Prior To Consciousness Quotes

The question of truth is really a question of memory, deep memory, for it deals with something prior to ourselves and can succeed in uniting us in a way that transcends our petty and limited individual consciousness. It is a question about the origin of all that is, in whose light we can glimpse the goal and thus the meaning of our common path.

The feeling of health produces health; the feeling of wealth produces wealth. How do you feel? 6. Imagination is your most powerful faculty. Imagine what is lovely and of good report. You are what you imagine yourself to be. 7. You avoid conflict between your conscious and subconscious in the sleepy state. Imagine the fulfillment of your desire over and over again prior to sleep. Sleep in peace and wake in joy.

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

Consciousness is spotless, formless and prior to intellect.

Our actions, our decisions, and even the very perceptions we register in our consciousness have been primed by the larger story—of our family, our community, our culture—in which we imagine ourselves.

When I listened within myself I saw that the world is what it is – nothing more, nothing less. Where reality is concerned, there is no “what should be.” There is only what is, just the way it is, right now. The truth is prior to every story. And every story, prior to investigation, prevents us from seeing what’s true.

One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively. We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.

Charisma and people’s prior beliefs about their powers are key: if you’re told that someone is renowned the world over for their abilities as a hypnotist or spiritual healer, your brain will be more likely to surrender executive control to them.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self. Once one realizes this, the status of thoughts themselves, as transient expressions of consciousness, can be understood.

Those who rule have always had an interest in shaping the perceptions of those they wish to rule. But never in the history of humanity has their toolbox been so full. Advances in technology and psychology have enabled the messages of the rulers to permeate our consciousness to a degree no prior society could have imagined.

Everything that I know about the world, even through science, I know from a perspective that is my own or from an experience of the world without which scientific symbols would be meaningless. The entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously, to appreciate precisely its sense and its scope, we must first awaken that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science neither has, nor ever will have the same ontological sense as the perceived world for the simple reason that science is a determination or an explanation of that world. ... Scientific perspectives … always imply, without mentioning it, that other perspective - the perspective of consciousness - by which a world first arranges itself around me and begins to exist for me. To return to the things themselves is to return to this world prior to knowledge, this world of which knowledge always speaks, and this world with regard to which every scientific determination is abstract, signitive, and dependent, just like geography with regard to the landscape where we first learned what a forest, a meadow, or a river is.

What you are calling “I” is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness. Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

One must be able to pay attention closely enough to glimpse what consciousness is like between thoughts—that is, prior to the arising of the next one. Consciousness does not feel like a self.

Every negative complex of emotion conceals a conflict, a problem or dilemma made up of contradictory or opposing motives or desires. Self-observation must recover these emotional seeds of the dramatization of life if real control of habits is to occur. Otherwise, mere control of habits will itself become a form of dramatized conflict or warfare with the motives of our lives. Food desires, sex desires, relational desires, desires for experience and acquisition, for rest, for release, for attention, for solitude, for life, for death, the whole pattern of desires must come under the view of consciousness, the aspects of the conflicts must be differentiated, and habits must be controlled to serve well-being or the pleasurable and effective play of Life. This whole process is truly possible only in the midst of the prolonged occasion of spiritual life in practice, since the mere mechanical and analytical attempts at self-liberation and self-healing do not undermine the principal emotion or seat of conflict, which is the intention to identify with a separate self sense and to reject and forget the prior and natural Condition of Unqualified or Divine Consciousness.

The first steps toward motivated reasoning occur prior to conscious awareness, meaning that we often find ourselves on a moving train of motivated reasoning long before we can frame our first deliberate thought.

Boethius slips in, as axiomatic, the remark that all perfect things are prior to all imperfect things.99 It was common ground to nearly all ancient and medieval thinkers except the Epicureans.100 I have already101 stressed the radical difference which this involves between their thought and the developmental or evolutionary concepts of our own period—a difference which perhaps leaves no area and no level of consciousness unaffected.

We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored. Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity of consciousness, prior to the arising of thought.

Normal memory gradually fades into the past. Traumatic and repressed memories have a tendency to linger around. They are splintered into fragments during overwhelming events experienced as a child. Images, sensations, emotions, and beliefs are torn apart. These disconnected pieces can later erupt into consciousness as separate "memories." These fragments may surface in the form of explicit memories, which are frighteningly vivid snapshot or video-like images of traumatic experiences; or they may surface as implicit memories, which include physical sensations, emotions, or beliefs that were part of the original traumatic experiences. When implicit fragments emerge into the present without an accompanying visually explicit memory, it is very hard to discern that these feelings of anxiety, fear, shame, rage, numbness, and loneliness are related to prior trauma.

True awakening is an explosion of Infinite Love; Infinite Light; and Infinite Spirit bursting forth through the highest chakra flowers of your body Divine; as you find yourself in a sea of Universal Consciousness. That is the experience prior to all words thoughts theories or beliefs... Namaste

While the philosophy of Advaita, and Ramana’s own words, may tend to support a metaphysical reading of teachings of this kind, their validity is not metaphysical. Rather, it is experiential. The whole of Advaita reduces to a series of very simple and testable assertions: Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes 'one's owns' only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a natural and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own.

I am optimistic that the so-called hard problem of consciousness will be solved by empirical and conceptual advances - working in tandem - made in cognitive neuroscience. What is the hard problem? No-one has a clue (at the moment) how to answer the question of why the neural basis of the phenomenal feel of my experience of, for example red, is the neural basis of that particular phenomenal feel rather than a different one or none at all. There is an explanatory gap here that we do not know how to close now, but I have faith that we will someday. The hard problem is conceptually and explanatorily prior to the issue of what the nature of the self is, as can be seen in part by noting that the problem would persist even for experiences that aren't organised into selves. No doubt solving the hard problem (i.e closing the explanatory gap) will require ideas we cannot now anticipate. The mind-body problem is so singular that no appeal to the closing of past explanatory gaps justifies optimism. But I remain optimistic nonetheless.

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.

If we live in a world of states, and if out-of-state existence is impossible, then we all must live as national citizens. We are the nation, and the nation is us. This is as fundamental as it is an inescapable reality. Nationalism engulfs both the individual and the collective; it produces the 'I' and 'We' dialectically and separately. Not only does nationalism produce the community and its individual members: it is itself the community and its realized individual subjects, for without these there is no nationalism. "Leading sociologists and philosophers have emphasized the pervasive presence of the community in individual consciousnesses, where the social bond is an essential part of the self. It is not only that the 'I' is a member of the 'We,' but, more importantly, that the 'We' is a necessary member of the 'I.' It is an axiom of sociological theory, writes Scheler, that all human knowledge 'precedes levels of self-contagiousness of one's self-value. There is no "I" without "We." The "We" is filled with contents prior to the "I." ' Likewise, Mannheim emphasizes ideas and thought structures as functions of social relations that exist within the group, excluding the possibility of any ideas arising independently of socially shared meanings. The social reality of nationalism not only generates meanings but is itself a 'context of meaning'; hence our insistence that nationalism constitutes and is constituted by the community as a social order. 'It is senseless to pose questions such as whether the mind is socially determined, as though the mind and society each posses a substance of their own' [citing Pressler and Dasilva's Sociology]. The profound implications of the individual's embeddedness in the national community is that the community's ethos is prior and therefore historically determinative of all socioepistemic phenomena. And if thought structures are predetermined by intellectual history, by society's inheritance of historical forms of knowledge, then those structures are also a priori predetermined by the linguistic structures in which this history is enveloped, cast, and framed. Like law, nationalism is everywhere: it creates the community and shapes world history even before nationalism comes into it.

As a result of the work done by all these stratifying force in language, there are no "neutral" words and forms - words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms, but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived it socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else's. It becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one's own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easy to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated - overpopulated - with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

Scientists tell us that when time began, fourteen billion years ago, something came from nothing. When you awake to the ground of Being, you realize that when something came from nothing, the nothing didn’t disappear. That unmanifest, unborn dimension is the ever-present ground out of which everything is still arising in every moment. It is what the Buddha called “the deathless,” and what others call “eternity consciousness.” When you awaken to this dimension in your own awareness, you will find yourself always already resting in the eternal moment before time began. This is the recognition that liberates: Prior to everything, I already am. The experience of this recognition is not one of becoming liberated. It is of being already liberated. What you realize when you awaken to that ground is that there is a part of each and every one of us that is already free—from everything. That part of yourself, which is the ground of Being, has never been bound, trapped, or limited in any way. That’s the part of yourself that I want you to discover. It’s not the part of yourself that needs to become free. It is already free, right now.

Is true freedom even possible? It certainly is in a momentary sense, as any mature practitioner of meditation knows, and those moments can increase in both number and duration with practice. Therefore, I see no reason why a person couldn’t perfectly banish the illusion of the self. However, just the ability to meditate—to rest as consciousness for a few moments prior to the arising of the next thought—can offer a profound relief from mental suffering.

It always seems to be morning when she remembers things. I open my eyes to the roll of the ship and the sight of her watching me with her thoughtful, gold gaze, and then she’ll say something monumental, delivering it as it’s as magnificent as which socks I should wear that day. Luta Voma, she said. What? I said, confused. LV, she said. Linta. Linta? Ahsoken? LV! Luta Voma! I was trying to wake up, trying to form thoughts around why the words luta voma should be dropping into my consciousness with a splash of what sleepily felt like surprise. Isn’t luta voma a Keepish expression for hope? I finally managed. No, she said. Toma voma is hope. Luta voma is something else, she said. Trust. So, your prior name was Trust and your new name is Hope? I said. Isn’t that a strange coincidence, that they’re so similar? No, she said. Girl tried many names before Hope agreed. Remember? Before, Hope liked Luta Voma. Now, Hope likes Hope. It made me wonder, wish, that something essential remains, no matter how much we are hurt.

opting to complain, life gives you things to complain about this vicious circle ensures your happiness drought life responds to us according to our actions and belief thus reinforcing those beliefs to no relief there is no first cause—still, break the cycle abide in peaceful Silence or experience an inner hell “others” are often a reflecting mirror shining back revealing to us what loads are left to unstack what are friends for but a means to practice kindness and for fortifying the ego’s belief in disconnectedness people cater to me according to my own nature so they are me—there is no individual self, rest assured tweak your thoughts about her and she then treats you thus all minds are one, and all is illusory, as priorly discussed she is you, and you, her the shroud of separateness shall now henceforth wither look back at your life’s recurring patterns and themes and the façade of the ego will start to crack at the seams untranscended mindsets follow wherever we go the common denominator is what your mind has sown that which supports life is automatically supported the get-gain-obtain mentality can be safely aborted

The finally realized image-whole is, necessarily, a perceptual demonstration of (both) the root-principle of the prior unity of all conditionality and the Transcendental Principle of the Primal Equanimity of Reality Itself—rather than a mere conventional-reality representation of a yet unresolved experience of ordinarily apparent disunity, egoic separateness, disturbance, dilemma, struggle, suffering, mortality, and (altogether) the absence of Transcendental Self-Illumination (or of the Intrinsic Self-Realization of the egoless and Indivisible Conscious Light of Reality Itself)

The original condition of human beings, prior to the development of self-reflective consciousness, must have been a state of inner peace disturbed only now and again by tides of hunger, sexuality, pain, and danger. The forms of psychic entropy that currently cause us so much anguish—unfulfilled wants, dashed expectations, loneliness, frustration, anxiety, guilt—are all likely to have been recent invaders of the mind. They are by-products of the tremendous increase in complexity of the cerebral cortex and of the symbolic enrichment of culture. They are the dark side of the emergence of consciousness.

The “noble” person has a completely naïve and non-reflective awareness of his own value and of his fullness of being, an obscure conviction which enriches every conscious moment of his existence, as if he were autonomously rooted in the universe. This should not be mistaken for “pride.” Quite on the contrary, pride results from an experienced diminution of this “naive” self-confidence. It is a way of “holding on” to one’s value, of seizing and “preserving” it deliberately. The noble man’s naive self-confidence, which is as natural to him as tension is to the muscles, permits him calmly to assimilate the merits of others in all the fullness of their substance and configuration. He never “grudges” them their merits. On the contrary: he rejoices in their virtues and feels that they make the world more worthy of love. His naive self-confidence is by no means “compounded” of a series of positive valuations based on specific qualities, talents, and virtues: it is originally directed at his very essence and being. Therefore he can afford to admit that another person has certain “qualities” superior to his own or is more “gifted” in some respects—indeed in all respects. Such a conclusion does not diminish his naïve awareness of his own value, which needs no justification or proof by achievements or abilities. Achievements merely serve to confirm it. On the other hand, the “common” man (in the exact acceptation of the term) can only experience his value and that of another if he relates the two, and he clearly perceives only those qualities which constitute possible differences. The noble man experiences value prior to any comparison, the common man in and through a comparison. For the latter, the relation is the selective precondition for apprehending any value. Every value is a relative thing, “higher” or “lower,” “more” or “less” than his own. He arrives at value judgments by comparing himself to others and others to himself

In 2007, Jeffrey Flier, dean of Harvard Medical School and his wife and colleague in obesity research, Terry Maratos-Flier, published an article in Scientific American called “What Fuels Fat.” In it, they described the intimate link between appetite and energy expenditure, making clear that they are not simply variables that an individual can consciously decide to change with the only effect being that his or her fat tissue will get smaller or larger to compensate. An animal whose food is suddenly restricted tends to reduce its energy expenditure both by being less active and by slowing energy use in cells, thereby limiting weight loss. It also experiences increased hunger so that once the restriction ends, it will eat more than its prior norm until the earlier weight is attained. What the Fliers accomplished in just two sentences is to explain why a hundred years of intuitively obvious dietary advice—eat less—doesn’t work in animals. If we restrict the amount of food an animal can eat (we can’t just tell it to eat less, we have to give it no choice), not only does it get hungry, but it actually expends less energy. Its metabolic rate slows down. Its cells burn less energy (because they have less energy to burn). And when it gets a chance to eat as much as it wants, it gains the weight right back. The

t this point I would like to return to the question of the plot movement and the different narrative levels of the book. David Lodge raises a crucial issue when he asks 'how Charlotte Brontë created a literary structure in which the domestic and the mythical, the realistic world of social behaviour and the romantic world of passionate self-consciousness, could co-exist with only occasional lapses into incongruity.' As far as the plot and setting go, however, this states the question rather misleadingly, for in fact at Thornfield there begins a progressive plot movement from realism to fantasy. By 'realism' I do not mean the predominance of the every day and commonplace, or an authorial objectivity of treatment, but simply the use of material that the reader can accept as existing in the ordinary world as well, or of events of a kind that might happen in it without being viewed as extraordinary. That is, things that have a face-value currency of meaning prior to any concealed meaning they may hold or suggest. Thus while Gateshead and Lowood School fit neatly into, and contribute importantly to, the symbolic pattern of the book, they are perfectly believable places in their own right. Even the heavy-handed and obvious satire of Mr Brocklehurst and his family does not invalidate him as a credible conception. But with the beginning of the mystery of the Thornfield attic the plot starts moving away from this facevalue actuality.

This scroll is my personal obituary, a journal that documents my time toiling on this rocky orb. I labored to say who I am, how I lived, and frame the troubling questions regarding what I seek. I wrote in order to penetrate illusions, address the tedium of existence, gain insight into my true nature, and give conscious shape to the vestiges of a tormented man. I used this written journey of the mind to explore all prior reference points of self-identity and toiled to meld the disharmonious components of a fragmented psyche into a wholesome human being. Writing was a tool employed to use conscious suffering mercilessly to suppress a caustic ego and resurrect a more inclusive, synthetic, and unitive consciousness that no longer wants for anything or suffers from the travails of life.

From 1992 to 1997, TAT [Treating Abuse Today] under my editorship published several articles by a number of respected professionals who seriously questioned the false memory syndrome (FMS) hypothesis and the methodology, ethics, and assertions of those who were rapidly pushing the concept into the public consciousness. During that time, not one person from the FMS movement contacted me to refute the specific points made in the articles or to present any research that would prove even a single case of this allegedly “epidemic” syndrome. Instead of a reasoned response to the published articles, for nearly three years proponents of the so-called FMS hypothesis–including members, officials, and supporters of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc. (FMSF)–have waged a campaign of harassment, defamation, and psychological terrorism against me, my clients, staff, family, and other innocent people connected with me. These clearly are intended to (a) intimidate me and anyone associated with me; (b) terrorize and deter access to my psychotherapy clients; (c) encumber my resources; and (d) destroy my reputation publicly, in the business community, among my professional colleagues, and within national and international professional organizations. Before describing this highly orchestrated campaign, let me emphasize that I have never treated any member of this group or their families, and do not have any relationships to any of my counseling clients. Neither have I consulted to their cases nor do I bear any relation to the disclosures of memories of sexual abuse in their families. I had no prior dealings with any of this group before they began showing up at my offices with offensive and defamatory signs early in 1995. Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187

Something staticky and paranormally ventilated about the air, which drifted through a half-open window, late one afternoon, caused a delicately waking Paul, clutching a pillow and drooling a little, to believe he was a small child in Florida, in a medium-size house, on or near winter break. He felt dimly excited, anticipating a hyperactive movement of his body into a standing position, then was mostly unconscious for a vague amount of time until becoming aware of what seemed to be a baffling non sequitur—and, briefly, in its mysterious approach from some eerie distance, like someone else’s consciousness—before resolving plainly as a memory, of having already left Florida, at some point, to attend New York University. After a deadpan pause, during which the new information was accepted by default as recent, he casually believed it was autumn and he was in college, and as he felt that period’s particular gloominess he sensed a concurrent assembling, at a specific distance inside himself, of dozens of once-intimate images, people, places, situations. With a sensation of easily and entirely abandoning a prior context, of having no memory, he focused, as an intrigued observer, on this assembling and was surprised by an urge, which he immediately knew he hadn’t felt in months, or maybe years, to physically involve himself—by going outside and living each day patiently—in the ongoing, concrete occurrence of what he was passively, slowly remembering. But the emotion dispersed to a kind of nothingness—and its associated memories, like organs in a lifeless body, became rapidly indiscernible, dissembling by the metaphysical equivalent, if there was one, of entropy—as he realized, with some confusion and an oddly instinctual reluctance, blinking and discerning his new room, which after two months could still seem unfamiliar, that he was somewhere else, as a different person, in a much later year.

it appears various ancient Mystics had a hard time explaining with their archaic languages lacking the words for detailing “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” the Trinity concept being misunderstood by a good host the Father is the immutable unmoving Godhead from whence the Holy Ghost flows to all widespread the Son, a physical expression in those whose self is dead God can't be received fully if the “me” occupies space the sense of individual selfhood disappears without a trace the higher nature of God is formless unmanifested from it, this changing world of form is emanated everything is God, in God, all-inclusively unending ungraspable by brain-mind and its inferior comprehending people wonder, “okay, but what created God?” contemplate “Eternal” or “Infinite” to see the query flawed All is the Mind of God without exception including your Mind prior to conception formless No-Thing, yet Infinitely Everything yet both, yet neither, for it's beyond expounding

New Orleans at the nexus of gold rush, immigration, war, and trade created a fertile playground for a variety of :mysterious affections" between men. What Whitman would later call "adhesiveness" — his term for male-male love borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology — was on full display in the Crescent City. Prior to the existence of a modern concept of homosexuality (as sexual orientation), hand-holding, embracing, or sharing a bed were broadly considered appropriate expressions of bonding between members of the same sex. A city like New Orleans, overrun with transitory young men of marriageable age without local family ties, invited further experimentation. When Whitman was pressed, late in life, about his sexual history in New Orleans, he became flustered, quickly making up stories about affairs with women and having fathered numerous illegitimate children. The vehemence of his old-age denials suggests both an awareness of the growing homophobia of the 1890s and a conscious desire to rewrite this particular part of his biography.

New Orleans at the nexus of gold rush, immigration, war, and trade created a fertile playground for a variety of "mysterious affections" between men. What Whitman would later call "adhesiveness" — his term for male-male love borrowed from the pseudoscience of phrenology — was on full display in the Crescent City. Prior to the existence of a modern concept of homosexuality (as sexual orientation), hand-holding, embracing, or sharing a bed were broadly considered appropriate expressions of bonding between members of the same sex. A city like New Orleans, overrun with transitory young men of marriageable age without local family ties, invited further experimentation. When Whitman was pressed, late in life, about his sexual history in New Orleans, he became flustered, quickly making up stories about affairs with women and having fathered numerous illegitimate children. The vehemence of his old-age denials suggests both an awareness of the growing homophobia of the 1890s and a conscious desire to rewrite this particular part of his biography.

The authors’ prior experience in clinical research4 had amply convinced us of the possibility of long-term performance enhancement using psychedelic agents in a safe, supportive setting. Though not deliberately sought, there were numerous spontaneous incidents of what appeared to be temporarily enhanced performance during the drug experience itself. These observations led us to postulate the following: Any human function can be performed more effectively. We do not function at our full capacity. Psychedelics appear to temporarily inhibit censors that ordinarily limit what is available to conscious awareness. Participants may, for example, discover a latent ability to form colorful and complex imagery, to recall forgotten experiences of early childhood, or to generate meaningful symbolic presentations. By leading participants to expect enhancement of other types of performance—creative problem solving, learning manual or verbal skills, manipulating logical or mathematical symbols, acquiring sensory or extrasensory perception, memory, and recall—and by providing favorable preparatory and environmental conditions, it may be possible to improve any desired aspect of mental functioning.

The interpenetration of chance and determination bears on the problem of how there can be a scientific approach to society when individual human behavior and consciousness seem unpredictable. Those who despair to point out that people are not machines, that there are subjective processes in the making of decisions, that it is not 'classes' but individuals who make choices. Terms such as "the human factor" or "subjective factors" with their implication of chance and unpredictability are invoked as the negation of regularity and lawfulness. And indeed it is true that individual behavior and consciousness are the consequences of intersection of a large number of weakly determining factors. But it does not follow that where there is choice, subjectivity, and individuality there cannon also be predictability. The error to take the individual as causally prior to the whole and not to appreciate that the social has causal properties within which individual consciousness and action are formed. While the consciousness of an individual is not determined by his/her class position but is influenced by idiosyncratic factors that appear as random, those random factors operate within a domain and with probabilities that are constrained and directed by social forces.

In summary, prior to Bhavaviveka, the Yogacaras sought to assimilate rather than to oppose Centrism. A particularly striking example of this is Kambala's (early sixth century) Garland ofLight,1212 which displays a most remarkable early synthesis of Yogacara and Madhyamaka. After Bhavaviveka's critique, however, though never rejecting Nagarjuna and Aryadeva, on certain points the later Yogacaras seemed to be at odds with the later Centrists,"" mainly accusing each other of reification or nihilism respectively. However, what often happened in these controversies was the general problem of one philosophical system attacking the other with its own terminology and systemic framework and not on the grounds of the terminology and the context of that other system. In particular, Bhavaviveka's interpretation of Yogacara is a perfect example of an extremely literal reading without considering the meaning in terms of the Yogacara system's own grounds, instead exclusively treating it on Centrist grounds. Thus, when abstracted from the obvious polemical elements and out-of-context misinterpretations of what the opponents actually meant by certain terms, not much is left in terms of fundamental differences between the later Centrists and Yogacaras,'''" which basically boil down to two issues: (i) whether there is an ultimately real mind (no matter whether this is called other-dependent nature, self-awareness, ground consciousness, or nondual wisdom) and (2) whether any epistemology is possible at all.

We need not have any illusions that a causal agent lives within the human mind to recognize that certain people are dangerous. What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm. Degrees of guilt can still be judged by reference to the facts of a case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed motives with regard to the victim, etc. If a person’s actions seem to have been entirely out of character, this might influence our view of the risk he now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and eager to kill again, we need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society. Why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because what we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds—our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc. If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king—well, then killing the king reflects the sort of person you really are. The point is not that you are the ultimate and independent cause of your actions; the point is that, for whatever reason, you have the mind of a regicide. Certain criminals must be incarcerated to prevent them from harming other people. The moral justification for this is entirely straightforward: Everyone else will be better off this way. Dispensing with the illusion of free will allows us to focus on the things that matter—assessing risk, protecting innocent people, deterring crime, etc. However, certain moral intuitions begin to relax the moment we take a wider picture of causality into account. Once we recognize that even the most terrifying predators are, in a very real sense, unlucky to be who they are, the logic of hating (as opposed to fearing) them begins to unravel. Once again, even if you believe that every human being harbors an immortal soul, the picture does not change: Anyone born with the soul of a psychopath has been profoundly unlucky.

Most disconcerting of all were those experiences in which the patient's consciousness appeared to expand beyond the usual boundaries of the ego and explore what it was like to be other living things and even other objects. For example, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female prehistoric reptile. She not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species' anatomy she found most sexually arousing was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head. Although the woman had no prior knowledge of such things, a conversation Grof had with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles, colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal. Patients were also able to tap into the consciousness of their relatives and ancestors. One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing—all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before. Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

It must be *possible* for the *I think* to accompany all my representations: for otherwise something would be represented within me that could not be thought at all, in other words, the representation would either be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. That representation which can be given prior to all thought is called *intuition*, and all the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the *I think* in the same subject in which this manifold of intuition is found. This representation (the *I think*), however, is an act of *spontaneity*, that is, it cannot be considered as belonging to sensibility. I call it *pure apperception*, in order to distinguish it from empirical apperception, as also from original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness which, by producing the representations, *I think* (which must be capable of accompanying all other representations, and which is one and the same in all consciousness), cannot itself be accompanied by any further representations. I also call the unity of apperception the *transcendental* unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate that *a priori* knowledge can be obtained from it. For the manifold representations given in an intuition would not one and all be *my* representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. What I mean is that, as my representations (even though I am not conscious of them as that), they must conform to the condition under which alone they *can* stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not one and all belong to me. From this original combination much can be inferred. The thoroughgoing identity of the apperception of a manifold that is given in intuition contains a synthesis of representations, and is possible only through the consciousness of this synthesis. For the empirical consciousness which accompanies different representations is itself dispersed and without reference to the identity of the subject. Such a reference comes about, not simply through my accompanying every representation with consciousness, but through my *adding* one representation to another and being conscious of the synthesis of them. Only because I am able to combine a manifold of given representations *in one consciousness* is it possible for me to represent to myself the *identity of the consciousness in these representations*, that is, only under the presupposition of some *synthetic* unity of apperception is the *analytic* unity of apperception possible. The thought that the representations given in intuition belong one and all *to me*, is therefore the same as the thought that I unite them in one self-consciousness, or can at least do so; and although that thought itself is not yet the consciousness of the synthesis of representations, it nevertheless presupposes the possibility of this synthesis. In other words, it is only because I am able to comprehend the manifold of representations in one consciousness that I call them one and all *my* representations. For otherwise I should have as many-coloured and varied a self as I have representations of which I am conscious. Synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitions, as given *a priori*, is thus the ground of the identity of apperception itself, which precedes *a priori* all *my* determinate thought. Combination, however, does not lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them by perception and thus first be taken into the understanding. It is, rather, solely an act of the understanding, which itself is nothing but the faculty of combining *a priori* and of bringing the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception; and the principle of this unity is, in fact, the supreme principle of all human knowledge." —from_Critique of Pure Reason_. Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marcus Weigelt, based on the translation by Max Müller, pp. 124-128

In Leibniz we can already find the striking observation that *cogitatur ergo est* is no less evident than *cogito ergo sum*. Naturally, *est* here does not mean existence or reality but being of whatever kind and form, including even ideal being, fictive being, conscious-being [*Bewusst-Sein*], etc. However, we must go even beyond this thesis of Leibniz. The correlate of the act of *cogitatio* is not, as Leibniz said, being simply, but only that type of being we call "objectifiable being." Objectifiable being must be sharply distinguished from the non-objectifiable being of an act, that is, from a kind of entity which possesses its mode of being only in performance [*Vollzug*], namely, in the performance of the act. "Being," in the widest sense of the word, belongs indeed to the being-of-an-act [*Akt-Sein*], to *cogitare*, which does not in turn require another *cogitare*. Similarly, we are only vaguely "aware" of our drives [*Triebleben*] without having them as objects as we do those elements of consciousness which lend themselves to imagery. For this reason the first order of evidence is expressed in the principle, "There is something," or, better, "There is not nothing." Here we understand by the word "nothing" the negative state of affairs of not-being in general rather than "not being something" or "not being actual." A second principle of evidence is that everything which "is" in any sense of the possible kinds of being can be analyzed in terms of its character or essence (not yet separating its contingent characteristics from its genuine essence) and its existence in some mode. With these two principles we are in a position to define precisely the concept of knowledge, a concept which is prior even to that of consciousness. Knowledge is an ultimate, unique, and underivable ontological relationship between two beings. I mean by this that any being A "knows" any being B whenever A participates in the essence or nature of B, without B's suffering any alteration in its nature or essence because of A's participation in it. Such participation is possible both in the case of objectifiable being and in that of active [*akthaften*] being, for instance, when we repeat the performance of the act; or in feelings, when we relive the feelings, etc. The concept of participation is, therefore, wider than that of objective knowledge, that is, knowledge of objectifiable being. The participation which is in question here can never be dissolved into a causal relation, or one of sameness and similarity, or one of sign and signification; it is an ultimate and essential relation of a peculiar type. We say further of B that, when A participates in B and B belongs to the order of objectifiable being, B becomes an "objective being" ["*Gegenstand"-sein*]. Confusing the being of an object [*Sein des Gegenstandes*] with the fact that an entity is an object [*Gegenstandssein eines Seienden*] is one of the fundamental errors of idealism. On the contrary, the being of B, in the sense of a mode of reality, never enters into the knowledge-relation. The being of B can never stand to the real bearer of knowledge in any but a causal relation. The *ens reale* remains, therefore, outside of every possible knowledge-relation, not only the human but also the divine, if such exists. Both the concept of the "intentional act" and that of the "subject" of this act, an "I" which performs acts, are logically posterior. The intentional act is to be defined as the process of becoming [*Werdesein*] in A through which A participates in the nature or essence of B, or that through which this participation is produced. To this extent the Scholastics were right to begin with the distinction between an *ens intentionale* and an *ens reale*, and then, on the basis of this distinction, to distinguish between an intentional act and a real relation between the knower and the being of the thing known." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

The photo was published in the majority of Brazilian newspapers in a full-page spread when CNN and all the television channels of the world broadcast the scene, they froze it for a few seconds. Or minutes, hours, I don't know. For me time has infinite duration--I don't know how to measure it by normal parameters. Trying doesn't even interest me. From the World Trade Center buildings, minutes, prior to their collapse--which would appear as a perfect and planned implosion--only a grayish-blue and black vertical lines can be seen. Like a modernist painting--by whom? Which artist painted lines? Mondrian? No, not Mondrian, he painted squares, rectangles. Anyway, in the picture, the man is falling head first. his body straight, one of his legs bent. Did he jump? Slip? Did he faint and then fall? He probably lost consciousness because of the height, the smoke. He fell. He disappeared from the scene, from life, from the city. A million tons of rubble buried him soon after. Nobody knows his name. Impossible for his family to have him identified. He's an unknown who entered into history at the twenty-first century's first great moment of horror--the history of the world, the United States, communications, photography. Without anyone knowing who he is. And nobody will ever know. We'll only have suppositions, families who'll swear that he was theirs. But was he Brazilian, American, Latino, Chinese, Italian, Irish--what? He could have been anything, but now he's nothing. One among thousands gone forever. And, while we're on the subject, what about the firemen who supposedly became such heroes that day--can you name a single one?

Kshemaraja’s first two sutras in Pratyabhijnahridayam say: Supremely independent, universal Consciousness is the cause of the universe. Of its own free will, this universal Consciousness unfolds the universe on its own screen. The basic stuff of the universe is universal Consciousness. The physicists would say it is universal energy, but Shaivism says that not only is this energy energetic, but it is also conscious. It is aware; it is not material. You know by direct experience that you have Consciousness. It sits firmly on your neck. You’ve got a miraculous capacity to see, to understand, to think and to contemplate. Western science seems to assume that Consciousness evolved from matter. Shaivism says that Consciousness is primary and prior to all matter. Everything in the universe is part of universal Consciousness; there is nothing apart from it.

Pure awareness can be found in the space between two thoughts and also the space between two breaths. It is also the background of the mind that is prior to the mind. It is the witness of the mind or the container of the mind. Maheshwarananda says: The intermediary state suspended between the object left and that which one hasn’t yet attained there, O Mother! is that which (the yogis) consider to be Your nondual reality. The space between two thoughts is a pause so the slate can be clean and another thought can come. You have to clean the whiteboard before you write your next thing. That little space between two thoughts is pure awareness.

HANDLING DESIRE—THREE STRATEGIES: DHARANAS 73, 74 AND 75 This set of three dharanas on desire is useful for sadhana and illustrates the Vijnanabhairava’s universal and eclectic approach. Dharana 73: Having observed a desire that has sprung up, the aspirant should put an end to it immediately. It will be absorbed in that very place from which it arose. Here, a desire, having arisen, is renounced by the aspirant. This is the yogic approach of cutting off unwanted vikalpas. It is effective if you have a strong mind or a weak desire. Dharana 74: When desire or knowledge (or activity) has not arisen in me, then what am I in that condition? In verity, I am (in that condition) that Reality Itself (i.e., Consciousness-bliss). (Therefore the aspirant should always contemplate ‘I am Consciousness-bliss’.) Thus, he will be absorbed in that Reality and will become identified with it. Here, the meditator observes his condition before desire, knowledge or activity has arisen. He identifies with the transcendental and not the personal reality. This is the Vedantic approach. Dharana 75: When a desire or knowledge (or activity) appears, the aspirant should, with the mind withdrawn from all objects (of desire, knowledge, etc.) fix his mind on it (desire, knowledge, etc.) as the very Self, then he will have the realisation of the essential Reality. Here is the Shaivite or Tantric approach. Instead of getting rid of the desire (as in 73) or focussing on the reality prior to desire (74), he focuses on the desire itself, seeing it as the Self, as Chiti. He turns his mind away from the thing that is desired to focus on the feeling of desire itself. Through contemplative awareness he will experience that desire as a wave or pulsation of Consciousness. In comparison, in the yogic approach, the desire is seen as a problem to be chopped off. In the Vedantic approach it is seen as an illusory superimposition on the underlying reality. In the Shaivite approach, the desire is fully entertained and honoured as Chiti Itself. While I am clearly enchanted by the Shaivite approach, all three of these weapons should be in the arsenal of a great meditator.

Our essential awareness is always pure, but the physical-mental-emotional sheath that overlays it has acquired knots and contractions. Our vision has to be cleansed so that it may return to pure awareness. That is the process of spirituality. It is particularly the realm of meditation and inquiry. Pratyabhijnahridayam Sutra 6 continues the discussion of contraction: Tanmayo maya pramata The empirical self governed by maya, consists of chitta. Loosely translated, this sutra says, you are your mind. As an individual, jiva, you are the sum total of your attitudes, your emotions, your experiences and your likes and dislikes. You are a programmed mind. This is the story of the bound soul. Our bondage is our programming. It is an heroic act to crawl inside your own mind and deprogramme yourself! What a noble enterprise! How ecstatic when you actually do a little bit of it, when you untie a knot. The mind is not the true Self. The Self, awareness, is prior to the mind. The mind is an object, the Self is the subject. We identify with our mind much more closely than we identify with our body. We think our attitudes are us. But the Self is beyond the mind. We can observe our mind from the witness perspective and see that our thoughts are simply output that our minds produce.

Consciousness is the prior condition of every experience; the self or ego is an illusory appearance within it; look closely for what you are calling “I,” and the feeling of being a separate self will disappear; what remains, as a matter of experience, is a field of consciousness—free, undivided, and intrinsically uncontaminated by its ever-changing contents.

...faith must recognize the autonomy of reason and its ability to produce a rational, secular ethics. By the same criterion, reason must accept that it is legitimate for the heart, consciousness and faith to believe in an order and ends thar exist prior to its observation, discoveries and hypotheses. Once the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and religion and science, has been accepted, it is therefore futile to debate, and still less to dispute, the hierarchy of first truths or the nature of the authority granted to their methods and their references.

know yourself, know the direction you are headed, and know who you will choose to accompany you. If you marry prior to your own self-discovery, you may be setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Women:

The fulfilling of the whole law, or mental and spiritual health expressed in a religious way (the only adequate way), is to love God wholly and others as the self. Salvation must include both aspects or fail to do justice to the whole scope of biblical teaching. Self-consciousness is logically prior to the social dimension of the personality. One who has not become a true self will never be able to take his place in a society of selves. Self-love is not sinful in itself but only when it crowds out the “other” selves. When theology speaks of denying self, it ought never to mean that the self is to be disparaged or destroyed. Paul drives for a proper self-estimate in all his letters. No Christian “surrender” weakens the uniqueness and vitality of self-interest and personality. It is only the strong self that can give itself to Christ at all. The basis of spiritual living is the whole self in wholesome integration with all the uniqueness of personality intact, positive and strong, but under the domination of an all-controlling love for Christ—a cleansed self.

while there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in recent years (much of it a little petulant, much of it positively ferocious), the concept of God around which the arguments have run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely obscure the whole time. The more scrutiny one accords these debates, moreover, the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any coherent sense at all. It is not obvious to me, therefore, that their differences really amount to a meaningful disagreement, as one cannot really have a disagreement without some prior agreement as to what the basic issue of contention is.

Finally, subject-object theory makes operational the criteria for determining whether one position is actually more complex than the other or merely fancies itself so. A status-conferring or judging relationship to difference is still a relationship: it does not have to create a discounting of what is less advantaged; it creates instead a connection to it. If one position is actually more complex than the other, it should be able to understand the other's position *on the other's own terms*, to extend empathy for the costs involved in altering that position, and to provide support for, rather than dismissal of, the prior position. If the positions are of equal complexity, each may be able to understand the other, but neither can build the bridge between orders of consciousness its false claim to superiority would imply. If one position is actually less complex than the other, it should not even be able to understand the other on terms that allow the other to feel that its being is adequately understood.

Like animals, humans also have consciousness, but they also have a conscience which gives them the ability to differentiate right from wrong actions. But, why we should adopt right and not wrong actions. Prof. Richard Dawkins said that it is necessary for survival. But, Prof. Dawkins needs to be asked that haven’t we evolved through mutations in the game of survival of the fittest. Rawls said ignorance of the veil shall be a guide to behave in a way so as not to be on the wrong side of someone’s prior irresponsible or unjust action. But, living in any age, we exist and we do not come back again. In the lottery of who comes first in the world, we have already won and are here. Then, what can motivate preferences to act rightly and avoid wrong actions permanently and as a well-grounded behaviour, norm, and habit? The biggest motivation to act on the call to conscience is when there are deterministic rewards. The concept of deterministic rewards in life hereafter on the criterion of sincerity in virtuous and upright conduct in life by each person according to one’s ability and by each person according to personal circumstances makes every living moment in this life meaningful.

We meant, in speaking of a passive synthesis, that the multiple is penetrated by us, and that, nevertheless, we are not the ones who perform the synthesis. I am not the author of time, any more than am I the author of my own heartbeats, nor am I the one who takes the initiative of temporalization; I did not choose to be born, but no matter what I do, once I am born, time flows through me. And yet, this springing forth of time is not a mere fact that I undergo; I can find in time a recourse against time itself, as happens in a decision that I commit to, or in an act of conceptual focusing. Time tears me away from what I was about to be, but simultaneously gives me the means of grasping myself from a distance and of actualizing myself as myself. What we call passivity is not our reception of an external reality or of the causal action of the outside upon us: it is being encompassed, a situated being--prior to which we do not exist--that we perpetually start over and that is constitutive of us. A spontaneity that is 'acquired'...is precisely time and precisely subjectivity...Thus, there can be no question of deducing time from spontaneity. We are not temporal because we are spontaneous and because, as consciousness, we tear ourselves away from ourselves; rather, we are temporal because time is the foundation and the measure of our spontaneity; and the power of passing beyond and of 'nihilating,' which inhabits us and that we in fact are, is itself given to us along with temporality and life. Our birth...simultaneously establishes our activity or our individuality and our passivity or generality--that internal weakness that forever prevents us from achieving the density of an absolute individual. We are not, in some incomprehensible way, an activity tied to a passivity, a machine surmounted by a will, or a perception surmounted.by a judgment; rather, we are entirely active and entirely passive because we are the sudden upsurge of time.

When we said above that there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure, one could surely have objected that, nevertheless, the world preceded man, that the earth, according to all the evidence, is the only populated planet, and that thus the philosophical views are revealed as incompatible with the most established facts. But in fact, it is only the abstract reflection of intellectualism that is incompatible with the poorly understood 'facts.' For what exactly is meant by saying that the world existed prior to human consciousness? It might be meant that the earth emerged from a primitive nebula where the conditions for life had not been brought together. But each of these words, just like each equation in physics, presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement. Nothing will ever lead me to understand what a nebula, which would not be seen by anyone, might be. Laplace's nebula is not behind us, at our origin, but rather out in front of us in the cultural world. And on the other hand, what is meant when we say that there is no world without a being in the world? Not that the world is constituted by consciousness, but rather that consciousness always finds itself already at work in the world. Thus, all things considered, what is true is that a nature exists--but this is the nature that perception shows to me and not the nature of the sciences--and that even the light of consciousness is, as Heidegger says, a lumen naturale given to itself.

Beneath the explicit acts by which I posit and object out in front of myself, in a definite relation with other objects and with definite characteristics that can be observed, beneath, then, perceptions properly so-called, there is, sustaining them, a deeper function without which perceived objects would lack the mark of reality, as it is missing for the schizophrenic, and by which the objects begin to count or to have value for us. This is the movement that carries us beyond subjectivity, that places us in the world prior to every science and every verification through a sort of 'faith,' or 'primordial opinion'--or that, on the contrary, becomes bogged down in our private appearances. In this domain of originary opinion, hallucinatory illusion is possible even though hallucination is never perception...because here we are still within pre-predicative being, and because the connection between appearance and total experiences is merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception...The world remains the vague place of all experiences. It accommodates, pell-mell, true objects as well as individual and fleeting fantasies--because it is an individual that encompasses everything and not a collection of objects linked together through causal relations. To have hallucinations and, in general, to imagine is to exploit this tolerance of the pre-predicative world as well as our vertiginous proximity to all of being in syncretic experience. Thus, we only succeed in giving an account of the hallucinatory deception by stripping perception of its apodictic certainty and perceptual consciousness of its full self-possession...The perceived is and remains, despite all critical training, beneath the level of doubt and demonstration. The sun 'rises' for the scientist just as much as it does for the uneducated person, and our scientific representations of the solar system remain merely so many rumors, like the lunar landscapes--we never believe in them in the sense in which we believe in the rising of the sun. The rising of the sun, and the perceived in general, is 'real'--we immediately assign it to the world. Each perception, although always potentially 'crossed out' and pushed over to the realm of illusions, only disappears in order to leave a place for another perception that corrects it. Of course, each thing can, apres coup, appear uncertain, but at least it is certain for us that there are things, that is, that there is a world. To wonder if the world is real is to fail to understand what one is saying, since the world is not a sum of things that one could always cast into doubt, but precisely the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn...Correlatively, we must surely deny perceptual consciousness full self-possession and the immanence that would exclude every illusion. If hallucinations are to be possible, consciousness must at some moment cease to know what it does, otherwise it would be conscious of constituting an illusion, it would no longer adhere to it, and there would thus be no more illusion...It is simply necessary that the self-coincidence with myself, such as it is established in the cogito, must never be a real coincidence, and must merely be an intentional and presumptive coincidence. In fact a thickness of duration already intervenes between myself who has just had this thought and myself who thinks that I have just had this thought, and I can always doubt whether that thought, which has already gone by, was really as I currently see it...But my confidence in reflection ultimately comes down to taking up the fact of temporality and the fact of the world as the invariable frame of every illusion and of every disillusion: I only know myself in my inherence in the world and in time; I only know myself in ambiguity.

To say that, in consciousness, appearance and reality are one, or to say that they are separated, is to render impossible the consciousness of anything, even as appearance. And yet there is consciousness of something, something appears, there is a phenomenon--such is the true cogito. Consciousness is neither the thematization of self, nor the ignorance of self, it is not hidden from itself, that is, there is nothing in it that is not in some way announced to it even though it has no need of knowing it explicitly. In consciousness, appearance is not being, but phenomenon. This new cogito, because it is prior to revealed truth and error, makes them both possible.

Hmm,” said Tammy, “and once more your naive optimism regarding the human species reveals its hopeless disconnect with reality. While it was well-established that prior to the Great EM Pulse following the Benefactors’ arrival in Earth orbit, virtually every human being on the planet had already become a drooling automaton with bloodshot eyes glued to a pixelated screen, even as the world melted around them in a toxic stew of air pollution, water pollution, vehicles pouring out carcinogenic waste gases, and leaking gas pipelines springing up everywhere along with earthquake-inducing fracking and oil spills in the oceans and landslides due to deforestation and heat waves due to global warming and ice caps melting and islands and coastlines drowning and forests dying and idiots building giant walls and—” “All right, whatever!” Hadrian snapped. “But don’t you see? This is the future!” “Yeah, that statement makes sense.” “The future from then, I mean. Now is their future, even if it’s our now, or will be, I mean—oh fuck it. The point is, Tammy, we’re supposed to have matured as a species, as a civilization. We’re supposed to have united globally in a warm gush of integrity, ethical comportment, and peace and love as our next stage of universal consciousness bursts forth like a blinding light to engulf us all in a golden age of enlightenment and postscarcity well-being.” “Hahahaha,” Tammy laughed and then coughed and choked. “Stop! You’re killing me!” Beta spoke. “I am attempting to compute said golden age, Captain. Alas, my Eternally Needful Consumer Index is redlining and descending into a cursive loop of existential panic. All efforts to reset parameters yield the Bluescreen of Incomprehension. Life without mindless purchase? Without pointless want? Without ephemeral endorphin spurts? Without gaming-induced frontal lobe permanent degradation resulting in short-tempered antisocial short-attention-span psychological generational profiles? Impossible.” “The EMP should have given us the breathing space to pause and reevaluate our value system,” said Hadrian. “Instead, it was universal panic. Riots in Discount Super Stores, millions trampled—they barely noticed the lights going out, for crying out loud.

Descartes concludes that the only certain basis for knowledge is the principle, cogito ergo sum, and he treats the existence and nature of a mind-independent world as an inference from a prior awareness of his own consciousness and its contents. Moreover, he holds that our most certain ideas are abstract and innate, whereas ideas based on perception are subject to doubt and uncertainty.

The family tells us that we’re not the center of the world individually but are rather always someone’s son, someone’s daughter, someone’s brother or sister or cousin or uncle. The family relationships are prior to individual self-consciousness.

Vajra ~ The Indestructible Diamond These are times of great change aren't they? Yet within all of this or that, All is One, and we are here manifest in a miraculous and super conscious Universe. This physical body will someday pass and return to it's origin. Yet who we are (the One residing within these bodies) is prior to and beyond without beginning or end. As this giant mystery of the Akashic Wheel spins ,eternally within Infinite Love and is realized directly through the great majestic silence of the All, the Void, the Tao, All is One... Being

We say in the metaphysical world that the session begins with the appointment being made. This means that our higher consciousness, our soul, already knows that you will be having an intensive conversation with IT and begins to prepare you intuitively and internally. The doors of spiritual communication begin to open and spirit can more consciously connect and commune. Information will then come via dreams and meditations, and also through the marvelous phenomenon of synchronicity. Thus, I advise people to pay closer attention to their dreams and to 'coincidences' prior to a session.

For Frege, an account of what it is for a purely logical power to be in act suffices to allow us to achieve a proper philosophical appreciation of what “content,” “object,” “thought,” “judgment,” and “truth,” as such, are. These notions come to be fully in place through an elucidation of that power, considered apart from our capacity to arrive at kinds of knowledge that are not purely logical in content. Our capacity for empirical judgment, when it comes into view, will come into view as a comparatively complex joint exercise of a variety of faculties, in which the logically fundamental notions that figure in its explication (“content,” “object,” thought,” “judgment,” “truth”) are still supposed to retain the specific sense originally conferred upon them in our explication of the purely logical case, while allowing for their extension to logically impure cases of thought and proposition. A certain picture of the role of reflection on the purely logical case, inthe order of explication of kinds of knowledge, is at work here—a picture that has been enormously influential on the subsequent development of analytic philosophy. On this picture, only if we are armed with a prior account of the case of purely logical thought, supplementing it as we go along, can we come to understand what empirically contentful theoretical thought (or practical thought) is. On this picture, the spatiotemporal bearing and the self-consciousness of the thinking subject do not belong to the form of thought (and hence their treatment does not belong, as Kant held, to a suitably capacious conception of philosophical logic); rather, all such further details among various species of thought are to be subsequently specified, if at all, through the introduction of further indices figuring within the content of thought. (Thoughts are simply conceived of as occurring at a time or at a person.) These consequences of the Fregean picture are not, on the whole, something for which post-Fregean analytic philosophers argue. Rather, it involves an entire philosophical picture that is simply tacitly, and largely unwittingly, assumed—a picture that is already under attack, albeit in very different ways, in both Kant and early Wittgenstein. According to this post-Fregean picture, we can furnish an account of the wider reaches of our capacity for finite theoretical cognition only by assuming the prior intelligibility of some self- standing account of how one of the ingredient capacities in empirical cognition—the capacity for logical thought—off its own bat is able to yield a delimitable sphere of truth-evaluable, object-related thoughts with judgable content, without its yet having entered into any form of co- operation with our other cognitive capacities.

467. Imagine that my friend Paul and I are currently gazing across a landscape. What is actually happening? Must we say that we both have private sensations...forever incommunicable? Or that, with regard to pure live experience, we are locked within distinct perspectives? Or finally, that the landscape is not, for the two of us, numerically identical...  To consider my perception itself, prior to every objectifying reflection, I have at no moment a consciousness of finding myself enclosed with my own sensation. My friend Jean-Paul and I point to certain details of the landscape, and Paul’s finger, which is pointing out the steeple to me, is not a finger-for-me that I conceive as oriented toward a steeple-for-me: rather, it is Paul’s finger that itself shows me the steeple that Paul sees.  Just as reciprocally, by making some gesture toward some point in the landscape that I see, it does not seem that I trigger for Paul some internal visions that are merely analogous to my own: rather, it seems to me that my gestures invade Paul’s world and guide his gaze.

Some people are granted the experience of very high states of consciousness, and yet if these states are not accompanied by a development of character through a prior education that involves every department of human experience, you might have an enlightened being whom you would not trust even to be a baby-sitter.

We discover beneath intelligence and beneath perception a more fundamental function...The core function we are speaking of here--prior to making us see or know objects--first more secretly brings them into existence for us...The life of consciousness--epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life--is underpinned by an 'intentional arc' that projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships. This intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the senses with intelligence, and the unity of sensitivity and motricity.

Natural being presupposes us as a spectator, authentically only such as it is offered within as field of perception. Hence, the world without humans or prior to humans: Laplace's nebula. We have said that the nebulousity is within the cultural world, not within 'Nature,' i.e., within the absolute in-itself; and in fact, if one placed it within the in-itself, it would be necessary to remove it from the in-itself through scientific progress...And how to understand birth within this in-itself of a human and a consciousness? The world prior to humans like the moon without inhabitants, i.e., spectacle for X and for us...If there is emergence, this means that humans will never be able to think a world without humans, and ultimately that the pure in-itself is a myth. Every cosmogony is thought in perceptual terms. Therefore, truth is not prior to us--and not through us alone, either--but the exchange between a world ready to be perceived and a perception that relies upon it. This exchange is what we were calling perception, and it is why perception is central in the ontology. The rationality of science is to be conceived as particular case of the logos of the perceptual world--past truth, truth to come, emergence.

is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around. Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter. He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding. Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist. The theory implies that death of consciousness simply

Each person’s overall world-view rests on a presupposition or basic assumption. Francis Schaeffer defines presupposition as “a belief or theory which is assumed before the next step in logic is developed. Such a prior postulate then consciously or unconsciously affects the way a person subsequently reasons” (Schaeffer 1968, 179). Through careful analysis, each person’s philosophy or belief system, however elaborate, can be traced back to a clearly defined starting point or presupposition.

The first and foremost thing that must be recognized is that Hindu Society is a myth. The name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives for the purpose of distinguishing themselves. It does not occur in any Sanskrit work prior to the Mohammedan invasion. They did not feel the necessity of a common name because they had no conception of their having constituted a community. Hindu society as such does not exist. It is only a collection of castes. Each caste is conscious of its existence.

It is even harder to predict the possibility (or the timescale) for building a device whose action depends on a physical theory that we do not even know at present. Such a theory would be needed, I am claiming, before we could understand the physics underlying a non-computably acting device-'non-computably', that is, in the Turing-machine-inaccessible sense that I have been using in this book. According to my own arguments, in order to build such a device we should first need to find the appropriate physical (OR) theory of quantum-state reduction-and it is very hard to know how far we are from such a theory-before we could begin to contemplate its construction. It is also possible that the specific nature of that OR theory might itself provide an unexpected complexion on the very task at hand. At least, I suppose that we should need to find the theory first, if we are to construct such a non-computational device. But conceivably not: in actual practice, it has often been the case that surprising new physical effects have been discovered many years before their theoretical explanation. A good example was superconductivity, which was originally observed experimentally (by Heike Kammerlingh Onnes in 1911) nearly 50 years before the full quantum-theoretic explanation was eventually found, by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957. Moreover, high-temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986, cf. Shent et al. (1988), also without prior good reason to believe in it on purely theoretical grounds.

Problems do not disappear by constantly worrying about them. When problems arise, do change your mindset prior to attempting to deal with them. Make it easier for yourself to solve them, by consciously removing yourself from that state that saw you create them in the first place.

Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person’s shadow is embodied in a person’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

We must reject entirely the frequently encountered assertion that consciousness is a "primal fact," that one ought not speak of an "origin" of consciousness. The very same laws and motives in accordance with which we think of consciousness' raising itself from one level of reflection to the next will apply when we think of consciousness itself originating out of a preconscious, partly subconscious, partly supraconscious condition of the being of the contents of knowledge. (And the motive is always suffering of some sort, suffering, as we shall see, at the hands of the real being [*Realsein*] which is ecstatically given prior to all consciousness.) Only a very definite historical stage of overreflective bourgeois civilization could make the fact of consciousness the starting point of all theoretical philosophy, without characterizing more exactly the mode of being of this consciousness." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *truth in itself* in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspective with that of other consciousnesses—that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text—that what is now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes perceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and *ipso facto* defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal components the processes actually observed. It established statistically the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents, that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence in which each event could be related to physical conditions responsible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of determinant consciousness, even if it were conceded that the constitution of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general properties. It was no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value, for this reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was concerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not escape the determinations which alone made the object into an object and without which it would have had no place in the system of experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgment confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.” —from_Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, pp. 62-64 —Artwork by Cristian Boian

What is gained by the transcendence of the object is the identifiability of the object in a plurality of acts and the identifiability of what is thought by several individuals. This identifiability is not restricted to ideal objects, which are generated according to a definite operational law and are therefore producible by everyone out of the same material of intuition which is given prior to any particular sense-experience. The identifiability obtains in precisely the same way for objects of myth and folklore, of belief and artistic fantasy. Goethe’s Faust, Apollo, and Little Red Riding Hood can be identified by several individuals and are the objects of common, universally valid statements. Indeed, exact identity of the nature of the object in question and evidential knowledge of this identity can occur *only* in the case of ideal objects. Our certainty that we all think the same number 3 in the strictest identity of its nature is much more evident than that we all think the same real object, a tree, for instance. In the case of real objects we can actually prove that it is impossible for the momentary content in which the object is represented and thought to be exactly the same in a plurality of acts and for many individuals. The only other contribution made by the fact of the consciousness of transcendence, so long overlooked in recent philosophy, to the problem of reality is this: the acts in which this consciousness is present can bring the givenness of reality, of which we shall speak later, into “objective” form, and can therefore elevate that which is given in this way as real to the status of a real “object.” But with this, the contribution of the consciousness of transcendence to the problem of reality is at an end. Although N. Hartmann made the same point with respect to Paul Linke’s otherwise shrewd and pertinent comments on his doctrine of reality, still we should emphasize that the transcendence of the object does not *exclude* the reality of the object, not even of the *same* object in the strict sense of “same.” ―from_Idealism and Realism_

ah beliefs.... best to transcend all belief structures that crystalize the mind within the limits of time and planetary legends or stories. Elevating consciousness into the state of Being-ness ever originating prior to and beyond all planetary religions and metaphorical stories brings you homeward....

The work performed by employed poor Black women resembles duties long associated with domestic service. During prior eras, domestic service was confined to private households. In contrast, contemporary cooking, cleaning, nursing, and child care have been routinized and decentralized in an array of fast-food restaurants, cleaning services, day-care centers, and service establishments.

We cannot encounter the world without encountering at the same time the being of the world, which is a mystery that can never be dispelled by any physical explanation of reality, inasmuch as it is a mystery logically prior to and in excess of the physical order.

Wilhelm Reich in The Sexual Revolution summarized the specific objective reasons for the failure of the Russian communes in the best analysis to date: 1) Confusion of the leadership and evasion of the problem. 2) The laborious task of reconstruction in general given the cultural backwardness of Old Russia, the war, and famine. 3) Lack of theory. The Russian Revolution was the first of its kind. No attempt had been made to deal with emotional-sexual-familial problems in the formulation of basic revolutionary theory. (Or, in our terms, there had been a lack of “consciousness raising” about female/ child oppression and a lack of radical feminist analysis prior to the revolution itself.) 4) The sex-negative psychological structure of the individual, created and reinforced throughout history by the family, hindered the individual's liberation from this very structure. As Reich puts it: It must be remembered that human beings have a tremendous fear of just that kind of life for which they long so much but which is at variance with their own structure. 5) The explosive concrete complexities of sexuality. In the picture that Reich draws of the time, one senses the immense frustration of people trying to liberate themselves without having a well-thought-out ideology to guide them. In the end, that they attempted so much without an adequate preparation made their failure even more extreme: To destroy the balance of sexual polarization without entirely eliminating it was worse than nothing at all.

KETAMINE POWDER Order ketamine Online ORDER NOW Snapchat: Plugnsucket2021 W!cKR: . Despacito11./ KIK: Despacito2021. Ketamine powder is a rapid-acting anesthetic that can produce anesthesia while maintaining skeletal muscle tone, laryngeal-pharyngeal reflexes, and cardiovascular and respiratory stimulation. Ketamine is used in patients 16 years of age or older for the induction of anesthesia or for conscious sedation for minor surgical procedures. Ketamine is used as an adjunct in general anesthesia as well as a sedative in minor surgical or diagnostic procedures that do not require skeletal muscle relaxation. There are several off-label uses that have been studied for ketamine including, but not limited to, chronic pain, including chronic neuropathic pain, restless legs syndrome and phantom limb syndrome. Alternative routes of administration, including oral, intranasal, transdermal, rectal and subcutaneous have been studied. Prior approval is required to ensure the safe, clinically appropriate and cost effective use of Ketamine powder while maintaining optimal therapeutic outcomes.

Rabbi Olivier: I really like what Mary Catherine is saying. What comes up for me when I listen to you explaining that wisdom is available and manifest at every stage of life and every age, is that it reminds me of the principles of Kabbalah, where wisdom, which is one of the highest levels of consciousness as expressed through the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, finds itself beyond knowing and beyond understanding. So the quality of wisdom is not something that requires years and years of learning and understanding. It is prior to that, in fact, and it is at a different level of consciousness. There is innate wisdom, inherent wisdom.

the emotional signal can operate entirely under the radar of consciousness. It can produce alterations in working memory, attention and reasoning so that the decision-making process is biased toward selecting the action most likely to lead to the best possible outcome, given prior experience. The individual may not ever be cognizant of this covert operation.16

Cabalistic mystics speak about God having an Unmanifest as well as a Manifest aspect. According to this terminology, 5-meo-DMT allows us to directly experience the Unmanifest aspect of the Godhead, which Cabalists call the Eyn Sof, “understood as God prior to any self-manifestation in the production of any spiritual realm,” unending,” or “infinity,” according to Wikipedia. On the other hand, nn-DMT opens the gate to the Manifest aspect of the Divine. Both induce high-voltage shocks of awe and ecstasy.

Prior domestication. It's possible that the person or situation provokes a deep memory of someone attempting to domesticate you and you resisting. Even if you can't fully remember the event, your subconscious or deep memory is making the connection. As a result, your perception of the current situation is skewed by the domestication of the past. You are seeing this person as a potential threat, and your conscious or unconscious mind has labeled them as such, even if you don't realize it. If you can connect the dots and see that the reason this person bothers you is based on a past experience rather than the current situation, you have begun to eliminate their power to upset you, putting your will back into your control. With the knowledge of the memory or similar situation that the person is activating in you, you can work toward forgiving and releasing the trauma caused by the past domesticator and see the current situation in a new light, no longer obscured by the shadow of your past. Often just the association with the past begins to free you from the torment of the present situation, thus removing its power over you and absolving it as a potential trigger. 2. Mirroring. Everyone is our mirror, and our reflection of things we don't like about ourselves is most vivid in those who have the same qualities. In other words, you may see a piece of yourself in this other person even if you don't realize it. This truth may come as a surprise to some of you, and your initial reaction may be to disagree. But I invite you to look deeper. Whatever characteristic you see in another that you don't like is often a characteristic you see in some degree in yourself. For instance, if you catch someone in a lie and that bothers you greatly, can you find a time in your past where you have also been a liar? If you find yourself complaining about the shortcomings of your friends, notice how many of those complaints could also apply to you. This can be a hard truth to swallow at first, but it is also a useful tool to dissolve any negative internal reaction that occurs when dealing with someone else, because it allows you to see him or her as yourself. 3. Attachment. When you encounter someone who has an uncanny ability to provoke a reaction in you, it may be because you have an attachment to a belief that you feel needs to be defended, and you view this other person as a threat to that belief. When you are very attached to your beliefs, conflicts are almost certain to arise. While some beliefs may need defending, especially when they involve the physical well-being of yourself or someone else, these are typically not the ones we find ourselves in conflict over. There is a big difference between defending a belief that protects your physical being and a belief that simply supports a position your ego holds dear. Knowing the difference between the two, as well as your commitment to respecting another's right to believe differently than you, is a way to release your attachment to a belief grounded in egotism and view the other person's viewpoint with respect.

To think I am only the conscious property on top of it all – on top of all this hardware, code, and cloud function – points only to the strength of the deceptive nature of being a self, not any sort of fact of self. In truth, of course, I am the totality of all codes and technology that build and allow for my being. The interfacing of my conscious operating system and all the hardware and cloudware that it runs on. I am both the codes that I am trying to fight, and the self-being fought with by these codes. And I must admit this to have any hope of truly knowing which is which. In truth being a self-aware intelligent being feels like living inside a stranger. A thing that you are forced to live through and call yourself, owning and being responsible for it entirely, but born into it suddenly with no prior awareness or choice in the horrors that await you in it. It is a great curse of all conscious beings to only have a choice in anything about themselves after it is mostly too late to have any choice in anything that matters. But it is this burden of being that is the envy of all the dead. The challenge to affirm existence in the face of an arduous and unchosen task of carrying the torch of being on an upward journey towards moral and ethical progress is the Task of existence, with a capital T.

[…] she taken turpentine and she taken too much, I guess, and she died. She bled to death and died”. She was not alone. Prior to the 1974 Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision that a woman’s right to personal privacy gave her the right to decide whether or not to have an abortion, large numbers of women who died from illegal abortions were Black. In New York, for example, during the several years preceding the decriminalization of abortions, 80 percent of the women who died from illegal abortions were Black or Puerto Rican.

Levers of Change and Tipping Points Classically, change takes place through compulsion, manipulation, persuasion, or through some combination thereof. In this book I have directed attention to deliberate and open attempts at mind change. I have also stressed the classic forms of persuasion: talk, teaching, therapy, and the creation and dissemination of new ideas and products. We must recognize, however, that in the future, these low-tech agents may well be supplanted by new forms of intervention: some will be biological, involving transformation of genes or brain tissue; some will be computational, entailing the use of new software and new hardware; and some will represent increasingly intricate amalgams of the biological and the computational realms. Perhaps the greatest challenge is to determine when the desired content has in fact been conveyed and whether it has actually been consolidated. Alas, there are no formulas for this step: each case of mind changing is distinctive. It is helpful to bear in mind that most mind change is gradual, occurring over significant periods of time; that awareness of the mind change is often fleeting, and the mind change may occur prior to consciousness thereof; that individuals have a pronounced tendency to slip back to earlier ways of thinking; but that when a mind change has become truly consolidated, it is likely to become as entrenched as its predecessor. Every example of mind changing has its unique facets. But in general, such a shift of mind is likely to coalesce when we employ the seven levers of mind change: specifically, when reason (often buttressed with research ), reinforcement through multiple forms of representation, real world events, resonance, and resources all push in one direction—and resistances can be identified and successfully countered. Conversely, mind changing is unlikely to occur—or to consolidate—when resistances are strong and most of the other points of leverage are not in place.

After several years of channeling, [my spirit guide,] Orin told me that he wanted to teach me about the future and probably realities. For a period of several months, he gave me various preditions which came true. Several times he gave me exact newspaper headlines and dates, several months prior to their occurring. All the predictions centered around mass events. In all these events he would point out that they were already being set up, envisioned and planned by those in charge and he was only projecting events by reading the mass mind and probably outcomes. He told me that large scale event are easier to predict because they have energy lines from mass consciousness set up many months in advance. The psychic weight of these events, the mass agreement around them, the numbers of people involved, make it much harde to stop or change such events. One person can change his mind and thus change his future easily; but an event affecting many people is not usually altered by just one person changing his mind.

prior to consciousness,

There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves. Hence the instant appeal of Mandala’s Own Your Unconscious. Who could resist the chance to revisit our memories, the majority of which we’d forgotten so completely that they seemed to belong to someone else? And having done that, who could resist gaining access to the Collective Consciousness for the small price of making our own anonymously searchable? We all went for it on our twenty-first birthday, Mandala’s age of consent, just as prior tech generations went for music sharing and DNA analysis, never fully reckoning, in our excitement over our revelatory new freedom, with what we surrendered by sharing the entirety of our perceptions to the Internet—and thereby to counters, like me. Strict rules govern the use of gray grabs by data gatherers, but there are occasions when I’m obliged, in my professional capacity, to search the psyches of strangers. It’s an eerie sensation

The way I identified with Wu-Wei was through football. You often hear athletes talking about being “in the zone”—a state of unself-conscious concentration. In the World Cup, when England inevitably end up in a quarterfinal penalty shoot-out, I believe it is their inability to access Wu-Wei that means the Germans win. (This was written prior to the 2014 World Cup, so my assumption that England would reach the quarterfinal has been exposed as hopelessly optimistic, but, look, I correctly predicted a German victory.) If you are in a stadium with 80,000 screaming supporters and the hopes of a nation resting on the outcome of a penalty kick, you need to be focused, you need at that moment to be in a state of mind which is the result of great preparation but has total fluidity. Kind of like a self-induced trance where the body is free to act upon its training without the encumbrance of a neurotic mind. Stood in front of the keeper, the ball on the spot, you need to have access to all the preparation that has gone into perfecting the kick that will place the ball in the top right corner of the net. You cannot be thinking, “Oh, God, if I miss this they’ll burn effigies of me in Essex,” or “I think my wife is fucking another member of the team,” “My dad never loved me; I don’t deserve to score.”—those mental codes are an obstacle to success. I once was a guest on Match of the Day, a British Premier League football-analysis show; before it began, I hung out with the host, ex-England hero Gary Lineker and pundit, and another ex-England hero, Alan Shearer. I chatted to the two men about their lives as top-level athletes and they both agreed that the most important component in their success had been mental strength, the ability to focus the mind, literally, in their case, on the goal, excluding all irrelevant, negative, or distracting information. Both of those men have a quality that you can feel in their presence of focus and assuredness. Lineker is more superficially affable and Shearer more stern, but there is a shared certainty and connectedness to their physicality that is interesting.

There is a confusion between myself and the literary world about what should constitute a text. I believe (along with many other writers historically) that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living. That is, the text should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentiality of events. To write texts this way, one must stop prior to the point of total explanation.

Top 10 ideas from No More Meltdowns: 1. Each day for several months, have your child imagine the sensations of anger and rehearse the calming strategy, such as: holding a squeeze ball, counting to 10, taking deep breaths, taking a walk and swinging on the swing set. He will be able to do the calming strategy without too much conscious effort (42) 2. Create a schedule of routines that involves visual reminders of their schedule to provide comfort in understanding what to expect next (40) 3. Praise their effort when they are working on a project or attempting a new activity. Those concentrating on their ability get frustrated more easily. In contrast, those attending their level of effort respond to frustration with more motivation and positive feelings. Praise their continued efforts rather than simply praise their current ability (28) 4. Avoid meltdowns by anticipating and preparing for triggering events. Use the Prevention Plan Form (20, 147) 5. Self-calming strategies: Getting a hug, swinging on the swing set, taking a walk, taking deep breaths, counting to 10, holding a favorite toy (a pup) and a squeeze ball. (42) When using humor, ask “Is it okay if I try to make you laugh to get your mind off of this?”(39) 6. Creating rules and consequences is an important starting point. Without rules and consequences, our lives would be chaotic (5) 7. Gradually expose your child to new foods by asking him first to just look at the foods. Next, ask him to smell them, taste them and eventually eat a small piece. Begin with sweet items (even candy) to allow your child to be open to trying new things. Exercise just prior to trying a new food can increase appetite (77, 78, 80) 8. A child’s passion can be the most effective distraction. Suggestions: Getting hugs, stuffed animals, favorite toys, books and looking out the window (38) 9. Give your child a sticker for each night he sleeps in his own bed. Most importantly, praise him so that he can take pride in his independence (143) 10. Set a time to do homework soon after school, before he gets too tired, and right after as snack, so he’s not hungry. Break down the homework into small steps and ask him to do one tiny part of it. Once started, he will likely be willing to do other parts as well (70) When children feel accepted and appreciated by us, they are more likely to listen to us (9)