Are You Going to Ascend Soon?

Some time ago I had a person come to me for some spiritual counseling. Let's call him Jack, and he was about forty years old. Jack was not a happy chap. He hated his job and was planning his escape, a nice trip around the world. In particular he was going to visit all the great spiritual destinations out there. 

Nothing wrong with that, you might say. Good on him for having the goolies, so to speak. Yet as I spoke to Jack it became quite clear to me that he was living a fundamental delusion. This delusion is common in alternative spiritual circles, so I am going to discuss it briefly here today. It also mirrors a psycho-spiritual delusion that is the foundation of many religions across the world.

Jack had been told by a certain spiritual teacher that he was going to ascend one day, and this formed the basis of his spiritual belief structure. 'Ascension' is the idea that you are going to be pulled up and out of the body and into a higher dimension. This other place is trypically seen as having a higher vibration, being more blissful, and generally just a lot nore groovy than the mundane world of the earth plane. Sound familiar? Well, to me this other place sounds a lot like the Heaven or paradise of most religious philosophies.

Here's the problem. Ascension is a false teaching. It is not going to happen. There are two reasons why this is vitally important to understand.

Firstly, what generally lies behind the belief in ascension (and Heaven) is the rejection of what is here now. There is a subtle desire to escape. In this sense ascension entails a rejection of the life that is before you, and also the 'you' that you are now. You are saying that this life is not good enough, this 'me' is not acceptable.

Secondly, this rejection of your life makes it impossible for you to be fully present, and it is in presence that the true joy and love of "God" is found. If you speak to those who have experienced strong transcendent experiences they will tell you that they almost always emerge when the mind is in a deeply embodied state of silent presence. Thus the great irony is that the belief in ascension actually cuts you off from presence, from God, and from Heaven on earth.

What is now before you is the truth of life. There is tremendous simple joy to be found in just being here now, in the body. You were not put here to escape. You were put here to be here.

What drives the delusion of ascension is the dissociation of mind, body and spirit - and the trauma this entails. Your mind feels this pain at all times, but it doesn't know quite what is wrong. In fact if you stop and become fully present, you may actually find yourself falling into a state where you begin to feel this pain within you. If you have the courage to give it a voice, it rises from belly and into the throat, expressing itself as a sad whining sound, like a lost child which cannot find its mother. It is the fundamental feeling of being lost and unloved. Empty. This is how I have experienced it.

The mind, in its dissociated state, is unable to recognise that it has created the pain by itself, by not being here fully. Instead of stopping to be here, it runs. It tries to escape. It finds solace in entertainment, fiddling with gadgets, 'romance', eating, drugs and alcohol, sex, gossip, reading blogs like this... Or going on a spiritual journey. It might even believe that it is going to be lifted out of the body and beyond the mundane world into a better place. In this endless seeking it turns toward a hoped-for better future, and away from itself. Yet in all this there is no relief. The pain does not heal.

The quest is doomed to failure, for it merely perpetuates the split, the separation. 

This is what I told Jack. I told him that he was already a being of light, love and compassion. There was no need for him to ascend, merely to deepen into presence. In that moment Jack didn't understand. He didn't want to. His final words to me where that he had arranged the meeting to check to see if my knowledge was coming from a higher plane. But alas my understanding is not higher, merely deeper. He decided to keep aiming for the higher place.

Yet one day, one lifetime, Jack will get it. Maybe that little seed God planted in him that day as we talked will find fruition soon. It is not for me to judge.

The only way to heal your pain is to be here now. That's it. One of the great mysteries of our species is that this is so very, very simple. Yet only a few extraordinary individuals have ever been able to master the process.

Marcus

Video & Radio Talks by Marcus T Anthony

Here is a little complilation of some public talks, interviews and videos I have done in recent times. I hope you enjoy them. (If you are interested in inviting me for public talks and interviews, contact me, Marcus: mindfutures-at-gmail-dot-com).

Video Presentations

“Cosmos,Psyche and Our Brilliant Futures.” Talk given at the March 2012 TEDx conference at the University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong.

In this short talk I make several predictions about how I think the way science sees the nature of mind and intelligence will shift in the coming years.

“Deep Futures.” A 2011 talk about Deep Futures, given at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. 

Here I discuss the need to deepen our view of the future to acknowledge a broader range of human experience, and move beyond Money and Machines futures. The talk includes a discussion of the changing nature of human intelligence, as well as the idea of a non-local intelligence, or Integrated Intelligence. (The first five minutes is an introduction by Dr Luke van der Laan of USQ).

Short videos:

• A review of David Shenk's book The Genius in All of Us. 
• What is Your Bliss?
• Can Intuitive Intelligence be Developed?

Radio Talks

"Discover Your Soul Template." On the H2O Network (New York) with Dia Nunez. In this interview I chat with Dia Nunez about the idea of the Soul Template and what it means for your soul’s journey.

"Deep Futures and Consciousness." On The Morning Brew, Hong Kong's Radio 3 with Phil Wheelan. Here we talk about how we can develop our minds to include more intuitive ways of knowing, and what it means for the future. (Scroll down the page till you see my name, then click).

A Profound Simplicity

I simply love the message of Leonard Jacobson. Leonard's message is deceptively simple, but truly profound: embrace the present. If you have a few moments to spare today, I think you would get a lot out of watching at least some of this video, below. I don't know of any spiritual teacher today who is as  wonderful, warm, humble and wise as Leonard. He really does walk the talk. The best thing is that he provides people with very simple tools to transform their lives, and free them from the grip of the "mind" and its illusions.
 

Here is Leonard's latest video webcast. 

Blessings,

Marcus

Marcus T Anthony TEDx Talk 2012

In March at the Hong Kong TEDx conference at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University I gave a talk called "Cosmos, Psyche and Our Brilliant Futures". In the talk I make some bold predictions about the future, especially in relation to the way an improved understanding of the non-local nature of consciousness will play a seminal role in science, education and society. Previously I posted the first three minutes of the talk here on 22cplus. This video includes the entire twenty minute talk. I hope you enjoy the talk, and feel free to leave comments.

Regards,

Marcus

Daily Insight: Whitney's Fall

 Whitney before

 This is the first of short daily insights I will post on 22c+. These will mostly cover news events, and ongoing issues related to the development of our species and the world.

What happened to Whitney Houston? Blessed with a model's good looks, a soaring, angelic voice and spectacular international success, she didn't "almost have it all" - she had it all! Well, at least in terms of the measuring stick of the human ego.

So what happened?

As regular readers of this blog and my books will know, I am an intuitive. I read consciousness fields. When I look at Whitney Houston's psyche there are some obvious "messages" coming through. The following is the essence of what her spirit is saying. I use the present tense because this is the energy as it exists now.

I am so tired. I just want to go home (to Heaven). I can't take this any more. Please, just let me go. I'm sorry (esp. to mother). I wasn't good enough. I couldn't do it right. I can't go on. There's no point living anymore. Everything is empty, tired, pointless. I give up. I want to escape. I feel so ashamed of myself. I'm a bad person. I'm just too tired.

Whitney after

So Whitney Houston gave up on life, and on herself. 

Her drug habit had a lot to do with her downfall, as has been widely reported. There are a lot of people in alternative and New Age circles who believe that certain drugs are harmless or even beneficial. I am not one of them. While the occasional use of certain drugs may give insight, any habitual use is harmful to the psyche and to your consciousness field. Apparently Whitney did crack like there was no tomorrow (and now there is no tomorrow for her, at least not round these parts). And despite popular mythology that it is a 'light' drug, marijuana is one drug I would stay well away from. Its effect on the energy field and brain makes chronic users susceptible to depression, and a magnet for dark energy. Apparently marjijuana was one of the drugs Whitney abused.

Overall the biggest problem with drugs is that they can kill the zest for life by creating dissociation from the body, and from the present moment. And as I have said many times, presence is the key to spiritual fulfilment, not psychic, psychadelic and visionary trips.

Does this mean that Whitney killed herself deliberately? Not necessarily. When we give up on ourselves and our lives, the spirit will often find a way to check out. Whitney wanted to escape. But there is no escape, not even in death. Consciousness - and shame - follows you wherever you go. The demons pursue you until you have the courage to turn and face them.

Marcus

Rediscovering the Spirit of Education

Long ago I came to the conclusion that the world was flat. Not the real world of course, but the world that we are taught about in our schools and in the mass media. I intuitively knew that something was missing, and that was the spiritual elements of life and learning. At our deepest level we are not machines, but spiritual beings. 

With this in mind I wrote an article for the Journal of Futures Studies, called “Crisis, Deep Meaning and the Opportunity for Change.” In the article I look at why education has become so despiritualised, and how educators can begin to honour the human spirit in their classes and lectures. I then link this into the current world economic crisis, and argue that the crisis is a great opportunity for us to begin to shift education for the better. Below, I have included the conclusion of that paper. I think you will find it easy to read, as I always try to write in accessible style, even in academic journals. If you want to read the whole paper, including the references, just click here. 

Here's the article extract. I hope you find it deeply meaningful!

Marcus

P.S. This current volume of the Journal of Futures Studies features a symposium on responses to the global economic crisis. For some reason my version of Firefox doesn't open it, so you might have to use Explorer to get to the right page.

                                                             *     *     *

Practically speaking

I am not advocating bringing a personal agenda for inculcating a particular religious or philosophical perspective through the classroom door. The process needs to be more considered, more subtle and more respectful than that.

The key is bringing in inner worlds and other ways of knowing into curriculum, and into the classroom. Introducing other ways of knowing into the classroom requires no religious or spiritual jargon. Nor does it necessarily require that students share everything that they experience while exploring the intuitive or being reflective. 

I use visualisation and quiet time for my students. Journal writing can also be a great way to get students to honour the intuitive, without necessarily having the need to bear their soul with the class. Using journals immediately after quiet time is a great way to develop the link between the left and right brains, the conscious and subconscious minds. 

Sharing meaningful anecdotes from personal life is another way of touching a more profound psycho-spiritual level within the students. Ideally, the themes should be something related to the kinds of profound philosophical and spiritual issues I have mentioned in this paper. Whenever the teacher touches upon the profound or something that connects us with the greater thread of human history, life itself or our dreams and aspirations, opportunities to be meaningful open up. Such themes can include the environment, nature, justice, space exploration, the death penalty, free-market economics, personal success, failure, suicide, illness, triumph, defeat, disability, serious challenges, personal danger and so on.

There are other ways to introduce spiritual concepts and experiences into classrooms without getting caught in the crossfire of religious and spiritually-specific terminology. Recent studies into the practice of mindfulness have shown promising results (Reid, 2011; Sawyer 2009). Further, introducing the spiritually playful concept of synchronicity may also be an opening to a general spiritual awareness (Cho, Miller, Hrastar, Sutton & Younes, 2009).

The world is not likely to be transformed into the serenity of a giant Buddhist monastery anytime too soon, and neither is the average teacher’s classroom. I am suggesting small, balanced introductions to inner worlds. This can even be done with senior students. I recently asked a new Form 7 class (18-19 year olds) in Hong Kong if they had ever tried visualisation before. None of them had. Not ever in some 13 years of education! But I didn’t let that stop me! We did a visualisation on something deeply meaningful to Hong Kong students – the public exam!

Finally, educators can’t fake wisdom or deep understanding of life. They have to discern amongst concepts they feel they have mastery or understanding of, and those they do not. Intuition must be employed in the classroom - to know what, when and how “deep” to teach. And that is something subtle. It is a different way of knowing how to teach.

The shifting sands of the twenty-first century

The shape of the world is shifting. The dominance of Anglo/white culture is over. The global economic crisis is not merely about greed or poorly regulated banking systems. It is a crisis of meaning. What does it mean be human in the modern age? 

Contemplation and meaning cannot simply be afterthoughts in the curriculum. They are an essential part of life. Schooling is meant to equip us to live life in a way that is meaningful. We must bring time into the classroom to reflect upon what it is all about. This entails a degree of vulnerability on behalf of the teacher. Is the teacher to admit her own fears and weaknesses, or her pain at loss and suffering? Is she to confess to the things in this world that she does not understand? Her limitations? And what of those profound life experiences which have granted her wisdom and understanding? Is she to remain silent regarding this? Talking about such things requires courage. This is a state of emotional vulnerability which can only be negotiated by an individual with a high degree of psychological and spiritual maturity. In short, wisdom. And wisdom emerges from a deep introspection upon life experience. It emerges from inner worlds. We need to start planning for futures with depth.

Carl Jung died in 1958, lamenting his failure to help people see that the human race has a spiritual essence, and that “religion and philosophy” had become impoverished. More than fifty years later, are we any closer to uncovering that “buried treasure” in the field? If not, how can our societies and education systems be part of the discovery process, rather than part of the perpetuation of the problem?

The Transhuman Agenda

Last weekend I attended the Humanity Plus conference in Hong Kong. This was essentially a conference for transhumanists, although it also featured a good diversity of other presenters. The organisers of the conference were well intentioned, and many share similar ideas about mind and consciousness to my own. This post is not about them, so the following observations are not directed at them. But many of the invited speakers, who came from all over the world, were of an entirely different ilk.

Put simply, transhumanism is the idea that we will one day (hopefully soon) be able to upload our minds onto computers and live forever. Perhaps the most famous exponent of this idea is Ray Kurzweil, who in his book The Singularity is Near maintains that we will be able to reverse engineer the brain to create conscious machines; and then we can merge with them. Kurzweil was not at the conference, but there were a large number of other such transhumanists present.

I came away from the conference with my perspective on transhumanism largely unchanged. There are both technical and psycho-spiritual issues I have with the movement.

New Cosmos, New Wisdom?

 Home: The Milky way and its 100 billion stars

A review of:

The New Universe and the Human Future How a Shared Cosmology Could Transform the World. Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack

The New Universe and the Human Future is a wonderful book, and I encourage everyone who has a passion for understanding both the human future and humanity’s place in the cosmos read it. The authors are veteran cosmologists, and they have taken the time to bring together the latest research and information about the universe we live in, and put it all in one short and readable volume. Today I am going to provide a very general overview of the book, and make one specific points about it. I may write another post commenting on other aspects of the book soon.

Abrams and Primack’s thesis is simple. Currently there is no universal human mythology which provides a big picture map of the cosmos or our place in it. The maps of yore, mostly religious in nature, are not only in disagreement, they are woefully inaccurate in terms of their depiction of the cosmos. Without a common “coherent, meaningful” map, humanity cannot work together as a united whole to face the huge problems that are upon us in this moment in history. What is it that can provide that unified map? It is, the author’s believe, a knowledge of the science of cosmology, and how our universe is put together. As I shall write below, I believe their aim is noble and necessary, but in itself is not enough to achieve its vision. Nonetheless the book is such a wonderful excursion through space and time in all its cosmic vastness, that I give it a definite five star rating. It admirably achieves one of its prime aims, to share with the reader the reality that we live in a cosmos of literally unimaginable size, wonder, beauty and complexity.

Listen to Your Heart... or else

As I mentioned in my last post, I am currently in Australia for three weeks. I am in the greater Brisbane region in the state of Queensland for the first week or so (for benefit of non-Aussies). I have two lectures I am giving at universities here. 

My first lecture was delivered at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba. not far from Brisbane. I was invited to talk by the Australian Digital Futures Institute there. 

Associate Professor Luke Van Der Laan, a futurist who is very sympathetic to my kind of Futures thinking, was instrumental in arranging the talk. The lecture was entitled "Deep Futures in the Digital Age".  Deep Futures is my term for a way of looking at the future which expands discussion beyond politics, technology and economics, and includes a greater reflection upon meaning, purpose, spiritual well-being, and the greater relationship of human beings to nature and the world we live in.

Both Luke and I were quite amazed at the interest in the talk, which was not widely publicised. About 60 people gave up their lunchtime to attend. I spoke about how digital technology and modern education can actually be used to deepen our thinking about the future, and the way we live in the present. I spoke about the way that modern society and education has been accelerating certain kinds of human intelligence (visual/spatial and abstract), while effectively retarding other expressions of intelligence (intuitive and self-reflective). I brought in the ideas of mindfulness (bringing the mind into presence) and Integrated Intelligence (spiritual intuition).

I admit I was a bit worried about how the audience would receive some of my ideas, which are a bit "out there" for mainstream university discourse. After all, almost all of the people there were academics and university workers (there wasn't much publicity for the student body). However the audience was very receptive, and the feedback I got from all quarters was very enthusiastic. The sense I get, and from what people have been telling me, is that many people are now ready to discuss these kinds of things, and there is a general thirst for them in Australia. 

This is one of the reasons why I am going to move back to Australia. I have to say that getting people in Hong Kong and China to listen to ideas like mine has been a real struggle. The general mindset of the population is so tightly focused upon finance, work and (I don't know how else to write this) shopping that there is almost no cognitive space left to consider a more deeply meaningful approach to life. 

I'll briefly mention one contrasting example of a talk I gave at a tertiary institution in Hong Kong. The talk was about how to use the intuitive mind in research and learning. Only four people turned up, and two of them got up and left when I introduced the topic, just a couple of minutes into the talk. Apparently they thought the talk was about something else. The two who were left were actually doctoral students who had chosen me to be their supervisor for their doctoral theses, and had come to meet me for the first time. After the talk both told the school they didn't want me to be their supervisor anymore. 

Unfortunately I have had just too many experiences like this in Hong Kong, and I finally have to admit that my situation there is a bit of an oil and water combination. Hong Kong is a place where efficiency and convenience are king, and the goal of education is to get a qualification and get the hell out of the school. "Education for transformation" (one of my favourite sayings) makes no sense in that intellectual climate. I'm not deluding myself that Western education is a paradise for educators like me, but it is further along the road.

I have long written about the importance of following your heart in making decisions. Recently a lot of my spiritual guidance has been reminding me of this. Yesterday I was walking along a street in downtown Byron Bay, and saw a sign for a bookshop, and immediately felt a pull to go in. Inside I found that it was a metaphysical bookstore, and I bought some books. At the counter I asked the older blond haired woman if they did readings there, and she told me they did. So I booked a half hour session. It turned out that the session would be delayed 30 minutes, but I felt a strong sense to hang round for it, and I'm glad I did. The reader, a woman of early middle age named Missy, picked up my situation immediately. It takes one to know one as they say (I do readings myself), and she was very, very good indeed. She tuned into my situation straight away, and emphasised the importance of listening to the heart. Sometimes even inituatives need insight from a second party!

I have to admit I have not listened to my own heart enough with my situation in Hong Kong. I have been getting the "message" to leave for a year or two but have been delaying it. The result is that my own mental state has suffered. That is what happens when you ignore the voice of spirit. But in this instance I'll forgive myself for my stubbornness. 

Better late than never, as they say in the classics.

On Monday I give another talk, this time at the University of the Sunshine Coast, which will be to a much smaller audience - the Futures graduate students at that university.

Marcus

Martin Rees and the Frontiers of Knowledge

The cosmos: it's bigger than your worldview

For those with a fascination with frontier science, you might like to listen to this Martin Rees lecture entitled, “What we’ll never know”.

The audio can be found on the BBC website.

The talk has also kindly transcribed online and can be downloaded here. 

It’s part of a series of lectures called the Reeth Lectures. Rees is the President of the Royal Society, or at least was at the time of the lecture, with his retirement imminent. I find Martin Rees to be a refreshingly open-minded scientist, with a strong ability to accommodate those with differing scientific and cultural views. He is certainly no Richard Dawkins, and expresses his strong belief that science and religion must learn to must co-exist.

In this lecture Rees discusses some of the cutting edge domains of science, and addresses the limits of human understanding. Topics he covers include the discovery of life elsewhere on the universe, space programmes, time travel, the big bang and much more.

As I have often opined on my blogs and in my writing in general, there are limits to the human intellect in its typical current state of development; but this development does not represent the limits of human perception in its current potentials. One thing Rees does not address is whether there are other ways of knowing which can deliver understanding of some of these frontier domains of inquiry. My experience with meditative and visionary states, and the development of Integrated Intelligence, have allowed me to see that such other ways of knowing exist and are available to all of us. 

 Martin Rees grasping the point. But are the big questions like water: the harder one grasps, the less the mind can hold the answers?

It costs billions to fund scientific endeavors like space programmes to attempt to answer the fundamental questions that martin Rees addresses, yet there are at least partial answers to them available via a strong commitment to expanding the intuitive capacities of the mind as they exist today. Integrated Intelligence won’t deliver mathematical answers or empirical proofs, but it does enable a deepening into relationship with the world and cosmos; and in that empathic state, there are profound knowings that are available.

Martin Rees represents the affable limits of open-minded rational inquiry, or what I like to call critical rationalism. There is certainly much more that we can and will know using critical/rational inquiry, so I not suggesting we desist in its deployment.

The one statement Rees makes which epitomises the limits of scientific inquiry as they currently exist, is as follows.

Some have speculated that other universes could exist 'alongside' ours.  Imagine ants crawling around on a large sheet of paper (their two-dimensional 'universe'). They would be unaware of a similar sheet that's parallel to it. Likewise, there could be another entire universe (with 3-dimensional space, like ours) less than a millimetre away, but we would be oblivious to it if that millimetre were measured in a fourth spatial dimension, while we are imprisoned in just three.

Because of the way his cognitive development has been delimited by modern science and education, Martin Rees, somewhat ironically, cannot see just how true that statement is, that the there are indeed other universes sitting right before us, and that intelligent life is already interacting with us from other realms of existence.

I certainly don’t pretend to understand more than a tiny piece of the scope of those other dimensions, but I think it is reasonable to assume that one day science will come to explore and understand them at a much greater level, and with that exploration, we will allow ourselves to relax and permit other ways of knowing to inform our understanding of the cosmos. Intelligence is not confined to the brain, and mental influence is not confined to local space and time. I have seen this to be true beyond any doubt.

It is perfectly reasonable to assume that other intelligent life forms from other worlds and other universes and dimensions know this at a level far beyond what any human can perceive, and that they currently utilise this non-localised space/time and integrated intelligence to connect with other life in the cosmos – and us. This would certainly help to explain many of the things that I have seen and experienced in my own lifetime (UFOs, spiritual entities, ESP, out of body experiences etc), and those experienced by mystics, alternative researchers and teachers such as Whitley Strieber, Esther Hicks, John Mack, Rupert Sheldrake and so on.

Undoubtedly we (I’ll include myself and the reader as lesser known explorers in the same waters) are making mistakes in our thinking and perception. Yet unless we step offshore to explore the oceans of the cosmic mind, not only will we never make mistakes, we will never learn from those mistakes.

Still, I suggest you take the time to listen to Martin Rees lecture and to the teachings of other learned scientists and thinkers who may not necessarily hold a spiritual perspective on life and cosmos. We have much to learn from each other. The truths that I write about here will make themselves known in greater scale sooner or later, and in the meantime we should relax and listen to each other in the spirit of open-minded and humble exploration.

Marcus

Review: The Cosmic Scale of "The Tree of Life"

The Tree of Life is a complex and beautiful Terrence Malick film which verges on the brink of greatness, yet in the end is hampered by its own grandiosity.

The movie is as much a piece of art as it is storytelling. The story is relatively simple. The setting for most of the film is Waco, Texas, perhaps around the early 1960s. The date, like much of the film, remains deliberately unstated. A young man is killed, presumably in the Vietnam War, and we see the family mourning his passing. In particular we are led into the psyche of the grieving mother (Jessica Chastain), as she questions her Christian beliefs, pleading to God, demanding an explanation as to why her child has been taken from her.

Behind this there is a strangely removed narrative of the dead boy’s brother, played by Sean Penn in the present day. Jack O’Brien is a middle aged architect in a large city of metal and glass towers. Upon his face he wears a look of constant bewilderment, haunted by the death of his brother many years before. We see the older Jack wandering through huge office spaces and cavernous walkways. The contrast with the setting of his idyllic small town childhood could not be more stark. I assume Penn wasn’t paid by the word for his role in the movie, as he  barely opens his mouth in the small amount of screen time he does get. As the story unfolds we see much of the narrative through the eyes of the young Jack, played by Hunter McCraken.

Despite its weaknesses, I do recommend this film. This is a quintessentially spiritual experience  which attempts to weave together the unimaginably vast universe which has been revealed by modern scientific cosmology and biology, and the spiritual worldview of Christianity and religion in general. For me, by far the most profound and memorable part of the film is the breathtaking scenes of cosmic frontiers which inexplicably burst forth onto the screen just after we have been confronted with the family's grief. We see planets moving across a boiling sun, the moons of Jupiter orbiting the colossal planet, whirling galaxies stretching to infinity. And all displayed with an angelic, operatic soundtrack which lifts the soul into a souring mystical climax. Then we are witness to the beginnings of biological life itself, the fertilization of the egg, the dance of living cells as they reproduce and multiply. We see an asteroid crashing into the earth, ice ages, and even dinosaurs. The Tree of Life is indeed a creative work on an epic scale.

And then we are brought back to Waco, Texas. But even this mundane world is transformed into an almost celestial beauty by superb cinematography, from sunlight streaming through windows, soft and intimate close ups of faces, children playing and laughing as they run through the spray of a water sprinkler, the planting of a tree… We see the mother playing with her growing child, and eventually the family produces three boys.

Did I mention Brad Pitt is in there too? Pitt plays the classic, overly stern patriarch, tormented by his own demons and unfulfilled quest for personal fulfillment. I’m not a great Brad Pitt fan, but I have to say this was an entirely convincing performance by him. I’m sure many of us now in middle age will relate to a time when fathers were quite different from the typical family patriarch of today. Certainly I could see elements of my own father’s iron fisted ways in Pitt’s tough performance.

The Tree of Life will divide audiences, I suspect. In the day time session I attended here in Hong Kong, some people got up and left - bored, I suspect, with the slow pace of the movie. But the vast majority stayed, and several were weeping near the end.

Even if its entertainment factor does not live up to the grand scale of Transformers 2 (yes, that’s sarcasm), The Tree of Life is not a film you will forget quickly. Indeed, as I reflected upon this movie today, it struck me that this is a piece of cinema that could potentially stir the latent spiritual yearnings amongst those cognitively locked inside the iron cage of the modernist scientific worldview. The movie paints a grand, breathtaking cosmos which honours the vast frontiers of scientific knowledge even as it renders resplendent the spiritual longings of the mystic attempting to answer the eternal questions of life, death and what it all means. 

(warning, slight spoiler in the remainder of the paragraph) In the film’s climax the mother surrenders in an archetypal act of grace. She says, “Lord, I give you my son.” This follows on from the opening scene of the movie, where a voiceover implores that there are two ways of the universe: the way of nature, and the way of Grace. The way of nature is conflict and death. The way of Grace opens us to the eternal.

This could have been a better film, a classic indeed, with tighter editing, and perhaps a tighter reign on the director’s ego! For the artist, leaving stuff out is always difficult. If the movie had been cut back by 20-30 minutes I think it could have been much more powerful. Instead, it does get slightly confusing in places, and the narrative is not always explicit. There are elements of surrealism too, and it is not always easy to separate the real from the psychic (in the broader sense of the term).

But then again, maybe that is the entire point. Life rarely delivers answers in neat blocks of reality.

Just a few weeks ago a childhood friend of mine sent me an email. I had - a few months previously - given him details of my websites and blogs. He wrote to me and said, “I am confused. Are you for religion or for science?” I felt somewhat sad that a man in his mid forties has lived so long bearing the false science/religion dichotomy on which modern western thought is premised. It is for people like my friend that The Tree of Life might bear the greatest gift. That is, the awareness that science and spirituality are part of the one seamless whole, and that it is only the split in the modern mind that has torn them asunder.

As has been noted, the universe is not only vaster than we think, it is vaster than we can think.

Stephen Hawking & the Science Delusion

I apologise for some of the formatting errors, especially spacing in this post. Blogger is really playing up today, and I have already spent way too much time trying to correct this...

It’s now official. Heaven is a fairy story believed by people who are afraid of the dark, says famed physicist Stephen Hawking, in an interview with Ian Sample in The Guardian. The article already has some 2000 comments posted. I haven’t read a single one, but I already know that they will consist of religious enthusiasts and scientifically minded skeptics beating each other over the head with very blunt objects. In today’s post I am going to skirt round the projections of minds violently seeking to affirm their worldviews, and move directly to addressing the truth claims of Hawking from the first person perspective of a mystic.

That is, me.

I will simply take Hawking’s individual claims one at a time and relate what I have discovered at a personal level. Feel free to ignore everything written here if you prefer.

Firstly, about truth claims. The ways of knowing – cognitive processes – which we use in attempting to understand these big questions about God, the universe and everything are crucial in determining the answers we find. From my perspective, I have come to see that a rational mind employing verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical intelligence is inherently limited in what it can understand about first causes– the fundamental nature of things. This is because left brained processes operate is a state of agitated separation from the things being examined. The scientific method is inherently limited for this reason. The ‘rational’ is fantastic for describing things from the surface, but poor at perceiving depth – the fundamental causes which underpin the existence of phenomena. The refusal to acknowledge this in dominant science is one of the great problems of our times.

I have spent two decades working with intuitive ways of knowing in deeply relaxed states. In these states of consciousness brain physiology changes, and the deep connections between and amongst things becomes clearer. It is also the realm of spiritual guidance and direct knowing. Spiritual guidance comes directly from spiritual entities which exist in some other dimensions. I don’t know much about the specifics of such dimensions. I just know that they exist, and that information is sometimes received from those dimensions (there is also utter nonsense relayed from other dimensions, but I won’t go into that here).

The physical universe that we detect with our senses and the instruments of science and mathematics is only a small component of reality.

This truth claim – that intuitive ways of knowing are valid ways of understanding the cosmos - is unprovable, and I am not going to try to validate it beyond what I have written. I will just point out that my claim is no less provable than the claim that by breaking things down into component parts we can divulge the intimate meaning and purpose of things, and not just say, some very important and interesting descriptions about the way things function. The confusion of function with cause and/or purpose is one of the prime delusions of modern science. The selfish gene theory is the perfect example. That genes exist and the system works towards their preservation and reproduction is purely descriptive. The reproduction of consciousness (carried within a physical form) can just as readily be ascribed as the raison d'être of evolution. It is no less - and no more - provable.

The important point is that Stephen Hawking knows none of this simply because his physical disability creates a disembodied condition which effectively retards spiritual perception; and even beyond this he has not done the required work necessary to understand it. He has not developed his mind in the way required to perceive deeply. His mind exists in a state of extreme dissociation from body and also from his intuitive faculties. Of course this is not his fault, due the nature of his physical condition. Embodiment is crucial to be fully present, which in turn opens doorways to expanded perception (the idea that the physical world is an illusion and not important is a false spiritual teaching).

In a sense Stephen Hawking is simply not qualified to make pronouncements about first causes because is using a rational way of knowing in an attempt to comprehend spiritual phenomena. That makes about as much sense as walking into an art gallery with a calculator with the aim of appreciating some classical paintings.

Now I turn to some of other things that Hawking has stated. My aim is not to win any friends here, but simply to tell the truth as I understand it. Apologies in advance for those who may be offended.

"What could define God [is a conception of divinity] as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of that God," Hawking told Sawyer. "They made a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe and how insignificant an accidental human life is in it, that seems most impossible."

The most obvious error that Hawking demonstrates is a fundamental lack of sophistication regarding the concept of God. He begins with the false premise that God is a human like deity who controls things from afar, and hands out reward and punishment according to a predefined set of rules. This is the erroneous teaching that most religions put forward. This fundamental confusion is what leads Hawking astray from the word go, and most of the conclusions which follow are thus inaccurate.

Hawking then attempts to define God as the laws of nature, which is really just a semantic game. Einstein, by the way, used the word ‘God’ in the same sense. He did not believe in a personal God.

If we change the concept of God to being a background intelligence which lies at the heart of all things, and that religions have simply confused this teachings by attempting to understand it through the mind, then things start to fall into place more easily. In fact that background consciousness is accessible, but only when the mind is brought into deep stillness. It cannot be accessed through the ‘rational’ mind. That ‘God’ does possess qualities which are consistent with many religious representations: compassion, love, forgiveness; and is experienced as an overwhelming sense of light. It’s just that it isn’t anthropomorphic.

The limits of reason are perhaps best demonstrated with Hawking’s attempt to develop a "theory of everything" – a set of equations that describe every particle and force in the entire universe. "It would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God," Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time. Here Hawking has reached the precise boundary where reason has exhausts its potential. No equation will ever allow one to know the mind of God. Mathematics is processed – at least in part - via the angular gyrus, which is situated near the superior edge of the temporal lobe of the brain (although other brain regions are activated, depending upon the problem or the way we go about solving it). No amount of number crunching will ever bridge the gap between the knower and the known. Staring at an equation simply embeds consciousness within the left brain and its delimited neural processing.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark."

This is an incorrect conclusion because the premise if false. The brain may metaphorically share similarities with a computer, but consciousness is not confined to the brain. It merely functions through the brain while the body is alive. When the brain and body die, consciousness leaves the body and moves into another plane. In fact consciousness often leaks from, or vacates the body even while the body is alive. There are projections of thought which affect others around us, and other’s thoughts affect us in turn. I explain all this in detail in Discover Your Soul Template. Out of body experiences are also real, although most involve ‘travel’ to other dimensions, not to physical places in our world.

Hawking is correct when he says that there is no Heaven in the way Christians think of it, but he is incorrect when he states that there is no afterlife. When you die your consciousness continues, but it continues at precisely the same level of spiritual evolution as the moment you left the body. All the essential psychological and spiritual issues which remain unresolved are taken with you. This is quite clear to me. I am continually aware of projections from many relatives who have died, for example. I have observed my late father’s consciousness on many occasions, and he retains all the guilt, self-rejection and anger that he carried with him when he was alive in his body. I cannot say much about the after-life dimension. All I know is that it is no Happy Happy Land. I can say that just like here on earth, we continue to interact with others, and there are probably opportunities to learn and grow, just as there are on Earth. And just like on earth, most people on the other side probably don’t learn much.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to ... set the Universe going…”

This explains very little, and is simply poor logic by Hawking. One might ask where the laws came from? The logic is circular, because he makes the fundamental nonprovable claim that there is spontaneous creation and then goes on to say that this is the reason why the cosmos exists (it creates itself therefore it exists to create itself). Certainly it is not necessary to invoke a Biblical God here. But then again, one can just as easily and validly do so. Either case is simply a guess.

So if everyone is destined to power-down like computers at the end of their lives, what should humans do to lend meaning to their experience?

"We should seek the greatest value of our action," Hawking told the paper.

Certainly this is so, but the problem is that there is no fundamental value structure. How are we to separate Al Quaida’s values from that of the Tele Tubbies’? In fact there are universal values, and they can be directly experienced in silent meditation. Love, compassion, forgiveness, live and let live, surrender… all these are inherent qualities of a conscious universe. They are experienced in communion with “God." There is a fundamental evolutionary thrust of consciousness, and for humans that involves ‘correcting’ the delusions of the human ego. To make that as simple as I can, it is coming to a deeper understanding of the abuse of power and control (evil) and correcting the misconception of what love is (finding goodness). This sounds an awful lot like something a few religions have been saying for several millennia.

The problem is that modern science, education and society make little room for the silent presence where the understandings I mention can be directly perceived. Science has made all discussion of God and spiritual experience a taboo. Education has followed suit and prefers to focus upon filling brains with information and making students work towards tests. And society is increasingly teaching us how to consume, accumulate stuff and fiddle with gadgets. We are now a species of zombies, cut off from our spirits. Society compounds the problem by promoting the most dissociated of individuals to the top of the pile (How else did Richard Dawkins become Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford?) , and silencing those who have a deeper understanding of the fundamental basis of life and consciousness.

The result is what I call the zombie delusion, and most of us are living it.

Opening to the Spirit of China

Note: I no longer write in this blog. My new blog is www.mind-futures.com.

See you over there,

Marcus



Here’s a confession. It’s not much of a secret really, and anyone who has read more than a few of my blogs will no doubt be aware of this at some level. So here it is. Sometimes I become frustrated at the typical mindset of people in China and Hong Kong. Ever since the late Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping declared “It’s glorious to get rich” around about 30 years ago, China has been hell bent on modernization and in particular, the focus is upon materialism. Money and social advancement are at the forefront of most people’s lives. Within this environment, there hasn’t been a lot of scope for the kind of ideas I talk about on this bog and in my books (well, my blog is blocked in mainland China, anyway!). For example, about four years ago I met up with a youngish woman in Beijing, and she was trying to begin a kind of spiritual/ New Age company there. I am pretty sure that nothing came of it, because she soon stopped responding to emails and I never heard from her, nor of her, again.

Yet there are changes afoot in China, in terms of a deepening of awareness, and like most changes in china, they are coming fast!

During the last days of my Beijing vacation, I attended a three day workshop with Australian spiritual teacher Leonard Jacobson (www.leonardjacobson.com) at a beautiful “resort” about one hour out of the centre of Beijing. I really didn’t know what to expect, as I had only confirmed my place there two days before. I didn’t know who was attending, nor what Leonard was going to do. I just knew that I had to be there.

I should mention that Leonard’s thinking has inspired me much over the years. Before the workshop I had met Leonard on two previous occasions, the last time being in 2001.

I was driven out to the workshop by Amy, a Chinese woman who lives in Beijing with her American husband. I was expecting that there might be 10-20 people at the workshop. I shocked when Amy told me that there would be 130 people there from all over China, and I was the only foreigner attending! (not counting some Taiwanese).

Beijing is very urbanised place, and there is not a lot of green space in the city centre. However when we got to the grounds where the workshops were being held, I found myself in large open spaces. The whole resort was brand new, and I could actually smell the ‘fresh’ wood inside. The wide open spaces were bejeweled with large ponds (full of fish), and hot springs. Birds sang in the trees, and geese waddled around the walkways.

Once the workshop started, I was amazed at how receptive most of the Chinese people present were to Leonard's teachings and the simple - yet powerful - processes he used. Basically Leonard brings people into deep presence. His entire teaching centres on the single premise that “enlightenment” happens now, and that attachment to the past and thought of the future ensnare us in the mind and ego.

Incredible as it may seem, Leonard does no preparation for his workshops. Not even a four day workshop like this one! (I could only attend the first 3 days). Almost the entire event unfolds spontaneously. There was wonderful translator there, a Chinese woman named Tiffany, who had helped organise the event.

As the audience began to relax into presence, the same thing began to happen as happens with all Leonard’s workshops. Put simply, people's repressed emotional pain started to spontaneously emerge. I was quite shocked actually. I really didn't think Chinese people would allow themselves to be so emotionally vulnerable in public, due to cultural restrictions there.

Typically, what would happen is that Leonard would begin to talk about something, then someone in the audience would begin to sob or wail as their energy began to surface. Leonard would (on most occasions) then address the person, and quite often (though not always) he would invite them out the front. Leonard would then help them to connect with whatever pain they felt. This in turn would trigger some emotional release in audience members. Let me give just one example. There is something of a synchronicity involved in this one, for me.

There was a woman sitting right in front of me who kept putting her hand up. She was probably about late forties. I could see and hear that she was sobbing and shaking. She was a little scared, and kept putting her hand half up, but not high enough to actually attract attention. I wanted to help her raise her hand (the rescuer in me), but in the end she got noticed. The whole situation was perfect for me, because there was something I was meant to see (of all the people who could have been directly in front of me, it was her!). Finally, Leonard asked her what her problem was.  The woman was terribly distraufght, telling of how childhood was a nightmare. She began to sob deeply. Leonard invited her out the front, and allowed her to express what she felt (the whole process was incredibly loving and gentle). Then the little girl inside her started raging against what happened during the Cultural Revolution (a hellish social movement started by Mao Ze Dong, lasting a whole decade, 1966-76). As she allowed the pain to surface, she raged about how everything around her was darkness and pain and suffering, and nothing was safe.

People started to shift a little uncomfortably in their seats, as you can imagine, because all talk of this period in Chinese history is effectively banned in China, right to this day. Soon the woman began to rage with full fury against the government and the Communist Party for the living hell they had created. I was deeply moved by her courage. She simply let loose her murdrous wrath, expressing what the wounded part of herself had been wanting to “do” for 35 years – to kill and destroy, to take revenge against those who had hurt her and those she loved.

Leonard then helped her bring that wounded part of herself into the present, which is so vital for healing (As long as we are stuck in the pain, the suffering and the blame, we cannot heal). The purpose is to allow the pain and its accomanying story to surface, but to bring to deeper understanding that the story is not real anymore. It is only the pain that is real. The past is gone, and only the present moment is extant.

I must say I was deeply moved by the woman’s personal courage.

The next morning I was walking to breakfast, and the woman "just happened" to be coming out of her villa at the same time as me. So I started talking to her, and told her how brave she was, and how China needed more people like her who could face the pain inside themselves and express it responsibly. She agreed. She told me that she had talked to a friend beforehand and decided it was OK that she brought it up.

The whole workshop made me realise that there are people in China, many in fact, who are now willing to make the spiritual journey. Other Chinese people I spoke with told me that these kinds of ideas are booming in China now, and in the last year or two it has really taken off. One aspect of this is that life coaching using spiritual or intuitive consciousness is now increasingly in demand. I was told that there were many middle class people in there 30s and 40s who are well off, but who are asking themselves why they are not happy and fulfilled.

During my time at the workshop I was invited to give public talks and workshops at several different venues. During my vacation I also met with another women who has a group of about 40 alternative practitioners in Beijing. She invited me to do some work with her group.

In short, it is an exciting time in China for this. And there is much need of healing of the past in the country. The energy of trauma cannot be suppressed by book burnings and internet police. As long as that energy remains unhealed, there will always be the danger that it will be projected back into the world via violence and chaos.

Yet the truth remains that those of us who do this work in China tread a fine line. The day after that woman had raged against the Cultural Revolution, I discussed the issue with some of the workshop organisers. They accepted the woman's behaviour, but clearly felt slightly nervous about the whole thing. There were uniformed police at the event at various times, and it is fairly standard to have undercover government “representatives” at such gatherings.

What I really liked about Leonard is that he is not trying to overthrow governments. He is just getting people to take responsibility for the own spiritual evolution. I feel the same way. I have no personal interest in challenging any power structures in China, merely helping people who wish to open their spirits to a greater awareness and understanding.

My Beijing trip was an eye opener. I feel I now have a greater understanding, respect and love for the the Chinese people, and their courage.