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4 - Planet Earth is a jail

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An Alien looking at planet Earth through his telescope would see 8 billion individuals moving around like ants. He may be wondering what the cause of all this animation could be. We need food and shelter. That does not explain everything.  A couple of centuries ago, approximately 85% of the population was comprised of farmers. Today, they represent less than 5% of the population. We should be free from basic needs 80% of the time. What keeps us so busy?

We have long-term and short-term motivations.

The human body is high maintenance. It must be fed three times a day. It must be kept at the right temperature at all times. It doesn’t smell good unless we keep washing it regularly. We don’t know what happens during our 8 hours of sleep. Even if you spend one hour a day keeping your body in working order, you should have more than 14 hours of leisure per day. Something is missing somewhere.

Behind the short-term motivation of the individual lies the long-term motivation of a society. Civilizations appear and fade away like flowers bloom and wither. We are familiar with the Egyptian civilization, followed by the Greek and Roman cultures. More recently, in the 15th century, Portugal was the leader of Europe. In the 16th century, Spain was the leading power, followed by the Netherlands, France, and England. All those countries seemed to follow the same process. The individuals who lived at the time were not conscious that they served the same purpose. We are not separate individuals. We are a flow of people like a river running across the centuries. We serve a purpose, consciously or not. Something is missing in our understanding of life. Sooner or later, we stop what we are doing and ask ourselves:” What is the purpose of all this? What am I doing here? Is it worth it?”  Earth may not be hell, but it is not a paradise either. It looks more like purgatory.

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To answer the question of “What are we doing on Earth?”, some people use religion. Others decided that they will be happy when they have enough money or become famous. We are all looking for love. The problem is that we don’t know where to look. Looking for love cannot be a daily activity.

How is motivation implemented in Nature?

Let’s take a labyrinth.

Pink Poppy Flowers

At first, we sent water to fill the labyrinth. It filled all the dead ends and found its way to the exit. Water is driven by gravity.

The next step is to replace the water with slime mold. It is this gluey thing spreading on dead trees in the forest. It has no head and no brain. However, it is used to improve our computers because it can solve problems faster than we can. The slime mold will fill all the dead ends of the labyrinth. It will also reach the exit. After reaching its goal, the slime mold will remove what is filling the dead ends and could be put to better use elsewhere. Slime mold is motivated by the search for food.

Now, let’s place humans at the entrance of the labyrinth. They are not driven by gravity. They are not looking for food. They lack real motivation. They may not find the exit. Motivation could be the key to success. It lacks shape, color, or weight. You will not find it in the material world. The key to success is in our souls.

Love could be the leading motivation in our lives. Unfortunately, we don’t have the necessary sense organs to guide our search. All we know is that we will not find it in money or in the material world. The answer will come from our soul and our motivation.

Planet Earth is beautiful.

It is a beautiful jail

Learning about ourselves and our environment reveals many limitations. We can blame our ancestors for some of them, but we have to accept some responsibility for the society we created. It is getting to the point where the Earth seems to be a cage, and the more we learn about it, the smaller the cage. The final blow came from the astronomers saying that the material world does not stand for more than 5% of reality. What a disappointment!

 

Getting conscious of the problem  

It takes time. It can take a long time to realize that all human beings have the same problem. We cannot live alone. We need to communicate with one another. We need to see other people, hear them, touch them, smell them. The information received from our sense organs is powerful. This is the domain of the material world.

 

The problem starts when we try to go beyond the possibilities of our sense organs. We need to know if the people around us are happy, honest, reliable, and sincere. What they are thinking and feeling could change our life. Our problems start when we enter the immaterial domain. This is where we find love, feelings, consciousness, harmony, happiness, and a lot more. This is where we find what is important in our lives. We know that a mother’s love is important but cannot be measured. We don’t even have the words to describe it.

The problem of communication between souls can be found in many details of everyday life. A woman would not say that she bought that dress because she fell in love with its color. She would rather use good reasons that everybody can understand. “I had nothing to wear. It was on sale. It matches the color of my shoes.” She knows that it is easier to communicate when you stay in the material world.

 

This is our problem. We need to communicate what is in our soul. Our sense organs can only help with what can be seen, heard, measured, weighted and smelled. They are useless in the soul’s world, where we need them most. It would be possible to divide the human population into two categories. Some are dominated by their body, and some are dominated by their soul.

 

We could learn a few things from children and animals.

Children who speak different languages can understand each other and play together.  They are not (yet) prisoners of their body channel. Their imagination and their soul channel are still available. Their thinking is not yet limited to the logic that adults are so proud of.

We need schools where parents could go

and reactivate their imagination.

We also have something to learn from animals. We know that cats and dogs can remain friends forever if they are raised together. We can see the same bonds between a cow and a dog, a tiger and a deer, even between a human and a whale. There is, all around us, a possibility to communicate through the souls. Animals seem to be using it more than humans.

 

The choices we make reveal who we are:

A man wanted to sell his car. He had two offers. One of them was from a man who badly needed a way to go to work. The other one would like to have a second car. He was offering 20% more. The choice was between helping somebody and getting more money. Taking the highest offer would make him part of the ‘body people’.

 

Another example comes from a film festival. Every day for 6 weeks, seven movie theaters in town had lines that went all around the block. There were two lines. One for people who already have their tickets. They will be the first ones to get in. The other line was for the hopeful. Some will not get in. A man went to the line of the hopeful and said, “I must leave. I have two tickets. Who wants to buy them?” He got one offer, and a better one, and another. It became an auction. After he had the best offer possible, he decided to sell his tickets… to the lowest bidder. Everybody was laughing. There was a feeling of freedom. It was a reminder that we don’t have to remain prisoners of the material world.

It is normal for a gardener, looking for a job, to look for the best possible salary. However, the way he waters the flowers should not be influenced by his salary. It is something between him and the flowers. The ‘soul person’ should dominate the ‘body person’. It is not always easy. Planet Earth is not a rose garden.

 

We don’t have to look for limitations to find them, they are all around us.

  • Animal knows what to eat. Humans cannot make the difference between good mushrooms and the ones that will kill them.

  • Any dog has better hearing and better smelling than humans.

  • The main purpose of many human activities is to push the envelope of our limitations. We made cars, trains and planes to help move our bodies. We made computers and AI to help our thinking.

There is more:

There is a zoo, in the Netherlands, between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, where visitors walk through a dark hallway with windows on both sides. Through one of the windows, they can see birds in a well-lit room. The window is open. Nothing is preventing the birds from flying through the window and joining them in the dark hallway. The only obstacle is darkness. Birds want to stay in the light. They are prisoners of their vision.  What is their most important link with the outside world has become their jail.

Through another window, the visitors can see snakes. Nothing is preventing the snakes from coming through the window looking for a meal. Nothing but some ice. The snakes are prisoners of temperature.

We are prisoners of our eyesight, our hearing, the temperature, the air we breathe… We are prisoners of our bodies, like fish are prisoners of the water. We are prisoners of what makes us free.

Humans are prisoners of what makes them free.

Something interesting happened in another zoo. The time had come to move the monkeys to a much larger place where they would be free to roam, and visitors would stay in their cars. To help the transition, they moved the monkeys inside their cages to the new environment before opening the doors of the cages. As soon as they were turned free the young monkeys left the cages and began climbing the trees and exploring their new environment. The old monkeys went to the door and looked at the outside world. They decided to remain in the safety of their old cage. The older they were, the more they preferred the safety of their cage. They sacrificed freedom for safety.

That can also happen to humans. As we get older, we are less willing to take a chance. We don’t go skiing anymore and for good reasons. We are more likely to fall and break a leg. What happens to the body can also happen to the soul.

Heat has a message for us and we should listen:

Can we think of heat without something being hot? It is not easy.  Heat can move from one place to another without getting attached to anything.  We don’t have a sense organ devoted to heat, but we can sense it with any part of our body.  We don’t have sense organs in our soul, but we can sense love in our heart, instead of the sense organs sending information to our brain.

A question comes to mind. We know that the human body must be kept inside a narrow range of temperature.  We need a constant supply of heat but in limited quantity. Could the same idea apply to love? Could we handle all the love of the world around us without getting cremated?

Could the same limitation apply to life, consciousness, ideas and everything in our souls? Some plants cannot survive unless they have a certain amount of water and light. Humans could be limited to certain amounts of feelings, courage and consciousness.

 

What we can safely do is to increase our level of consciousness. When a teacher gives his students a problem of mathematics, he does not expect them to find a new solution. He wants them to become conscious of a solution that already exists. Education increases consciousness.

In the 21st century, the student has all human knowledge at his disposal on the internet. The purpose of education is to increase our level of consciousness.

Education increases consciousness

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14 From Helena to Robert  Check the NDE

What was the reaction of your friends when you told them about love? Keep in mind that your friends are in a dark cave, and you don’t even know, yourself, how you got out of that cave.

Fortunately, there is a way out of our predicament. Our consciousness may be limited, but it can be amplified. We have been working on that problem for a long time already. To love people is to be conscious of them. It is more than being mindful of their presence. It is being conscious of their state of mind. You find this between a mother and her baby. She knows why the baby is crying. No need for words and reasoning. She is conscious of what needs to be done. Between adults, you may not know the details of their past, but you are conscious of the influence that their past had on their soul.

You can get some idea of what an increased consciousness is like by talking to people who have gone through a near-death experience. Many of them have new abilities that they kept after this experience. The most common one is that they know what people around them are thinking. Be careful of what you are thinking if you go to one of their meetings. (There is one every month in most big cities.) If you see a big nose, try to think, “What beautiful hair”. You are swimming in increased consciousness. They may be aware of something about you that you forgot. Search ‘Near Death Experience’ and you will find hundreds of people of all ages who have surprising stories. Most of the time, it happened during surgery. This is not something I would recommend! We say that they lost consciousness. I would rather say that they were not conscious of their physical body. Do we need a physical body to be conscious? This is not on my list of sense organs.

What happened to both of us is that we became conscious of one another. After a big hug, there is not much more to talk about. This is what could help your friends.

15- From Robert to Helena – Critical mass

Helena, I keep thinking of what transformed our relationship. The only explanation I could find comes from the atomic bomb! No mathematics. I promise!

Take a small sphere of radioactive material. The energy generated varies with the volume of the sphere (4/3π R³). The energy lost varies with the surface area (4πr²). As you increase the size of the sphere, the volume increases faster than the surface area. You reach a point where there is more energy generated than energy lost. You have an explosion. This is called “the critical mass.”

Are you still there? Something similar could happen to people. As long as they are separated, nothing much happens. It is only when they get together that they can reach a certain “human critical mass”. The problem is that there may not be enough energy between the two of them to reach that point.

The idea is simple but difficult to believe. Look at the people around you. Each one can generate some love, but not enough to elevate himself to another level. Take two of them at random, and most of the time, their total energy is too small to reach the ‘critical mass’.

Let’s see what could be missing in many people. One possibility is that they are still attached to the material world. They cannot detach themselves from their own body. Most people struggle to make the transition from being a separate individual to becoming half of a couple.

Another possibility is a lack of freedom. Love and freedom come together. When I was a teenager, I was saving my money to buy a record player. Thanks to inflation, the price of the record player increased faster than my savings. It was a race I could not win. Soon after I abandoned any hope, a neighbor bought himself a new record player and gave me the old one. It seemed to me that renouncing reaching a goal in a specific way opens the possibility that it can be reached another way. By detaching myself from using my savings, I introduced freedom into the system. That opened new possibilities.

The general idea is that many people are still prisoners in Plato’s cave. The more knowledge they acquire in the material world, the more they become prisoners of that knowledge. It is more difficult for a surgeon to change professions than it is for a blue-collar worker.

Before you dismiss my critical mass as a crazy idea, let me tell you how it can also be found in human history. The homo sapiens have been on Planet Earth for more than 300,000 years. How come nothing much has happened until the last two centuries? How come the steam engine, the planes, GPS, the computers, and AI did not appear 100 000 years ago? The answer could be that humans were dispersed on the surface of the Earth. There was too much distance between them. The invention of agriculture allowed people to move to cities. Over the past 200 years, the population of cities has continued to increase. A computer is composed of millions of simple ideas contributed by millions of different people. The computer made the internet possible, which further enhanced communication between individuals. More and more brains are becoming increasingly interconnected. That should lead to human beings achieving their critical mass and a higher level of consciousness.

Helena, I predict that more and more people will find their puberty of the soul together.

I would go even further. We will become conscious that Homo sapiens is the seventh stage of human evolution. It is not a question of selecting one race or one religion. Dividing the world’s population into countries fighting one another does not make sense. Either the seventh attempt of Homo sapiens will succeed, or they will disappear from the Earth’s surface like the dinosaurs.

Instead of fighting one another, we’d better unite and look for a way to get out of Plato’s cave. The love between two human beings is pointing in the right direction.

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We,The People, are not happy

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