Basic needs

A good quote from Sex at Dawn on page 103, but it's actually from William and Jean Crocker from one of their publications, discussing the Canela people of the Brazilian Amazon region:

"Sharing possessions brought esteem. Sharing one's body was a direct corollary. Desiring control over one's good and self was a form of stinginess. In this context, it is easy to understand why women chose to please men and why men chose to please women who expressed strong sexual needs. No one was so self-important that satisfying a fellow tribesman was less gratifying than personal gain." (emphasis theirs)

So here we see that there is a direct link between our culture's attitudes about sex and our inability to stop fighting with each other. Specifically, we fight because of a perceived lack of possessions. This is because we've made sex into a hoarded and rare resource. There is enough sex out there for everyone, but our society is structured so that we think we don't have enough.

We fear uncertain paternity- when, in fact, such a thing could be our greatest boon. Many of these older cultures see paternity as communal, and to have another man with a stake in the raising of your children is a positive concept that maintains and strengthens community bonds. Ryan and Jetha even mention a quote explaining homosexuality by E.O. Wilson on page 104, "all above a form of bonding... consistent with the greater part of heterosexual behavior as a device that cements relationship."

Now that is even more evidence for my personal folder of evidence against the Judeo-Islamo-Christian worldview. I've known for years that system of thought begets violence, and I've known it had something to do with seeing things linear as opposed to circular. One part of that is to assume we are different from each other, and should only be joined in controlled circumstances. Homosexuality doesn't fit in those controlled circumstances, even if it poses no physical threat to said control. Their worldview seems to be based on the exact opposite of truth and what makes us happy. Now I can understand why some people think that worldview was designed by nefarious intelligences to undermine our nature, it almost seems to be inflicted upon us. But maybe any other worldview equally based on untruth would have similar characteristics.

Kicked into the Garden

That's a point I like from Jetha and Ryan. In essence, the garden is an ordered place where weeds are killed and only the prettiest and only the most desirable plants grow in neat rows. So it makes more sense to say that Adam and Eve were kicked into the garden, where "the curse suffered by Adam and Eve centers around the exchange of the arguable low-stress, high-pleasure life of foragers (or bonobos) for the dawn-to-dusk toil of a farmer in his garden" (page 82).

As sex became shameful and food became something that must be worked for, I'm seeing that the standard food, water and shelter argument as the basic human needs actually could be fixed a little. It seems what we really need are food and sex. Water comes naturally, shelter grows on trees. We've been domesticated by our own designed society, "agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal" (page 83).

We've been told that this move to agriculture is best for the common good, but it's also the worst for the individual. We've got these behemoth manifested gestalt phenomena, from religious groups to corporations, that don't benefit the human but are sustained by it though misinformation and simply taking advantage of people who don't or can't understand.

One thing I've been thinking on recently is the an idea of Gerald O'Donnell's in which he mentions that the earth has a specific shape that is in resonance with the grand vibration of the universe. Every plant, puddle and rock is placed somewhere specific to raise the vibration of the earth to higher planes. So when we human clear a spot and plant monoculture, it's like sticking some gum on a cymbal- it messes up the whole vibration. The earth is self-directing and self-healing, though, so weeds inevitably sprout in all monocultures as the earth's vibration starts to overcome the dissonant spots.

This is relatable to our suppression of the human's natural state. Our bodies have the highest frequencies when they are tuned to certain resonant states. These states not only involve physical structure, but also the mental and emotional. So betraying our base needs is not unlike monoculture, the weeds will always grow because it's well beyond our abilities to suppress them.

Scientific Community, indeed

As I continue to read Sex at Dawn, I'm not having trouble with the main crux of the argument- that the idea of humans as naturally monogamous and naturally aggressive is simply incorrect. It makes a lot of sense to me. What's interesting is that they are also targeting the research that led to this erroneous point of view in the first place. One specific misguided set of conclusions is the human's relation to chimps and bonobos.

Bonobos are know for being sexually liberal. They have sex frequently and not for reproductive reasons, often for mood enhancement and other social reasons. Chimps, on the other hand, have sex primarily for reproduction. Here's an interesting table from page 77 of Sex at Dawn:

-Human and bonobo females copulate throughout the menstrual cycle, as well as during lactation and pregnancy. Female chimps are sexually active only 25% to 40% of their cycle.
-Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly than chimpanzees, beginning to play with others at about 1.5 years, much later than chimps.
-Like humans, female bonobos return to the group immediately after giving birth and copulate within months. They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos- captive or free-living.
-Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory positions, with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively.
-Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other's eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply. Chimps do neither.
-The vulva is located between the legs and oriented toward the front of the body in humans and bonobos, rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates.
-Food sharing is highly associated with sexual activity in humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps.
-Genital-genital (G-G) rubbing between female bonobos appears to affirm female bonding, is present in all bonobo populations studied (wild and captive), and is completely absent in chimpanzees. Human data on G-G rubbing are presently unavailable.
-While sexual activity in chimps and other primates appears to be primarily reproductive, bonobos and humans utilize sexuality for social purposes (tension reduction, bonding, conflict resolution, entertainment, etc.).

What I've been taking away from this is the standard model's desire to maintain that humans have a chimp-like mindset. It seems that we act like chimps because we've been denying that we are supposed to live like bonobos. Ryan and Jetha mention earlier in the above quote chapter that upon encountering another group at a territorial boundary, bonobos engage in sex to alleviate tension.

This reminds me of Nisa by Marjorie Shostak, in which a stunning portrayal of an African forager society is given. In their culture, sexuality is introduced at an early age and there is little that is taboo about it save for violent sexual acts. Small children practice sex with each other before maturity. I have often wondered if this portrayal is more accurate than the puritanical monogamy we claim to have here in America that we don't actually follow.

Our modern society seems to be based on creating unnecessary needs - and it all began with the need to preserve food stocks due to a sedentary lifestyle followed by the need to control the woman's reproductive abilities. Now we have a backwards idea of what makes us happy. One of the things that makes for a happy human is women having complete sexual freedom. Denying women their sexual freedom is close to impossible, for one, because they have prominent breasts at all times (unlike ANY OTHER MAMMAL), lack any external cues as to when they are ovulating, and exhibit noises during intercourse that are unique and impossible for any other human to ignore. To assume that women don't like sex and that their bodies should be controlled by a monogamous male simply invites relationship disaster, as we can see in all societies that identify themselves as monogamous.

Women try to hide their sexual nature or become ashamed of overtly expressing their sexuality or even appearing sexual- think of all the different approaches American women have to bearing or covering their cleavage. And then think of their response should they find a male looking at their cleavage! The amount of breast shown and the amount of offense taken are usually independent of each other. Then there's the dreaded female areola- if males are meant to control sex, the female's bare breast has a strange and incongruent potency over the male.

Trying to assume paternity leads to fighting when the male has no idea if he had sex with his chosen mate when she was fertile and he is investing all of his time raising one female's offspring. We should be raising kids as a village, where paternity doesn't matter. Our reproductive developments make it almost impossible without sophisticated genetic technology to determine fatherhood. If we didn't have the need to confirm paternity, we wouldn't feel the need to control our women. And if half the population is under control, the whole population feels the effects.

Most fascinating- we won't have assumed for 100s of years that women didn't experience orgasmic pleasure when prostitutes/ porn stars are trained to simulate that exact thing. It seems that much of the literature that has been published around human sexuality has this Victorian bend where to admit that having a liberal view of sex is to invite sin. Sin in this case not being restricted to going to Christian hell, but also including disease, single parenthood, orphans, and, this is the big one- that if women gave it away for free, they would have no bargaining chips for resources and would fall to the bottom of society (or even further to the bottom).

Of course, in primate societies the opposite is observed, liberal sexuality is correlated with a matriarchal society. The females don't have an aggressive-must-defend type of hierarchy, rather the oldest females simply have more influence. So liberal sex attitudes lead away from war and toward matriarchy.

Conversely, in our societies where women have the least sexual freedom- in Muslim and many Christian societies, for example- we also see the most warmongering. Women in these cultures are desexualized as much as possible- the ostensible reason being that if the women we to be sexual "on the street" so to speak, they would be inviting male attention and thus compromising the monogamous bond they share with their mate at home. This appears to make for a miserable time for everyone, the women don't have freedom to do much of anything and the men have to view porn, visit prostitutes or at least masturbate while fantasizing about other women to be satisfied. True, this seems to work out for the males okay, but factoring in the fact that they could be having all the sex they wanted while not being at war pales in comparison to what's going on now.

What's fascinating to me is how blatantly obvious this all is to the modern human, and yet how the scientific community continues to disagree. To say humans would be happier having more sex with each other is just a wrong thing to say. It's treated as if some research proves that humans would be happier if they killed more humans. Researchers wouldn't believe it and wouldn't publish it. Somehow sex has gotten to be just as bad as violence in modern society and to suggest it's healthy somehow seems wrong to most of the traditionalists out there, and most humans are traditionalists.

Next book: Sex At Dawn

The whole purpose of this blog, here is to generate some thought experiments that I can put to use in stories that I write. I'm done with Schwartz, for now, the end of his book dissolved into speculation, some of which has been disproved since the book was published 10 years ago.

So I just started "Sex at Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethé. Basically it's a discussion of how our cultural sexual imperatives are fundamentally at odds with our biological sexual imperatives, and this leads to some serious frustrations, and in many cases out-and-out war.

From page 14, comparing our cultural set-up since the advent of agriculture: "Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now how to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought and sold. Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern." (emphasis theirs)

This is a thought-provoking point of view. This most recent culture that we used to have seemed to be based on the idea of unity within the group. All group members were part of the tribe, and shared everything. To hoard or declare personal property was wrong, wrong, wrong, and perhaps unforgivable. Someone who did not consider themselves unified with the tribe was a negative and dangerous person, who may be completely ostracized.

It's important to note that this is not necessarily where we come from, before that we had more of a harem situation, with one alpha male having dominion over many female sexual partners and male slaves. It is, however, where we currently seem to rest biologically. Despite our recent change to want to believe that personal property, which includes our sexual partners, cannot be taken away from us, it's blatantly obvious that this system doesn't fit. Monogamy is one of the most difficult states to maintain for the human, and even if it is maintained with regard to contact with other sexual partners, it is almost never maintained when we bring pornography into the mix.

Dissolving subsystems

Still working on grokking Schwartz. He hit upon a good point on page 163.

When sugar dissolves in water, it disappears, but is still present. There is a new system that involves sugar-water info-energy. We can apply energy to the system in a form that causes the water to be "pushed out", in this case in the form of radiant infrared heat energy. This procedure causes the water energy to redistribute itself outside of the container and away from the sugar energy. The sugar remains, in its original form, but slightly changed by its experience being entangled with water.

Water seems to be a substance that works well with our current level of energy manipulation, so an experiment like the one above is easy to do and even easier to understand. As a metaphor, however, it seems to suggest that nothing ever dissolves completely. Upon death, for example, our systems extend into the void indefinitely. It's Schwartz's position that we merely need to apply the correct energy to the void and the confounding energies that prevent us from perceiving the energy from dead humans will redistribute "outside of the container" and we could see dead human energy. Sure, it would be changed during its interaction with the void, but it would still be unequivocally the same energy, just like the same sugar crystals result from redistributing the water.

Why you should use your whole Self

Holograms, of course. Directly from page 152 of "The Living Energy Universe" by Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek-
"The systemic memory process requires that we hypothesize that the whole that you 'you' is circulated to each and every cell in your body. Hence, each cell theoretically stores 'you' in it. This is why each cell is like a tiny location in a huge hologram. In holograms, information about the 'holo' is stored everywhere in the 'gram'- the more of the 'gram' you activate, the clearer the 'holo' memory received."

This is one more reason why bodywork is important. As I said when commenting on Conscious Breathing, the human is like a musical instrument that must vibrate according to its unique structure. However, negative energies can stick to portions of your body and prevent proper vibration.

Another way to visually represent this is as a hologram instead of a musical instrument. If our subtle energies are blocked, we manifest less of our Selves in reality. Just like if you painted some black ink on a hologram. The image would still be generated, it would just be dimmer. If enough ink was put on there, the image would be indistinct and the hologram would fail to fulfill its purpose.

The vacuum

I definitely needed some more from Schwartz on the concept of the vacuum. I understood the energy vortexes, but I was still having trouble buying into the concept fully. My visualization process would generate the vortex in my mind's eye, but in the absence of A and B I saw it slowing and merging with the surrounding energy as to become indistinct.

He mentioned an interesting experiment by one Rupert Sheldrake that more or less confirmed this stumbling block. Sheldrake is a proponent of the morphic field. Such a field is constructed of energy that surrounds matter and lends it shape. A morphic field is then strengthened by the matter and a positive feedback loop results. Thus all phenomena have a self-perpetuating implicit character that could be tapped into in order to gather information about the object.

Sheldrake did an experiment where he had an artist draw 4 embedded figures, which is a type of illustration where the shape lines of an object are hidden by other lines in the drawing. Once the object has been shown to the viewer, however, it becomes easy to find it again. So he sent these 4 drawings via post (he's a Brit, no mail over there) to a series of subjects all over the world. He also hosted a television show with one of the drawings where he pointed out the embedded object to the viewers. Then the people who received the drawings in the mail (and had not seen the show) looked at their pictures and reported if they could find the object or not.

According to Sheldrake, if his theory is correct, people trying to find the object in the drawings that were shown on television would be affected by the morphic field and be able to find the objects easier. There was success, with a caveat. The further from Britain that the subjects got, the less likely they were to find the object that has been on TV. So this suggests a locality to the morphic field, and that it does "shine brighter" closer to its generating source.

Then, if we bring in quantum mechanics, we can add in "locality and non-locality" as Schwartz puts it. Quantum mechanics says that a particle can be anywhere at any time, but is more likely to be found at certain locations according to its energy level. So the morphic field, which follows much of the same laws as quantum mechanical wave-particles, can technically be accessed from anywhere and it is the energy level and resonance of the receiver that allows communion. Those folks closer to morphic field are already in a closer resonance and better able to pick it up.

My other issue with his theory is how fields in the vacuum interact with each other and perpetuate even in the absence of the original objects that generated them. I think the logic step there is to know that the fields are reality and what we see as "objects" are manifest from the vacuum, not the other way around.

A to B and back again- the soul

Still reading Schwartz and Russek, and he came to a really good point that took me a sec to pick up on but is really good.

One of the big concepts he mentions is non-material reality. Imagine a two-object system that consists of A and B. A and B transfer energy all day long and are different at time 1 than they are at time 2 due to the nature of their interaction (I'm skipping over part of the main crux of Schwartz's argument by simplifying the interaction like that). When these two objects interact, they do so through the "vacuum"- or the space between them.

Physicists have spent some time pondering exactly what the vacuum is- they currently assume that two objects transfer some sort of force carrier (mesons are the current force-carrying candidate) that moves through the vacuum and delivers information by its unique energetic structures. This doesn't hold for all interactions, of course, it can't be proved yet for gravity because no mathematical model allows for a force-carrying gravity particle. It also can't be proved for objects that are entangled, there's just no equation that allows for "strange action at a distance".

Schwartz takes the interaction for granted- that there is some sort of radiant and energetic information expressed by all objects in reality at all times. To interact with each other, different objects are actually interacting with this radiant info-field. That's not to hard to assume, there are quite a few examples of force-carrying particles that have been predicted and found- photons come to mind.

So if all objects are radiating this info-field, then we are awash in information at all times. We know this to be at least partially true by pointing our primitive telescopes anywhere at all- there is a lot of information out there, and it's constantly bombarding us as a background hum. This info-field is omnidirectional, even though we study the interactions between two objects, the field is actually available to any objects not in the study.

So the fields of objects A and B interact and revise with regard to the flow from A to B and the flow from B to A. Schwartz's point is that the fields can and do continue to exist in the "vacuum" in the absence of A and B. There is only one contiguous vacuum, and it is what allows interaction, and hence all of reality, including A and B, to exist. So, in the absence of the generating power of the fields, a virtual memory still exists of their interaction, a spinning vortex that will be unrecognizable after the generating power stops, but is not gone. This "memory vortex" is free-flowing around in the vacuum, just waiting to be accessed.

My first sticking point here was getting around matter and energy being different. Imagine A and B are two electrodes in a filament and their interaction is manifest as visible light. Turn off the power and there's no more light. Or is there? Everything that light shined on was changed slightly by its energy. If we see the filament as A and surrounding objects as Bs, then the into-field is still in existence and could be accessed with the right equipment.

By the same token, imagine our eyes are A and the brain is B. The two create a memory vortex between them. This vortex is the essence of the interaction, and thus the most important aspect. Logic suggests that in the absence of the eyes, it is still totally possible for the memory vortex to process light and generate neural impulses, for from the perspective of the brain, that's all that ever happened with the eyes, they processed light and generated neural impulses. This is not to say that someone can see without eyes- rather that the eye-brain memory vortex is how visual information gets to the brain. And this vortex is not some mystical thing- it's photons and other measurable phenomena. Hence the idea of out-of-body experiences and clairvoyance- since the brain does not depend on the eyes to see, an interaction with the eye-brain memory vortex is enough to generate neural impulses that the brain then "sees". And since that vortex is in the contiguous vacuum, there are quite a few things indeed that could interact with it.

Can the emergent properties of water be predicted from the individual properties of oxygen and hydrogen?

Currently reading "The Living Energy Universe" by Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek. I might get into his full hypothesis later, but for now I want to focus on one aspect: Water has "emergent" properties, can these be predicted by the individual properties of hydrogen and oxygen?

First let's pick a few emergent properties of water that are uncommon to most other compounds:
1. Solid water is lighter than liquid water
2. All snowflakes are unique
3. Capillary action/ electrostatic adhesion
4. Ionic action/ formation of acids and bases
5. Life

The interaction between oxygen and hydrogen seems easy to predict, but I think my familiarity with water is coloring my perceptions. Oxygen seems important- it is active in all living tissues to a great extent. Its electronegativity plays into this quite a bit- in descending order, the most electronegative elements are:
Fluorine
Oxygen
Chlorine
Nitrogen
Bromine
Iodine
Sulfur
Selenium
Carbon
Gold
Tungsten
Lead
and so on.

Then let's look at the relative abundance of the most common elements in the solar system:
Hydrogen 1- 705,700 ppm
Helium 4- 275,200 ppm
Oxygen 16- 5,920 ppm
Carbon 12- 3,032 ppm
Neon 20- 1,548 ppm
Iron 56- 1,169 ppm
Nitrogen 14- 1,105 ppm
Silicon 28- 653 ppm
Magnesium 24- 513 ppm
Sulfur 32- 396 ppm
Neon 22- 208
And it gets small after that.

However, the earth is 47% oxygen by weight. Most of the earth is composed of silicon dioxide and pretty much all of the rest is composed of some other metal oxide. All of the other bodies in the solar system have similar properties, being mostly composed of silicon dioxide, save for the sun, Jupiter and Saturn, that are composed of Hydrogen and Helium. Taking this data into account, the atoms are available to make water. However, hydrogen would rather be a gas and oxygen would rather form rock.

I am reminded of my friend Zach who plays the trumpet. He once mentioned shopping for a high-end trumpet in Germany. He explained to me that some of these trumpets included various mixes of copper and zinc in different ways, and that some of the richer tones from these finer metals wouldn't even be heard unless an expert was playing the instrument. This is like the tuning of the planetary system. Only earth, which represents the trumpet being played just right, can cause water to emerge. On the other planets, sound is surely formed, but not at such a perfect tone as earth.

When a planet is placed at the right location relative to the power sources of the galaxy, liquid water forms. Oxygen usually forms solid oxides with the other common elements that are out there, but in the right conditions it forms a liquid that has some properties fundamentally unique when compared to any other substance.

One of the most important properties for this exercise is that solid water floats. When a pool of most of these oxides solidifies, it does so from the bottom (coolest near the crust) to the top (warmest near the sun). Water, however, floats to the top of the pool and is then warmed again by the sun. The densest water at the bottom of the pool is actually above freezing at 4° C. This is unlike any other oxide, where the densest material at the bottom of the pool would be at the freezing point of the oxide. So water alone naturally forms a special crystalline structure that prevents it from freezing totally.

More powerful is water's ionic abilities. It naturally disassociates just a little so that there are always ions present. Add in some ionic impurities and it carries an electric charge very well. But that's not all, it can also interact with highly reactive species like chlorine, fluorine and sodium to become a powerfully ionic substance that can react with almost any other element to greater and greater degrees.

And its greatest role is what it does form to life. This requires interaction with carbon, but the ions in water can be charge-separated to form energetic systems the complexities of which aren't seen anywhere else. It can create quantum effects that absorb energy from the environment and channel that energy to perpetuate specific patterns. Life, in other words.

Schwartz's main point is to look at this as a system, as opposed to discrete effects that happen to interact at this particular place in the universe. It's not like there are any other phenomena that generate such a wide array of unique properties. The universe seems to be designed to have "waterness" at certain points- and waterness leads to life.

This is the crux of the emergent property argument that systems thinking proposes. Looking at the properties of oxygen and hydrogen alone may lead you to what water is and how water will behave, perhaps even leading to the assumption of snow crystals and the ionic effects so unique to water. But could we assume that life would exist unless we knew it was possible first? Could a consciousness conceive of hydrogen and oxygen, and not water, and write out enough equations to theorize that life as we know it could not exist in the absence of water?

I doubt it. It would require a leap of faith to propose such a thing if we used our modern scientific rigor. There just aren't any combinations of 2 common elements that lead to such effects. In fact, pretty much all combinations of 2 common elements lead to a simple substance that has a linear phase transition diagram- hard and dense at low temps, slowly melting to less dense liquid, slowly evaporating to thin gas, slowly expanding to a diffuse plasma. Nothing else has such a wide array of differing and interacting electrical effects. No substance forms a crystalline matrix when frozen that is less dense than the liquid form thus causing the substance to circulate and distribute energy even over its volume. Few substances can be mixed with various other common elements to generate varying ionic and electrical effects. No substance makes up 70% to 90% of living matter apart from water.

So here we see systems thinking. I think another aspect to this is the lack of generalization. We often assume, due to lack of sheer processing power, that third and fourth order effects can be generalized, i.e. solids are more dense than their liquid counterparts. If we can see that the system of the universe inevitably produces water and therefore life, that such a phenomenon is inherent in the structure of matter, then we see the whole universe is life, all aspects of existence are participating. Assuming that all things are separate and obey a concrete set of laws generalizable across all similar phenomena fails to predict the most influential phenomenon in the universe- life.

Gerald O'Donnell has some good things to say

I've been listening to Gerald O'Donnell's podcasts from his site, Probable Future. This is the second time I've listened, and the first since having my revelation, so I'm getting more out of it.

I figured something out this morning about co-creation and competitive creation. Gerald was talking with an interviewer and the interviewer posed a scenario: person A wants chocolate ice cream, and person B wants vanilla. Only one type of ice cream can be ordered, so whose intentions win out?

I think this depends on two things, the level of connection they have to the reality that has structured the idea of ice cream (and the idea of the restaurant, the chair they are sitting in, etc.) and the level of connection they have to each other.

If they lack a tight connection, as in they haven't communicated with each other, barely know each other's names and will not make a tighter connection to each other in the future, then it's entirely possible that person A will have chocolate ice cream served in their universe and person B will have vanilla served in theirs. The weird thing is that, if one were to access the information about that meal from person A's perspective, person A will be eating chocolate ice cream, and if you access that same information from person B's perspective, person A will be eating vanilla ice cream. The same principle applies if we look at what flavor person B is eating, it depends 100% on the perspective.

What if the two people do share a tight connection? Then the flavor chosen depends on each person's degree of connection to the local overmind, or the matrix or the One or whatever. Whoever has the greater connection will have a greater influence on the outcome of the situation and the other person won't get the flavor they want.

This is all assuming that both people have a degree of connection to the One in order to influence their reality. If they only possess a trickle of connection, it's more likely the local overmind will impose whatever flavor has the lowest path of resistance.

Notes on Conscious Breathing by Joy Manné

There are connections everywhere, no one theorist has all the right answers to your reality.
Except you, of course.

Manné mentions the idea of separating from the body as a consequence of trauma. Traumatic events are stored in the body holographically as memories. If we experience a trauma that our Selves can't deal with without becoming non-functional, we repress that trauma.
Repression is useful and good, most of us can't deal with trauma when it happens, we need to process it slowly and according to our own inner machinery. However, repression is like damming up a river, it is not sustainable by its nature. Eventually the dam will wither and fail. Also, a dam is not a component of a healthy, functioning earth- it is an unbalanced phenomenon. We want that water to be flowing freely, changing according to gravity and other earthly phenomena- we don't want it to stay as its own object, stuck somewhere with no hope of flushing.
So, while repressing trauma is healthy in the moment, it also results in two negative consequences-
1. The portion of our Self holding the memory goes unused, which is like a broken key on a piano, we can't play some tunes with the somatic instrument because we're missing a note.
2. It takes energy to sustain the dam- energy that is best used for just about anything else.

Manné mentions some of her patients that cannot "feel" their bodies or even be present at all as a result of trauma. These people have dammed all of their somatic rivers such that only a trickle of water reaches their present consciousness and allows them to function. The piano keys available to them only play a narrow repertoire of tunes.
So Manné says this is why we get stuck in repetitive patterns when we haven't processed our trauma properly. With all 88 keys available, not only can we change the song we're playing, we also have every song in the universe available to us.
On page 96, Manné mentions a man named James who has powerful political views that he sees as dictating his perceived failure. "Society", "the rich", his family, his wife, all of these are out to take him down, and he cannot see what it is about himself that allows such victimhood to occur. "James has not got enough free energy for objective observation and assessment of his behavior" she writes.
This is important because it shows that we need energy that we don't use for repression to be happy, and there is a threshold amount without which a seed of contentment cannot grow into a happiness plant. This James character never figures it out and eventually stops going to sessions.

On page 102, Manné says a great thing about taking time out for meditation. "As long as we are choosing our time out, we are also choosing our 'time in'. When we are not choosing, we have grounding and awareness problems. For some people these problems are so severe that they cannot be present at all. Sufferers from severe mental illnesses are afflicted in this way."
I've said for years that the big difference between crazy people on the street and everyone else is that the people on the street can't choose when they are crazy. Most, if not all, of us are crazy at least sometimes during the week. People are homeless because they can't choose when to be crazy, and often end up acting out on the job. So those of us that choose to meditate are also making a better choice as to when our crazy comes out- not where it's destructive.

Launch Post

I've got to start somewhere with this.

On July 1st I connected to the Earth Mother for the first time. She gifted me with a connection to her, the benefits of which I won't try to explain just yet. In a nutshell, she removed my fear and caused me to act like a really nice person.

Going forward, I'm going to try and write down interesting things I come across in my further research.

The name of this blog refers to the idea that sound is everything, everything is composed of vibrating particles of light. Not light like a beam of photons, but potential light that is stored as in a battery. A battery never glows, but can easily be made to generate light. Electrons move about inside a computer, and if observed from a certain perspective, like an arc, they are light. However, in the computer, their patterns are amplified so only certain patterns are vibrated to light the monitor. This is all very similar to how the mind works.

This light that I speak of is synonymous with pure thought. All things are vibrated into existence by conscious thought.

Obviously, the world is changing, the background hum is getting louder and more noticeable, until eventually it will be the sound of thunder changing the Earth and the Human to different conscious levels. So I ask this thunder, and it can hear me for it is just as conscious as I-
Where we goin'?

Also, Brian Regan.