It seems (to us and today) that freedom and consciousness go hand in hand. We can’t blame the people in the cave for not knowing about a freedom they had never experienced. We become aware of freedom only when we experience it.
Plato’s message is ‘Get up and walk out of your cave.” That won’t be easy. The people in his cave didn’t accept the idea of a new reality. They resisted change, and so do we. Our challenge isn’t learning something new but abandoning old habits. Our newspapers didn’t run big headlines like ‘Let’s break our chains.” It will take time for us to accept that a door has opened to a new world.
Let us add another chapter to Plato’s allegory:
Plato has his explorer return to his cave to help his fellow men. That is very commendable, but let’s consider another ending. Suppose our explorer chooses to stay outside the cave. You can imagine what happens. He meets a woman and falls in love. He becomes aware of new feelings and a different reality.
The woman made him aware of feelings he had not anticipated. He discovers that his first cave is inside a larger cave, which itself is inside yet another bigger cave. We might say that he was climbing a staircase, and with each step up, his consciousness expanded.
Consciousness Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
Let’s water the little seeds:
Freedom, consciousness, and love were already planted in our explorer like seeds waiting to be watered. What happened inside him resembled what occurs in nature around him. Seeds are buried in the ground just as he was buried in his cave. If you don’t water the seeds, nothing grows. Nature waters them and makes them sprout. Seeds find the sunlight and grow in a different world. It’s their new reality. Consciously or not, we keep watering little seeds buried in our subconscious. Pushing the boundaries of our consciousness is a source of happiness.
Every stress in our life is an opportunity to bring something to the surface that can help us overcome our problems. This is how we nurture our small seeds. This is how we find happiness.
Adding a second chapter to Plato’s allegory of the cave
The previous chapter introduced the concept of love between two people. Plato already understood what would follow. It is the ‘platonic’ love. That means a feeling of love that does not depend on another person. It is detached from the material world. It is the love of the entire universe! This love moves through the world like the wind passing through a tree—without becoming attached.
Living a human life involves nurturing seeds already deep within our souls, such as freedom, consciousness, and love. It is through developing them that we become aware of a new reality.
What Plato didn’t tell us is that we face a problem. We water everything: not only the seeds but also the weeds. Everything can grow in our garden—the good and the bad.
Picture of the cave
This is an illustration of Plato’s cave. What you see at the bottom left is a group of people. All they know of the universe is the shadows on the wall in front of them.
Let us try to extrapolate.
Humans have both a body and a soul. They perceive the universe through these two windows. It is within their soul that you find life, love, happiness, consciousness, and everything that has no shape, weight, or color. It is the realm of the immaterial.
Their bodies are their window to the material world, where everything has weight and shape. This is what you see in Plato’s cave. To survive in Earth’s environment, the human body needs to see, hear, and smell. It requires sense organs. This is what happens to the people at the bottom left of the cave. They are only aware of what their eyes can perceive. Their sense organs limit their understanding. The shadows they see on the wall are restricted to red and violet. They are unaware of ultraviolet and infrared. The very sense organs that make them aware of their environment can also limit their knowledge of the universe. Their sense organs are their boundary. Their own body is their cave.
There is hope:
Plato’s cave has an exit.
There is a chance that thinking could help us break free from our prison. We are told that our brain is constantly active, both day and night. Our brain might serve as a bridge between the material and immaterial worlds. Descartes might have said: “I think at night, therefore I am.”
We have two windows to the world: our body and our soul. Unfortunately, our sense organs focus mainly on our body, even though it is in our soul that we need them most. Relying solely on thinking would require human thinking to be perfect. Look around you. Are you certain that human thinking cannot be improved? Plato might have had a good reason to keep those people circling in their cage. The material world makes us aware of the laws of nature. Gravity will stay with us from cradle to grave. Any idea can be verified with an experiment. Mother Nature will always be there to guide our thinking. We need to spend time in the material world to educate our minds before we can explore the world of the soul.
We rely on the material world to develop our thinking, and we need thinking to enhance our consciousness.
2-8 To sleep or not to sleep
Our life is based on the idea that a good night’s sleep is important,
But what happens during that time does not matter.
Go figure!
Nature also offers a transition between sleep and wakefulness.
While falling asleep, we experience “HYPNAGOGIA”. It is a period when we are both half awake and half asleep. We are partially conscious and partially unconscious.
While waking up, we go through “HYPNOPOMPIA”. It would be the most enjoyable part of the day if the alarm clock didn't ruin it.
These two transition periods provide a chance to improve communication between being awake and asleep. They serve as a link between our limited consciousness and full awareness. They offer a possibility to help us escape Plato’s cave.
We can amplify
We know that we can go to bed with a problem and wake up with a solution. We carried our problem through our Hypnagogia. We solved it at night using unlimited thinking. The solution made it through our hypnopompic. The process can work, but it has significant limitations. It reminds us of the beginning of our agriculture. We observed Nature burying some seeds to produce more seeds. We amplified the process and developed what became our agriculture.
We can handle ideas the way agriculture handles seeds. We want to create a transition between our material thinking during the day and our immaterial thinking at night. What matters most in our lives does not have a shape, a weight, or a color, and cannot be measured. This is what we need to focus on as we shift from wakefulness to sleep.
Progress can be slow at the start, like farming. We might wake up with ideas that we quickly forget, just like forgetting our dreams. We can't wait until after breakfast to jot them down. We also have to act on them. It's like receiving mail in your mailbox—no more mail will arrive unless you clear it out every day.
It's a question of persistence. It begins as a small drip. As the drip intensifies, the transition periods will grow longer. You are developing senses that have been ignored. You are training your neurons, just like computers are developing A.I. Both follow the same evolutionary path. We made ships bigger and bigger until transatlantic crossings were replaced with planes. A.I. could move from large corporations to individual minds.
Instead of looking at our body in a mirror
We may soon be looking at a screen
where AI will show our soul.
What happens when we are asleep?
Things get even worse at night. We don’t remember what happens when we are asleep. We know that our brain works 24/7, just like our heart and lungs. Our brain activity is more intense during our REM sleep (Rapid Eye Movements) and less during our NREM. It is reassuring to know that we have an on-call service in case of an emergency, but we would like to learn more about it.
He who looks inside wakes up,
He who looks outside dreams
Carl Jung
Could signals from our senses be replaced by signals from dark matter and dark energy? Do we experience a higher state of consciousness and greater freedom? Is it during our sleep that we are truly awake?
We understood that nature around us was far more complex than anything the human brain could grasp. We recognized that our perception of the world was limited by the information we received through our senses. We never expected it to be this bad. Planet Earth can be beautiful, but it is also a prison. A beautiful jail, but still a jail.
How would you react if your partner vanished for 25 years and then came back, saying he didn’t remember where he went or what he did?
This is what we spend one-third of our lives doing. The only reason it's accepted in our society is because we all do it daily, in small portions, at the same time. The question remains: What occurs during 8 hours a day?
We assume that our lives are limited to what we are aware of. We should accept that at night, we are not mindful of what happens during the day; therefore, what occurs during the day doesn't matter when we are asleep. Just because that sounds logical doesn't mean it's the right path to follow. It would lead to dividing our lives into two, fighting against each other. We’d be better off trying to cooperate.
We know that every evening, we leave our body in bed, much like we leave the car in the garage, and the driver is set free. The body is kept at the right temperature, with no noise or light. We want to prevent any signals from the sense organs from reaching the brain. This is strange. During the day, our lives are governed by the signals received from our sense organs. How can we live without them? Are we dead or alive when we are asleep?
Scientists have experiments showing that there is always some activity occurring in the brain. There is life, but this life does not use our sense organs. Scientists also have good reasons to believe that our brain utilizes 20% of the energy obtained from our food. How do we use all that energy without moving our bodies? Some brains should have been cremated long ago!
If the body doesn't use all that energy, it could be utilized by the soul. During the day, our soul is immersed in the physical body. Our lives are controlled by signals from our sense organs. At night, our soul is free from the sense organs. Instead of seeing each other’s bodies, we might have direct access to each other’s souls. Every morning, the soul returns to her body, gets dressed, and goes to work!
Under those conditions, the body would be nothing more than a tool for the soul, used to gather energy from the material world and transfer it to the soul.
2-9 Near Death Experience
We could dismiss NDE (Near Death Experience) as Voodoo, but we need all the help we can get. Let’s be cautious and keep an open mind.
You can find this at many civic centers. About 50 people of all ages, men and women, dressed like everyday folks, with nothing religious or political about them. A speaker recounted what happened after he fell from a tree while trying to cut a dead branch. He was severely hurt and taken to the hospital for emergency surgery. That was completely unexpected in his life. He was a dentist. He thought his life was well organized and perfectly predictable.
He said that during the operation, his heart stopped beating. He had no blood pressure and was not breathing for more than 30 minutes. He was clinically dead. A doctor could have signed his death certificate and sent him to the morgue. Since the 1980s, surgeons have discovered ways to reanimate dead bodies and bring them back to life. We always believed that death was a one-way street. Apparently, the body and soul can be separated and rejoined. The man was not promoting a book or introducing a new faith. There was no hidden commercial motivation.
When the surgeon visited him at the hospital a couple of days later, his patient told him what happened while he was under anesthesia.
At one point during the operation, you told those around you in the operating room, ‘We are losing him!’ I was fully aware the whole time. I was above the operating table, hanging from the ceiling. At first, I didn’t realize that it was my body you were working on. I felt great — no more pain.
I could hear and understand everything people were saying in the operating room. You got impatient with your assistant, didn’t you? Not only could I listen to what everyone was saying, but I also knew what they wanted to say even before I heard their voices. I could guess what they were thinking. I could also move around the room. I only had to think of a specific place, and I was instantly transported there. That might sound ungrateful, but after a while, I got tired of watching you. I decided to explore other rooms in the hospital. It was easy. Without a body, there is nothing to stop you from passing through a wall and taking a look at what’s on the other side..
As you can imagine, in the 1980s, patients returning after surgery with such stories were referred to a psychiatrist. An assessment was made of the differences between the patient and a “normal” person. Medications were prescribed to help the patient behave in a more ‘normal’ way. Most of the time, it worked! The patient understood that medications could become the central part of their diet. The only way to avoid this issue was to say, “I got confused because of the stress of the operation. I am feeling better now. Forget what I said.”
For many years, the speaker kept his secret to himself. Today, about 2% or 3% of the population have experienced an NDE—maybe more. There are millions of people with similar stories. They are no longer sent to psychiatrists. Instead, they have international organizations such as IANDS, NDERF, ADCRF, and OBERF, each with its own website.
There was a break, and it was even more fascinating. Audience members were discussing their lives after the NDE. Some of the abilities they had during their NDE trip remained. Some people can guess what others are thinking. If you ever go to one of their meetings and see a big nose, try very hard to think,” What beautiful hair”! Keep in mind that people around you can ‘view’ your thoughts like you see their nose.
Some people in the audience were discussing the experience of meeting someone for the first time and forming a powerful impression. They thought that they already knew that person. A woman saw a girl singing on TV in a foreign language and felt like it was her sister singing. Nobody could explain it. Maybe they met in a previous lifetime. Perhaps this is related to what we call ‘love at first sight’.
LLOyd Rudy video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdPDNXc3mp8
This meeting can give you the impression that we are going through life as we walk in the fog. We are only conscious of what is needed to survive on Earth. We live like children who are not aware that someday puberty is going to change their lives.
The speaker said that his life changed overnight. He bought a piano and started learning music. He attended concerts and visited museums. He distanced himself from some of his acquaintances and made new friends. His NDE transformed his life. It opened a door for him.
For most of us, that door remains closed. We need a good scientific proof that could be accepted in a court of law. Search for NDE on YouTube and see if you can find testimonies similar to the one at the Civic Center.
Let’s keep in mind that we are looking for a way out of Plato’s cave. We must think out of the box. Our logic may not apply. NDE is opening a door. Are we going to explore what is behind that door or remain outside?
Dr Lloyd Rudy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL1oDuvQR08
In 1970, Raymond Moody published “Life after Life”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_Life_(Moody_book)
Raymond Moody is the father of the modern NDE movement.
2-10 We need another way to think
Science shows that human thinking is often unreliable. Ideas must be tested through experiments. This is how we earn Nature’s approval. Thinking is just a tool, and we are responsible for the way we use it.
It is from the laws of nature in the material world that we learned to think. That was a good place to start, but that might not be a good place to stay. After learning to swim, we have to venture into the deep end.
We must learn to think as a species, rather than as separate individuals.
Nothing is certain. Many things could happen in the next two centuries. People might move to another planet. So far, the sun is growing plants, and we are eating them. We might find a way to bypass the plants and get our energy directly from the sun.
What matters most in our lives, such as freedom, thinking, love, life, heat, and happiness, comes from higher levels. How do we become aware of them? Where are the organs that make us conscious of freedom, thinking, love, heat, happiness, and life?
There are several possibilities.
-
What happens when we scratch a match? We don’t create light and heat; they existed long before matches. We merely triggered their appearance in our material world.
-
Any part of our body can make us aware of heat. If the body doesn't need a specific sense organ for sensing heat, then the soul might not need sense organs for life, freedom, love, and happiness.
-
Another possibility is that the sense organs exist in the soul’s world but are limited to embryos - nothing more than small seeds waiting to be watered.
-
At night, we can see people’s souls just as clearly as we see their bodies during the day. There’s no need for sense organs.
-
We could start with a trilogy composed of dark matter, dark energy, and ordinary matter. A human being and everything else would be a combination of these three. They could be nested inside one another like Russian nesting dolls. The smallest doll could be made of matter. The next one could be the soul. The following might be consciousness. All these dolls could be connected, much like fractals.
-
The human body is composed of deviations in the cycles of atoms. These processes create trees, flowers, oceans, and mountains. We are part of the world, and the world is within us. We are never truly alone.
We may have to distance ourselves from the scientific way of thinking.
Imagine a society completely ruled by human logic. Making decisions that cannot be justified would land you in a psychiatric hospital run by AI-powered robots. It would be a society full of gadgets performing many tasks without any feelings, like atomic bombs. You would suffocate. An education based solely on thinking would replace freedom with rules. Ideas are blind. They need to be guided by feelings.
When you break a cookie, you have three parts: the two pieces and the connection between them. We know how to handle the pieces; they belong to our physical world. However, the connection in the small gap between them is easy to forget. As a result, we end up with a dust of atoms, unable to use them to recreate the trees, the flowers, and the birds. We have removed life. We are skilled at killing.
Thinking needs humans like birds need trees. The birds don’t belong to the trees, and no individual tree is essential. What’s needed is a group of trees to support a group of birds. That suggests that individual thinking is part of a larger thinking process, whether or not we are aware of it.
Let’s try another approach.
The universe is infinitely complex. The human brain and senses are somewhat limited. We cannot grasp the entire universe. Instead, we can only try to grasp some parts of it, one step at a time.
After learning to think scientifically, we can expand our thinking beyond the boundaries of science. Instead of relying solely on experimental proof, we could seek guidance from within. We don’t measure a mother’s love — do we? — but it remains a vital part of our lives.
The association of opposites
If everything comes from the Big Bang, then everything is connected to everything else. As far as we can observe, nature has long used the concept of dividing things into two.
Our body began as a simple cell that was divided into two cells. The process continued to produce 4, 8, and 16 cells. It does not divide into 3 or 10 cells. The result is – Male and female – Intelligence and instinct – body and soul – The infinitely small and the infinitely large - The material world and the immaterial.
Dividing into two can create two parts with contrasting properties meant to complement each other.
-
The ovule and the spermatozoid have opposite characteristics. There is one ovule, moving slowly. It is a sphere and the largest cell in the body. On the other hand, there are thousands of spermatozoa, moving quickly. They are small, and their shape is elongated. These two opposites are obviously designed to work together.
-
In the human body, the brain is located inside a bone and has a spherical shape. It is connected to many nerves situated outside the bones and has an elongated shape. The brain and nerves could be the result of one unit being divided into two.
-
It was through exploring distant stars that astronomers discovered dark energy and dark matter deep within us.
-
We divide the world between good and evil.
After noticing something special in nature, we should look for similar things elsewhere. Is there a general idea implemented in many different ways?
The fractals
After noticing something unique in the shape of cauliflowers, we might explore similar patterns in lightning, lungs, or tree branches. This could lead to discovering fractals.
It took us many years, but we finally did it.
We should also tap into the resources of our subconscious and use them effectively. Advertising can employ “subliminal advertising,” where they insert a very brief message into their videos. The idea is to implant ideas into your subconscious that you're not even aware of. This practice is banned in most countries (but remains legal in the US).
Do you want to make a horror movie? Imagine that the Martians know how to bypass human consciousness. They have us under control. They treat us like a herd. They are using us like we use cows. Sometimes they make humans fight one another and watch the fighting, just for fun, like we watch cockfighting. How can we blame them for treating the level below them the way we treat the level below us?
Treat the levels below you
like you want to be treated by the levels above.
Robots and artificial intelligence could have a significant impact on our lives. However, robots belong to the material world.
Problems can have multiple solutions.
We will have access to one solution or another depending on our level of consciousness.
The slime has one solution available. Humans have another, but it’s not always the best. We might someday find that a virus can do even better.
Here is a straightforward example of a problem with multiple solutions.
Suppose that you want to find the total of the first 100 numbers: 1+2+3...+100. You might start by adding 1+2=3, then 3+3=6, then 6+4=10, and so on. This method can be pretty tedious.
A more straightforward way is to say that 1+100=101, 2+99=101, 3+98=101, and so on... We have 50 pairs that sum to 101. The total is 101 times 50, which equals 5050.
The first solution is labor-intensive. The second one demands a higher level of thinking.
We get access to one or the other depending on our level of thinking.
Our food problem:
Throughout history, humankind has constantly faced the challenge of finding food to survive. Thousands of years ago, we gathered fruit with our bare hands. Later, we used stones to cut meat, marking our first improvement. This was followed by associating power with tools and having a horse pulling the plow. Today, one person using machinery equipped with a powerful motor can produce enough food to feed many people. Farmers now make up only 5% of the total population. As we have evolved, we have found better solutions to our food problems.
The best way to handle problems is not to drain the resources of the material world. We should aim to access higher levels of thinking.
We should also apply this new perspective to how we see ourselves. Instead of focusing on what makes us different, we should examine what we share. Humanity consists of individuals confined within their own bodies, trying to break free from their solitude. We won’t escape our imprisonment by fixating on our differences. Instead, we should seek common ground. Synthesis must replace analysis.
Our efforts to understand should lead to changes in our brains. That is the purpose of going to school. We learn how to learn. What matters most isn’t the number of books we read but the books that reshape our brains.
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except how we think. Therefore, we are heading toward a catastrophe beyond understanding. Humanity will need a new way of thinking if it hopes to survive.
Albert Einstein
“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
Nikola Tesla.
“If you wish to understand the universe, think of energy, frequency, and vibration.”
Nikola Tesla
The time has come to understand that supersensible knowledge must now emerge from the materialistic grave.
Rudolf Steiner
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier, and simpler.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There is nothing good or bad; thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare
People who don’t hear the music believe that the dancers are crazy.
Instead of being the captain of our ship, we might only try to master the wind blowing in our sails.
2-11 Using happiness as a guide
Before looking for happiness, we should consider our chances of survival.
We represent the final efforts of Mother Nature to utilize the human species (from the Ardipithecines to Homo floresiensis).
https://www.britannica.com/list/human-ancestors
Many did not survive; they were cut short. What is Mother Nature going to do with us? We must admit that, over the past 200 years, human actions have mostly been harmful. We plunder natural resources. We pollute the air, rivers, and even the oceans. We are depleting oil reserves and possibly minerals in the soil. We leave behind plastic and radioactive waste that will last thousands of years. We even caused global warming. Would you blame Nature if she decided to end her last effort to use humanity?
Let’s assume, for now, that this was simply a matter of immaturity. We are learning the first law of nature: “Use but don’t abuse.” We deserve a chance to get back in line and keep our lives aligned with nature.
Should we pursue happiness inside ourselves or outside of ourselves?
Let’s start with the outside; it’s simpler. Our idea of perfection is a government that would “give” happiness to everyone. We’ve looked at various forms of government over the past 2,000 years, but we still haven’t found the perfect one. Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Humans are individuals, isolated from each other, each inside his own skin. Yet, they want to live in society. How can we live together and be isolated at the same time? Something has to give. It won’t be the others; it’s the individual who has to change.
We might begin with a list of countries ranked by how happy their citizens are.
Let’s compare the GDP (The body) with happiness (The soul)