Earthseals

First in the series.
Feel free to post or forward.
Let me know if you want to continue in this loop.
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PROJECT INTRO:

I think it important to "value weight" our information streams: to
underline more of what's significant, and to distinguish it from the
casual "just passing/killing time" fluff.

We should be able to point out (to whoever wants to uplevel their life)
those areas of human consensus about what has proven consistently useful
for our growth.

As a species we know a lot.

From within that huge body of knowledge, what do we want to point to as
most significant?

Big project.

How to go about doing this?

Me, I ask people.

I'm asking you.

If there were a collective wisdom of humanity database, what would you
most like to see included?
Of all that you've learned through your life, what's consistently
proven very useful, or important?
If you only had a few pages to download the top list, of the "most
useful conceptual tools" in your life, what do you know that's not
common knowledge?
What internal software makes your life run great that is not in general
circulation, that other people struggle through the swamps not knowing?

What would be your contribution? Or, if not yours alone, what are you
pointing to that you have learned from others, teachers/mentors/guides?

Myself, from my this "collective wisdom of humanity" database, I
extract and synthesize and send out to you this first paper in the hopes
of not only passing on something that is at the top of my list, but also
to inspire you, prime your pump, to get you thinking about what are the
core insights in *your* life!

Think about what's helped your life immensely.
What have you learned, discovered, understood, synthesized that's made
a difference, significantly upleveling your quality of life?
What do you know that might be of service to someone else, perhaps
eager, motivated, intelligent, yet with less time and experience under
their belt?
What best advice has stood the test of time for you?
What consciousness structures have you "metabolized from life
experience"?
What's up there are in the top ten of your "memes bank account"?
What are the shiny, most frequently used tools in your
physical-mental-emotional-spiritual tool box?
Think about what the accumulated wisdom of your life.
What would be your "legacy memes"?

Send to me.

[If that is too big, too overwhelming, send me something smaller,
bite-sized, do-able.
If this is too small an order, not challenging enough, reform your own
questions, what's most interesting? What have you learned? What do you
see many people needing to find their way through, that you have some
leads on??]

I invite your comments on these papers,
or on the "Collective Wisdom of Humanity" project as a whole.

Do please tell me if you do (or do not) want to be part of this.

Feel free to forward this on to others who might want to join the
conversation.

Here is my first paper, on the Universe being so "easy", so generous,
so kind, as to agree and say YES! to almost any thought proposal sent
out and implanted in it.

"She" germinates our seed, and gives us back in form the products of
mind.

"As if in a school for gods, we learn the consequences of thought."
~ W. Brugh Joy

wishing you well,
PCH
4/16/05

~ ~ ~

PAPER #1

======== The Universe says YES =========

This simple five minute speech (below) in 1978 by author John Michell
rocked my world.
Although today, more and more people are discovering the power of this
meme, it may still be decades before this wave fully washes over all of
humanity, even thought the latest in theoretical physics now appears on
the verge of knowing the actual mechanism by which it works.

I suspect that at some point in time we have all had the platitude
foisted upon us by well meaning elders: "You will get out of this what
you put into it."

But something a bit wilder than that is happening.
It may be commonplace where you live (as it is in northern california
where I live) to acknowledge that "we create our own reality", that
thought actually "enacts" an outer world.

Yet, for the majority of the world's people this is still a wildly
foreign concept and will come as a huge breakthrough.
The once cutting edge New Age precept still ripples across the
landscape: our lives in the objective world are indeed plastic, and
malleable in a way far far beyond what Horatio Alger taught previous
generations.

Turn on a PBS prime time pledge break and you'll hear Wayne Dyer
saying:

"When you change the way you look at things, what you look at will
change."

The local Institute of Noetic Sciences reminds us:

"When you change your worldview, the world you view changes."

A woman in Marin reports being stopped by a police officer who wonders
aloud to her why she chose this day to get a ticket.

Berkeley Psychic Institute teaches "what you pay attention to expands".

In the local high school corridors you hear:

"...different choices, different lives, different realities, different
worlds <yawn>..."

Somewhat more elegantly, from Brugh Joy,: "We live as if we are in a
school for gods, wherein in slow motion we learn the consequences of
thought..." -- a quote that stayed on my refrigerator in Berkeley for
years before the full extent of its meaning started dawning on me.

It is indeed that strange, powerful, true.

Yet let us say clearly, for the vast majority of the world's people,
this is either unknown or ignored, or if noted then dismissed out of
hand, or if still around, vigorously attacked.

To the 30-40% of the world at "traditional/fundamental" level of
consciousness development, the idea that there is more than (their) one
reality, more than one objective "world", that what you see "out there"
is changeable, controllable to a large degree, by the appropriate
direction and control of one's internal way of one's thinking... this is
anathema and seems dangerously close to the magical thinking of the
ancestors from which they've emerged not too long ago.

To the 40-50% of the world at the "modern/rational" level pf
consciousness development, these quaint old-fashioned notions, which seem to undercut the very foundations of objective science, are
throwbacks to primitive ignorance and superstition, and simply,
dismissably, are outright wrong.

It may even be easy for the material reductionist scientists to dismiss
this phenomena as ... "the subject sets their information filter towards
a certain pattern, and then picks out --from the abundant flowing
information streams surrounding him-- just those data points that fit
the initial pattern." but hardly worth noting more than that ... <yawn>

And yet, this process of "reality creation" may involve much more exciting than that,
somewhere along the ragged edge between the latest string theory in
quantum mechanics and good, old fashioned magic,
something more like what William Murray in 1951 declared about his
experience with the Scottish Himalayan Expedition:

"Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one
elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and
splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then
Providence moves too.
[My emphasis.]

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have otherwise
occurred.
A whole stream of events issue from that decision, raising in one's
favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material
assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way if he
was still doing his thing.
I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:
"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it."

And now String Theory and the latest in theoretical physics (without
getting into its stranger implications of parallel universes) may be
ready to explain a mechanism by which interior thought enacts objective
reality. My understanding so far:

Every bit of matter, whether inside your brain or out -- way below the
level of atoms, neutrons, or quarks-- is made up of tiny vibrating
strings.

On the macro level we all know about resonant entrainment: walk into a
quiet music shop filled with stringed instruments. Pluck any note with
sufficient force and the whole store comes alive with echoing harmonics.

Similar situation, similar responses at work at the very finest, small
grain level too?
To the point of actually crossing the barrier between inner(mind) and
outer(reality)??

Somehow in the empty quiet meditative mind, a thought sufficiently
focused and intently held then resonates strongly across unknown
mechanims ["Providence"] to create sympathetic harmonics vibrating into
existence in the objective, exterior world.

From thought to reality.

Intention resounds strongly, rippling outward, setting up circumstances
in our lives, (way beyond what we merely control or select).

How does this happen? How far can this go, until it reaches what
limits??

Coming to grips with this process of mutually creating reality, and
putting it under conscious control, will be (I predict) one of the most
dramatic background shifts occurring in the lives of all conscious
beings on this planet for the next few decades:

* for the Traditionalists to find their way to modernity - that life is
not just their OTROW [One Right True and Only Way];

* for they (and the Moderns) to go beyond the "objective" world view to
realize the vast freedom and potential of each individual to create our
own reality, to set up the conditions of which world we will live in;

* and for all of us learning how "interior" thinking actually enacts
and brings into being exterior reality, the huge responsibility we have
for the power of what we think, for the choices we make, that actually
create the kind of world we live in.

Hence, a brief look at this process is my choice for first paper from
the Collective Wisdom of Humanity project.

Paper #2 looks to where the Universe balks, says No!! --where it
resists our efforts at manipulation, and what those limits then point
to. But for now, let's sit back and let John Michell remind us of just
how far reaching this effect is, how often, how willingly, easily,
graciously, kindly, generously, the Universe agrees to support whatever
we're thinking.

To suppose is to propose

...the accepting universe says yes, Yes!, YES!!

"as in a school for gods"

Paul C. Hoffman
Berkeley, CA
4/16/05
<earthsun@pacbell.net>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ John Michell, 1978 ~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm devoting these momentous five minutes to the most interesting
aspect of the universe of which we are part:
its habit of reflecting back ideas projected onto it, of seeming to
provide positive evidence for any theory that can possibly be
formulated. This feedback effect is something which everyone can test
for themselves. Take the wildest idea imaginable, commit yourself to
believing it, become obsessed with it, and you'll soon find all kinds of
evidence turning up as confirmation of it. John Keel in his most
interesting book, "Operation Trojan Horse", shows with many examples how
writers on UFOs, including himself, and those who develop even a mild or
skeptical interest in the subject, may get led into experiences with
strange creatures and remarkable revelations often ending up in delusion
or madness. This same risk is notoriously inherent in all occult
studies. If one is studying a subject intensely, particularly if writing
about it, ideas on that subject from unknown sources flood into the
mind, and phenomena connected with it may even intrude into one's life,
as the Raven of Edgar Allen Poe intruded upon the midnight scholar.

Another aspect of the feedback effect is the tendency of scientific
experiments to confirm the theory being tested. The great Charles Fort
gave several humorous instances of the same experiment yielding two
different results, each one gratifying the experimenter; and he declared
that anyone who climbs a mountain, but in Mount Ararat or Pike's Peak,
in search of Noah's Ark, is bound to find something which can be said to
be a relic of the Ark, petrified perhaps.

The universe is so generous that it gives to anyone, crank, scientist
or religious believer, the evidence which confirms his particular belief
or theory.

The reference so far has been to the delusory tendencies in the
universal feedback effect. I now come to the interesting part, the way
in which the effect can be used creatively. Study a subject, allow it to
obsess you, ask questions of it, and next time you visit a library, a
bookstore or a friend's house, you may pick up the one book in the world
which gives the answer you were looking for. Coincidences can be
invoked. I have asked many writers about this, and nearly all of them
were able to give striking personal examples of being helped by this
useful aspect of the feedback effect which Arthur Koestler attributes to
"library angels". Colin Wilson in the introduction to his book "The
Occult" (a significant title in this context) writes how during his
researches "Items of required information have turned up with a
promptitude that makes me feel nervous...On one occasion, when I was
searching for a piece of information, a book literally fell off the
shelf and fell open at the right page."

Another excellent example comes in the first volume of Solzhenitzin's
"Gulag Archipelago". The astronomer Kozayev, who was imprisoned with him
in the Dmitrovsk Prison, desperately needed some technical information
for a system of physics which he was working out in his head. No books
were available except the dreary items of party propaganda in the prison
library. Kozayev prayed intensely for help. Half an hour later the
library came round to change the books and the volume they issued him
was "The Theory of Astro-physics" containing the very tables he needed.
No pen or paper was allowed, so he quickly memorized them before the
mistake was discovered and the book confiscated.

An odd story, almost incredible. Yet read Strindberg's "Inferno" for a
record of the creative coincidences he invoked during his subterranean
period as a lonely, impoverished alchemist in Paris during the 1890's.

Now it is time to sum up or to tell you what I was talking about. It
was about the hermetic quality of the universe, the way it will respond
to desires implanted in it and reflect back images projected onto it.
This implies that we are all, individually and collectively, responsible
for the world as it really is, which is how we experience it. In terms
of objective fact there is little to choose between any cosmology,
traditional or scientific. Yet we get back what we project. Evidently
therefore it is to our advantage to regard this best of all possible
universes, this fascinating organism of which we are part, with the most
high-minded expectations in the knowledge that as we imagine this world
and our relationship to it, so it will become.