WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH MATTER?

In a mine in South Dakota, one mile below the surface of the earth, scientists wait patiently by tanks filled with liquid xenon, a material as dense as rock, each surrounded by outer tanks of 70,000 gallons of water.  They are waiting for the arrival of dark matter particles which, supposedly, will tap out a distinctive beat when they collide with the xenon.  According to these scientists dark matter outnumbers regular matter in the universe by a ratio of five to one.  Dark matter is so elusive that it as yet has escaped observation, but it must exist, according to current thinking, to explain certain phenomena, like why the spiral arms of constellations don't spin out into the universe from centrifugal force, but continue to be held in place.  Also, the expansion of the universe, supposedly from the Big Bang, is considerably slower than first predicted, which must be explained by all this extra, yet undetectable mass, slowing down the expansive force of the Big Bang.  While these scientists labor underground in South Dakota, other subterranean scientists labor dilligently in Switzerland, colliding subatomic particles at enormous speeds in search of the Higg's Boson.  Physicist Thomas Higgs postulates a Higgs field which pervades the universe but is, like dark matter, undetectable, and collides with particles a millisecond after the Big Bang or other collisions or explosions of particle busting intensity, conferring mass on some particles and none on others (see my post 'Higgs and Creation').  Dark energy, dark mass, the Higgs field and the Higg's boson, the exploration in South Dakota and the exploration in Switzerland seem closely related.  They all stem from our bewilderment regarding mass, how to explain it's origin and how to explain why our usual Newtonian formulas regarding mass and force don't seem to come close to working when we are dealing with the gigantic forces and masses of the universe or with the forces at work within the minuscule dimensions of the atom.

The prevalent philosophy of most Western people on this planet at the moment is one of materialism.  This philosophy is based on the 'real' things, the solid things that we can see and measure around us.  It is terrifying to a materialist (at least to a thinking materialist, and those may be few and far between) that there may be no real solidity what so ever to the universe.  Originally it was thought that solid matter was composed of tightly knit indestructable pieces of matter called atoms.  It was later discovered that those atoms were really separated by large distances (large in relation to the size of the atoms themselves) from each other and connected, not by matter, but by force fields of mutual attractions and repulsions). Still later, the atom itself was discovered to be composed of a 'solid' nucleus separated by large distances (large in relation to the nucleus itself) from electron particles or an electron field, which again, was held in place by non-material forces of attraction and repulsion.  Now we have been able to pierce the solidity of the atomic nucleus and we have discovered within these seemingly solid protons and neutrons a bewildering array of much smaller subatomic particles, of quarks and gluons and mesons, all connected within the proton and neutron by force fields of mutal attraction and repulsion.  So are these quarks and mesons the 'ultimate' particles, providing the 'ultimate' solidity to the universe, or are these too, ultimately, composed not of matter, but of forces, in the case of quarks, of two opposing forces, one expansive and centrifugal, one contractive and centripetal, in a tight embrace?  What if all particles were, in fact, not made of anything solid at all, but were combinations of opposing forces, neutralizing each other in a stable configuration?

These force fields, by the way, in fact all forces, cannot be seen or measured directly, but only by their effect on matter, on particles and waves.  The forces themselves are not material.  We fall off the roof of a building because of a force, which we call gravity.  Whether our understanding of gravity is correct or not, it is a force and not matter.  In other words we don't go crashing to the ground because little 'gravity' particles are pushing down on us.  There are no particles involved.  The positive poles of magnets or negative or positive molecular ions do not repel each other because of particles or waves that push in between them.  This happens because of a force, which, in this case, we call an electro-magnetic force, but it is no more material than the force that we call gravity is material.  In fact all forces, the so-called weak force and strong force, as well, have no material base in and of themselves, but can only be measured by their effects on matter.


We have been brought up on a basic Newtonian model of mass versus force.  There is a big rock in the road.  How much force will it take to move that rock to the side of the road?  We exert force against the resistance of mass to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish in the world.  Certainly mass must exist.  It's as real as your older, bigger brother sitting on you when you were a child and you not able to muster enough force to push him off.

Our understanding of gravity has changed in the past century.  We used to think of gravity as Newton would have it, as a mutual attraction between masses, the much larger mass pulling the smaller mass in toward it, but the smaller mass exerting a pull on the larger mass as well. With Einstein we have come to view gravity as a bending in the curvature of time/space, but this is also due to the mass, the solidity of large  massive objects.  We understand that when we are moving a large rock, it is hard to do because of the attraction of that large rock to the center of the earth and we are really exerting a horizontal force to overpower this downward vertical force.  We also know that if we were in a gravity free zone, within a space ship, for instance, that that heavy rock would have no weight or mass and we could easily move it with the flick of a finger. Yet we still think of this downward force as being caused by, as emanating from, this solid, heavy quality of the material of the rock.  Yet what if there were nothing really solid or massive about the rock at all.  What if the seeming solidity of the rock and all the particles within the rock had the appearance of solidity and mass because of  opposing forces in stable configurations and not because of any matter at all?

In other posts (Higgs and Creation and Yin,Yang and Beyong) I have written a fair amount about yin and yang, the two opposing forces that many people believe (at least many people in Asia believe) are the structural foundation of everything in the universe.  Yin is the expansive, centrifugal force and yang is the contractive, centripedal force.  You may have heard that yin and yang attract each other.  This is not quite true.  Yin and yang ensnare each other.  Yin and yang combine to form particles and waves, the yang preventing the yin from expanding out beyond the boundaries of the particle or wave and dispersing into infinity, by pulling it in toward its yang center, and the yin preventing the yang from contracting into itself and disappearing from the physical plane into the non-physical vortex that holds the universe together and that was the site of the Big Bang.  Waves are more yin than particles, but they each have a shape.  Shape has dimension because of the yin force and has boundaries because of the yang force.  This is not an attraction, but a mutual entrapment.  Yin still wants to escape from the pull of yang and exapand out into Infinity, and yang wants to escape from the outward push of yin and collapse into itself.  This dynamic tension, the intensity of this pushing and pulling is what gives us the illusion of solidity. Within the nucleus of the atom are quarks which are particles not of matter, but of yin and yang in a tight embrace.  Some of these particles (mostly in the center of the proton or neutron) are more yang and some of these particles (mostly toward the surface of the proton or neutron) are more yin.  The proton and neutron are arrangements of these variously charged sub atomic particles held in a stable balance by their mutual attractions and repulsions, although the proton, being slightly more yang, is externally balanced by the yin electrons or electron fields which circle the nucleus and at the same time as they are pulled centripedally by the yang force of the protons, push out centrifugally by their own yin expansive force.

The real attraction is between smaller yang and larger yang.  Yang pulls other yang toward it.  Large accumulations of yang energy continue to attract more and more yang energy to it.  The yin that is bound with yang in all objects modulates this pulling force.  But this attraction of smaller yang to greater yang is the real explanation of gravity, of weight and mass.  Physicists run into problems and create enormously complex formulations because they look at the world as a single force versus mass.  There is the force of the expansion of the Big Bang versus the mass of all the material of the universe.  There is the centrifugal force caused by the spinning arms of galaxies versus the mass of the material in these galaxies.  If they would forget about mass, forget about any real solidity at all, and view the universe as an interplay of two countervailing forces in various configurations, not the interaction of a single force with mass, then, they would not have this problem.  Yes, there is the expansive force of the universe, perhaps caused by the Big Bang.  But there is the countervailing  contracting force still pulling from the non-physical center of the universe where the Big Bang took place.  Yes, there is tremendous centrifugal force caused by the high speed rotation of galaxies, but there is the countervailing centripedal force pulling back toward the denser, more yang center of these galaxies.

Just as there is no real mass, there are no 'massless' particles, as Western scientists refer to them. Every particle and even every wave maintains a shape.  For this shape to be maintained, for this wave or particle not to break the confines of its boundaries and disperse out into infinity, there must be some, at least minimal amount of yang.  The pull of this minuscule amount of yang cannot be detected on the Earth where the strongest gravitational pull is toward the yang center of our planet.  Yet when light waves, for instance, pass by the much stronger yang pull of large stars and the dense yang center of galaxies, light waves and electro-magnetic waves are pulled toward them and we get the bending of waves that led to much of Einstein's theories about relativity and space/time.

Gravity, dark matter, the slower expansion of the universe, can all be explained by an understanding of the simple principles of yin and yang.  These increasingly desperate searches for mass conferring particles and dark particles are in a sense, the last gasp attempts by materialists to find any solidity in the universe what so ever.  Crawl out of your mine shafts and tunnels and give all this nonsense up.  We live in a 'seemingly solid' world, but really a world of forces, forces which have no material bases at all.  These forces are laws.  Just like there are laws of gravity and laws of electro-magnetism, which are human attempts to describe how forces behave, there are laws of yin and yang (see 'Yin, Yang and Beyong').  In human society the laws that we create have to be externally enforced.  There is the law and included in the law are the methods of enforcing the law should anyone violate it, or as a deterrant to people that are thinking of violating these laws.  But in nature, the laws and the enforcement are the same.  The inviolability of natural forces demand that the universe behave in certain ways.  These laws cannot be violated, although they can be overcome.  Living beings and machines created by living beings, are the only things capable of overcoming, not violating, but overcoming, natural forces.  We do this biologically by metabolizing energy to overcome gravity and inertia, for instance, and pump blood to our heads, move food matter through our digestive systems, etc.  We do this behaviorally, by summoning the energy to overcome these same forces so that we can do what we want to do.  And we do it with machines, which are themselves a kind of metabolic system, by gathering energy and funneling it through a certain kind of shape and a certain kind of material, to overome natural forces and accomplish the task that the inventor of the machine had in mind when he first thought of it, and the users of the machine have in mind whenever they use it.

The force of gravity is not executed through particles which push down on you.  The Big Bang force of expansion is not executed by particles that push out on you.  Forces are non-material.  Stop thinking of non-material forces versus particles, or versus mass, and think of two countervailing forces.  In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth (the earth as a planet not being created for two more 'days' the reference must be to heaven force and earth force).  Infinity bifurcates into yin and yang.  Two different religions (Judeo/Christian and Taoist) from opposite sides of the world, saying exactly the same thing.  The universe begins not with a Big Bang but with an idea, an idea of two countervailing forces and how they can interact to form a 'seemingly' solid universe.

I not only welcome your comments, I hunger for them.

THE OBSERVER

Science is grounded in observation of the world around us.  Based on these observations scientists hopefully develop testable theories as to how physical things will react under certain physical circumstances.  These theories are tested and if found to be accurate, can be used to make predictions as to what will be the energy result, or the velocity result or the chemical result of a series of certain specific physical conditions.  These are observations of the external world.  Even biologists who make their observations on living bodies, make them, most commonly, not on their own bodies, but on other bodies which are, at least from the perspective of the researcher, part of the external world.

Social scientists often rely on what is called 'internal' observations.  Often subjects are asked to observe their feelings, their behaviors, even their body sensations and describe them to the researcher.  And we all make "internal' observations regularly in our daily lives.  We determine, based on observation of body sensations, that we are hungry or tired or relaxed or achey or sick.  When we try on new clothes we observe our body sensations to determine how well the clothes fit.  If you have ever been to a yoga class you are asked to 'watch your breath' or to keep observing different parts of your body to see if you can stretch further and twist more without straining.

When we are younger, disciplinarians ask us to 'watch ourselves.'   All of psychological therapy, all of it, regardless of the particular branch of therapy that is being practiced, all rely on the ability of the patient to step back when they find themselves caught up in a familiar pattern of behavior that they would like to change, and notice what they are doing and feeling at that moment.  Certainly there is no hope for change, either when psychologists attempt to change unfulfilling behavior patterns, or when judges or wardens or anyone else involved in the jurisprudence system, attempt to change criminal behavior,  if patients or criminals do not have the power to step back, to 'watch themselves.'

It should be noted that even with so called 'internal' observations of body sensations, feelings and memories, that the body sensation, feeling and memory is still external to the observer.  We observe a body sensation, but we are not the body sensation that we are observing. When we observe our experience we are not the experience itself, but that which is observing the experience. This is equally true for imagined observations.  We are not the dream, but the dreamer; not the concept, but the conceiver.   Whatever we observe, even if it is within our own bodies, even if it is within our own imagination, is always external to us, the observer.

So what is this observer that is making all these observations?  First of all, and obviously, it is not the 'eye.'  When you make observations in the external world, you often use your eyes, although many times you intentionally close your eyes when you are detecting a sound or smell because you may be able to focus more intently on a nonvisual observation with your eyes closed.  And certainly observations of body sensations, thoughts and anything commonly thought of as within your body is not made with the eye.  Even if you use your eyes, it is arguable that the eye itself is not making the observation.  You are looking through your eyes.  Your eyes by themselves, even with all their neural attachments to the brain, are just mechanical/electric cameras, although fantastically intricate and precise cameras.  There still needs to be an observer, an 'I' looking through that eye to actually see anything.  Many thousands of patients in vegetative coma states have their eyes open.  Are they actually seeing anything through those eyes or not?  This is a question that plagues their loved ones and care takers.  Since they are totally paralyzed there has been no way of knowing (until recently, see post 'Brain Scans, Comas and Consciousness') if there is anyone 'in there' or not.  People intuitively understand that even if the eye is working, even if all the various parts of the eye are there and in good condition, even if the optical nerve is in tact and the connections to the optical tetum of the brain are whole, there is no vision unless someone is in there; unless someone is using this equipment; unless an 'I' is looking through that eye.

This I, this observer, is what people with spiritual curiousity are interested in.  There is no reason why spiritual curiosity cannot happily coexist with scientific curiousity; scientific curiosity being an interest in observations of the world around us; and spiritual curiosity being an interest in the observer itself.  And there are several things about this 'observer' that are extremely interesting and extremely rewarding to anyone that has a real curiosity about it.  One interesting thing is that no matter what you are doing or experiencing, if you are able to observe it, then you notice that it, whatever you are observing, whether it is inside or outside of your body, whether it is real or imagined,  is always outside of you, the observer. So the observer, which is you, always eludes definition.  Whatever you decide this observer is, whatever concept you conjure up for it, that definition and that concept exist outside of the observer.  To try to 'figure it out' you have to conceptualize something and in doing so you automatically create something outside of yourself, the observer.  The observer is not a thing and it is not a concept.  It may be helpful to say that the observer is the context, the non-physical bowl within which you experience all  your experience.  It may also be helpful to use the analogy of the foreground and the background of a painting.  If a painting contains any objects what so ever, there must be a background for those objects to emerge from.  The observer, then is the background of your experience, and the foreground is the actual experiences of your life.  Yet this is not perfectly accurate either, and any image of contexts or backgrounds, if held on to, will actually prevent you from experiencing, and by experiencing, from knowing, the observer by itself, when it is not making any observations at all. And since you, yourself, are the observer, these concepts, and the continuous restlessness of desires which keep you ever focussed  on the objects of your desire, in the external world or in your imagination, prevent you from experiencing the observer by itself, apart from all observations; and since the observer is you, the real you, your inability to stop, even for a minute or two, the restless movement of your desires and your mind, which is the servant of your desires, prevents you from every really knowing yourself, from self-realization.  The observer, or the self, then, is not any of these things or images that we use to define it.  The observer IS.

You can also notice that the observer, whether you are using your eyes, your nose, your ears, your skin, your memory or your intellect, that the observer, itself, is exactly the same observer no matter which sensory organ or combination of sensory organs you are using to arrive at whatever it is that you are experiencing.  You, the real you, as opposed to your body, your mind or whatever it is that you experience, are the observer.   You are the seer of your sights, the hearer of your sounds, the thinker of your thoughts, and the 'senser' of your body sensations.  If you are able to separate yourself from what you are experiencing, you will notice that yourself always feels exactly the same to yourself, and that includes not just whatever you happen to be doing or experiencing at that moment but also wherever and whenever you happen to be doing or experiencing it.  The you that observes smells inside your nose and the you that senses touch sensations all along your skin, the you that tastes things in the roof of your mouth and the you that sees things between the external end of the optical nerve and the retina, and the you that hears things between the external end of the cochlear nerve and the ear drum, are all exactly the same you.  Also, your 'you' doesn't change with time.  There is no morning you and evening you; a summer you and a winter you.  You are always the same ground of experience, the same focus, the same observer, no matter what, where or when you are observing something.

So even when you were a small child, your experience of yourself to yourself was exactly the same as it is now.  That is why sometimes you wake up in the morning and before your adult thoughts and concerns come rushing in you have a momentary insight that you, yourself and to yourself, without the distraction of any thoughts, feelings or body sensations, are exactly the same as you always were.  That is also why people with Alzheimers, where the logical and time oriented connections in the brain have begun to deteriorate, can get terribly confused and think that they are present at a much earlier time in their lives.  That is also why all old people, when they can separate themselves from their body sensations,  never feel old to themselves but exactly as they always felt to themselves and are often surprised to see themselves in pictures and realize that they really are, at least as far as their faces and their bodies are concerned, old.  The same is true for people who have lost a limb, have gained a lot of weight, or whose body has undergone any drastic change.  They still feel exactly the same to themselves as they did before the change took place and often momentarily forget that that change has taken place.  Even stroke victims and people that have experienced brain damage know, even if they are no longer able to communicate this knowledge, that in their innermost self, they are still the same as they always were.  The intense frustration that these people feel comes from the fact that even though they are no longer able to translate their thoughts into words for others or even for themselves, the same impulses, the same desires that would formerly result in thoughts are still there but, maddeningly, they can no longer be communicated.

The fact that the observer, which is the true self, has not changed since one was a small child, can at first seem abhorrent to the ego.  Yes, you have a whole shelf of trophies that you have accumulated, you have a wall full of advanced degrees; you have a fabulous home, a fabulous car, and a wonderful family.  But all these achievements and acquisitions are external to yourself.  I know that you don't think the same thoughts, have the same understandings, feel the same feelings, have the same values or perceive the world in the same way as you did when you were much younger, but, again, all of these are the contents of consciousness, not consciosness itself.  In the same way, you may now be haunted by failures, guilts and disappointments.  You may be lonely and depressed in a way that you never were in early childhood.  Yet, these feelings, this 'sense of yourself' are the things that you observe or even the things through which you observe the world, but they are not the observer itself.  It's as if you have accumulated dirt on the surface of your flashlight.  The light that comes out is not as bright as it used to be, and all the things you see look dirty because of it; but if you remove that dirty cover of the flashlight, if you get below the surface, the light inside is exactly as bright as it always was.

So two curious things about this observer are 1. that everything it observes in the material world and in the imaginary world is external to it, and 2. that it never changes.  The things it thinks about changes, the body sensations it experiences changes, the values and and relationships and feelings that it dwells on at different times changes, but it, itself, not the experience, but that which experiences the experience, in other words, you; you, apart from your ever growing and aging body and your ever changing stream of thoughts, you, yourself,  never change.  This is exemplified beautifully in a Hindu legend of two birds in a tree.  The first bird is singing, then not, building a nest, then not, laying eggs and feeding children and then not; flying, eating, singing, and then not.  The other bird just sits absolutely still in the tree and silently observes everything the other bird is doing.  This other bird never moves; it never sings; it never does anything but silently and absolutely peacefully observes.  The first bird the Hindus refer to as the self with a lower case s; what they call the relative self.  The second bird  the Hindus refer to as the Self with a higher case S; what they call the witness.

Another thing that is most curious about this observer, or self, which I will now call this Self, is that it is not observable or measurable in any way directly.  Of course, it is usually quite obvious when a Self is present in the body of a living creature, because the presence of the Self means that that creature is alive; and the absence of a Self means that that creature is dead; usually a very obvious difference.  Yet when people are in vegetative comas and are being maintained by life support systems, it becomes very difficult to tell if they are alive or not; and no matter who is asking, no matter whether it is 'uber materialist' Steve Pinker, or 'man is merely a computer' Richard Dawkins, the question is always, even if the entire body and brain seem to be in tact,  "is anyone still in there?" Unless the person is not completely paralyzed and can voluntarily move some muscle, whether it is to wiggle a toe, blink an eye or clench a jaw, there has been no way (again, until very recently) to determine whether 'anyone' is in there; and always family and loved ones and caretakers, even neo-Darwinist materialist caretakers, are desperate to find out.

Even in healthy bodies, although the responsiveness of a living person gives you prima facie evidence that their is some one, some thing, some entity, in there that is hearing and considering your words and giving you reasonable responses based on those observations; the actual hearer of your voice, the being that is making sense out of your words, the being who is initiating a whole series of responses including the firing of millions of neurons, the contraction and expansion of several muscles in his tongue and jaw and the directing of just the right amount of air through his vocal chords to respond to your questions, that being, so obviously deduced from his or her reactions, is not actually visible or even directly measurable.

You may have been in yoga classes or done deep relaxation exercises where the instructor asks you to be absolutely still and, without moving at all, to 'bring your awareness' to your foot, 'bring your awareness' to your hand, to your chest, to any part of the body where you are experiencing tension.  All of this is done while you are being absolutely still.  If everything in your body, not the involuntary, microscopic movements within your cells, blood stream and digestive tract, but everything within your conscious control is absolutely still while your awareness is moving freely all around your body, then, clearly, your awareness is not a thing.  And your awareness is really you.  When you are asked to 'bring your awareness' to a certain place its not as if you are bringing or carrying something external to yourself called your awareness.  It's not as if you are moving to your foot and you decide to take your awareness along with you.  How could you move to your foot and not bring your awareness.  You and your awareness are the same thing; they cannot be separated.  You could as easily say, without moving, 'go to your foot,' or 'be with your foot,' and you will get exactly the same result.

The reason you can move the Self freely around the body while the body is absolutely still is that the Self is not a thing at all.  It is context not content.  It is the non-physical bowl within which you experience all your experience.  It is not made of molecules or atoms, of waves of energy, of quarks or neutrinos.  It is not a thing.  It is no thing.  I could call it consciousness, but that conjures up an image of something that includes the contents of consciousness, all the things that consciousness experiences.  Yet you are pure consciousness, not the contents of consciousness.  The Self is actually you at your deepest level, yourself,  and the moment you try to conceptualize it, to observe it in your imagination, you step outside of yourself and create an image or a concept that is bounded, limited and not really pure consciousness, which is unbounded, limitless and precedes any content.

The observer, the Self, is not understood but realized; it is not figured out but experienced.  In fact it is the only thing (which is not really a thing) that you can know with complete confidence.  To know the Self does not require an observation of anything.  It does not require the use of a measuring instrument which gives you a quantity or a quality of a thing, but never the thing itself.  It does not require the use of sense organs which receive some signals that are impinging on them and ignore others and which are affected by our previous experiences.  It does not require the brain, which is the organ which records and defines our experience and through which we look out at the world from a certain point of view.

As opposed to science, the experience of the observer, of the Self, requires no beliefs.  When contemporary scientists look back on past scientists they have no problem using the word 'belief.'  Scientists used to believe that the earth was the center of the universe.  Scientists used to believe that fire emitted a substance called phlogiston.  Scientists used to believe that time and space were discreet, separate qualities, as were electricity and magnetism.  Those same scientists when they were alive would have been just as upset and outraged by anyone calling their 'laws' or their 'conclusions' beliefs as contemporary scientists are about calling their current unerstandings beliefs.  Yet time always changes laws into beliefs that are only understood to be beliefs in retrospect.  The observer, the Self, however never changes.  It cannot change because it is not a thing and only things change.  Mystics and saints trying to put into words their experience of the Self and the effects of realizing the Self, use the same words and make the same attempts that they did five hundred years ago, five thousand years ago and last year.

All this brings us to a fourth interesting thing about the observer, the Self.  I saved this aspect of the Self for now because it is, unless it is understood carefully, the most ego threatening of all.  This fourth aspect of the observer is nothing more and nothing less than that the observer, the Self, that is looking out and observing the world from behind my eyes, and the observer, the Self, that is looking out and observing the world from behind your eyes, is the exact same Self.  In fact, the Self that is looking out and observing the world from your cat's eyes, or your dog's eyes, or any living beings eyes, or, if they don't have eyes, any living being's sense organs, the observer, the Self, in all living beings is the exact same Self.  Again, I do not mean that any two creatures perceive the world in the same way; that any two creatures have exactly the same values or feelings or thoughts.  I am not implying that every creature even has values or feelings or thoughts.  Yet every creature is conscious; every creature has at its center an observer, even if all it observes is to detect whether something is to be approached or avoided, eaten or ignored.  If a creature is alive it needs nutrients and it gravitates toward the things it needs and it expends energy to arrive at those things it needs, whether that means hunting, grazing, running, flying, swimming,  turning its leaves to face the sun or sending out roots to find water.  This creature, whatever it is, performs these tasks not because of gravity, electro-magnetism, the weak force or the strong force, but because it wants to, because of the force of desire; and it desires what it needs not because it, or we humans for that matter, have any understanding of our biological needs, but because we experience hunger, a conscious experience, which is the desire which draws us to what we want to eat (and also, thanks to the wisdom of the universe, to exactly what we need to eat).  And the 'that which experiences hunger' of that simplest creature is the exact same 'that which experiences hunger' in us humans, which is the exact same 'that which thinks our thoughts', and 'that which calculates our most sophisticated calculations.'

As Deepok Chowpra says, "conciousness is a non-local phenomena."  Living beings are ways of separating consciousness, not that it is really separated, but by committing to a separate body and a separate brain, and participating in this world only through the agency of this body/brain, each of us develops our own separate way of experiencing the world and maintains the illusion of separation.  In this light, a species is a group of living beings that share a common understanding of the world and that can therefore understand one and other.  Variation within a species means that while members of the same species share a basic understanding of their world, they do not share it exactly.  Yes, from an evolutionary point of view, variation within a species increases the chance of survival of that species in the face of a new predator or a sudden change in environment.  But from an experiential point of view, variation within a species means that each member of a species has an exciting life as it gets to know, but never fully knows, is continued to be surprised by, the other members of that same species.  Members of the same species have enough in common so that they can understand each other and do not die of loneliness.  Members of the same species have enough variation so that they can never understand each other fully and do not die of boredom.  Understand here that I am not coming from the point of view that we are here merely to try to survive.  If that was the only thrust of evolution we would have stopped in the very beginning with microbes, which began all living creatures and still dominate all other living creatures by billions or trillions to one.  Survival has never been the main issue.  The thrust of evolution is to provide an experience and as environmental conditions on this planet and available elements on this planet have allowed for more and more complex organisms, they have been created to provide a more and more complex and interesting life experience. And evolution stops with humans not because more survivable creatures are not possible (as I said, microbes are exponentially more survivable), but because we are the living creatures, finally, that have the complexity to realize, during our own life time, that we are not separate, in other words, humans are the first creatures that have the capacity to see through the game of life and realize who we really are.

If we were forced to summarize Christianity in one sentence it would be 'the Golden Rule,' Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.  This is the central teaching of Jesus and it appears in Hebrews in the Old Testament and in the writings of Buddha, in Hinduism, Taoism and Zoroastrianism.  Yet these great teachers of ancient religion were after something more than molding 'nice' people.  Look at the Golden Rule not just as a prescription for behavior but as a learning tool.  By acting as if other people are as worthy as yourself, you eventually come to realize that they really are as worthy as yourself, in fact, that they and you are all aspects of the one great cosmic Self.

Whether or not we have that complete realization that we, in our essence, are really one, we still get intimations of it.  Those intimations we call love.  Love is the experience that we get, if even for a moment, that the other creature that we are looking at, or listening to, or touching, or smelling, or just thinking about, is really the same being as we are; and the usual sense of separation that we always have, and that I referred to above, the separation between the observer and the thing that we are observing, for a moment, disappears.  The feeling that we get is that the thing that we are relating to is not a thing at all, but a being, a being whose essence is the same consciousness, the same Self, as ourselves.  In that moment the illusion of separation is penetrated and our sense of self expands to include another.

Even though that moment of actual union, which can take place within or without the context of sex, and can take place with a child, a parent, a friend or a pet; can take place with an art form, with an audience, with a stranger or with a tree; that moment does not last, at least not at that intensity, for more than a moment.  As soon as you and the other being resume your activities, you do so from your own point of view and the other does so from his or her point of view and that sense of union may linger but not at the level of intensity that you experienced at that one transcendent moment. Yet these moments of experiencing the piercing of the boundary between oneself and another, bring all the rest of the universe closer.  You feel in a completely new and much deeper way, that you belong here, if not on the whole planet, then at least that you belong at that particular place where you had this experience.  You experience some of that closeness and shared experience that you had with your loved one with the other people and even the objects in that place.

And, very importantly, you do not need another person to have this experience.  In spite of all the bad press that religion has received over the last decades, and how mindlessly and numbingly unconsciously so many religious practices are repeated by rote now a days, religion and it's rituals and practices were really created as a path to getting to a place where one can love one's Self.  Notice I did not say a place where one can love one's self.  That kind of love, self-love, has to do with a kind of pride about some aspect of your relative self that you feel is superior to a similar aspect in other creatures.  You obsess about this superiority of yours, not because of how ecstatic it makes you feel, but, usually, because it makes up for something else in your self that you feel is lacking or deficient.  This is precisely the kind of pride that you are reminded to get in touch with by well-intentioned but non-spiritual care givers.  "Why are you so depressed, a beautiful, young girl like you?"  "I know you are struggling with your studies, but remember what a gifted athlete you are." "I am sorry that the kids make fun of you, but you have to realize that they are just jealous of your intelligence."  This kind of bolstering of one aspect of the self to overcome negative feelings about another, doesn't really get you off the cycle of ups and downs, of ecstatic pride in one's victories and haunting shame in one's defeats.  What gets you off the cycle is realizing that the relative self, your body, your brain, your patterns of behavior, even your values, feelings and memories, are not the real you; they are part of the self, not the Self.  Your body and your brain are not you.  They are the equipment that you, the Self, use to experience the world and to satisfy your desires in the world.  But they are not the Self, which is not a thing or an activity, not a talent or an achievement; it is the context of everything else, it is pure consciousness, and by experiencing it, by knowing that that is what you really are, and what everybody else is, then superior and inferior disappear.  You can compete, but the life and death importance of competing is lost.  You are no longer competing because you need to  have a good sense of yourself or out of fear that you might wind up having a bad sense of yourself.  You know that your Self (not your self) will be exactly the same regardless of any defeat or victory.  This insight does not prevent you from competing, just competing with tension, with fear, with life or death stakes.  Competing becomes a game between two equals, in fact two identicals, who agree, for the sake of the game, that one will take of his shirt and be a 'skin' and one will keep on his shirt and be a 'shirt', or one will put on a black shirt and be black or a white shirt and be white; or a black body and be black or a white body and be white, or a male body and be male or a female body and be female; but all of this is part of the game of life, this game that, at times, but only at times, and actually at rare times, is competitive, but competitive as in a game and not as in those ridiculously dreaded and tension bound words......real life.

To love one's Self is to realize that in your essence you are exactly the same as every one else and every living being on this planet, and that you and everyone else are parts of, are different aspects of, a cosmic consciousness that is beyond space and time and is the source of all love, compassion, creativity and intelligence.  This Self can be discovered hap hazardly, which many religions call grace, or it can happen in an organized way by practicing a spiritual path.  Both experiences fade as you turn back to the world and pursue your interests within it with your usual point of view; although this experience is transforming enough that it will usually alter your perspective so that you will continue your worldly pursuits in a way somewhat different that you did before; the reason you are continuing to do the things you were doing will probably undergo a shift, and you may actually not continue to do what you were previously doing, but undertake some different activities.  If this experience comes as a result of a spiritual practice, then the experiencer knows how to get back to this experience once it fades; by going back to the spiritual practice that got her there. If it happens haphazardly and you are desperate to recapture the experience that you have lost, may I suggest a spiritual practice, anyone that appeals to you, as a vehicle for rekindling this experience?  If it is from a major religion, it doesn't really matter which practice you do, as long as you bring your full consciousnes and full desire to the practice. You know the experience that you want and that you love, so bring the fullness of that desire to your practice.  And, I said, any practice of a major religion will do.  Major religions have lasted for thousands of years precisely for this reason, that they do deliver to the person who zealously undertakes their practices, this very experience that I have been describing.

Religion, not the mind numbing rote repitition of rituals that is often practiced nowadays, and which is done because "you're supposed to", or because "God wants you to," or because "the priest (or the rabbi or the imam) told you to,"  but vibrant, experiential religion, which is practiced without any more belief in it than we have in anything else we do.  We spend time and money to go to a movie in the hope, in the belief, that we will derive a good experience from it.  We spend time and money and energy acquiring an academic degree because we hope, we believe, that it will somehow pay off.  Every investment that we make of our time and energy we do in the hope or the belief that it will result in an experience that we want for ourselves or for others.  Precisely the same holds true for religion.  When Buddha and Jesus attracted followers, the followers came to them not because they were Buddhists or Christians and that was what you were supposed to do; there was no such thing at the time as Buddhists or Christians.  Rather, they came with a very simple belief.  They saw in Buddha and in Jesus something that they wanted to emulate, that they wanted for their own lives.  They simply said, "is it possible for me to achieve some of the peace, the wisdom, the love, and the vitality that we see in you?"  And Buddha's and Jesus' answer was "Yes.  Just follow me!"  So the followers followed.  They did the things that Buddha and Jesus suggested not from a mindless belief, but because there was something very tangible that they wanted to achieve for themselves.  If they didn't achieve it, they would stop their practices.  If they did, they would continue to follow and even teach these practices to others.  Thousands of years later these two religions still thrive, not because of rote practitioners who got no value out of their practice (how long would that last?) but because enough people experienced real results, real change and improvement in their lives; enough to continue and rededicate themselves to these practies and teach them to new generations, not of blind followers, but of spiritual seekers looking to know and experience their true Selves and their true natures.

The Self is the observer and when you observe from the true Self, you observe without the intermediary of your relative self, twisted by personal memories and driven by personal desires.  That is why pschologists and judges, both, can say with confidence, "Just watch yourself."  The Self that is watching the self; the Self that can step back from the self, is a higher Self, a Self whose observations are not twisted by momentary desires.  The Self always picks the reasonable path over the irrational path; the solution for the greater and longer range good over the solution that benefits one side (even your own side) over the other; the solution that makes you feel better about yourself in the long run even if you have to forego the immediate satisfaction that would give you pleasure in the moment but a diminished sense of yourself over the long haul.

Spiritual people are thought of, in some circles, as delusional.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Spiritual people have profound experiences of themselves and a vision of the world that is based on that experience and that really makes sense.  Materialists view the world in such a pathetic, disorganized and frightened way that they believe is based on reality.  It is actually based on a series of absurd beliefs  including the accidental rise of life from nonliving matter, the accidental rise of the universe from a random explosion, the ability of molecules to desire and experiene and feel things, the ability of coded messages to form themselves, by themselves, into impossibly complex and synchronous ideas (the genetic code forming itself, by itself, into living bodies) which is the equivalent of letters forming themselves into great novels, numbers forming themselves into  the most sophisticated equations, and computer code forming itself into the most advanced software.  Not realizing that the Self is not a thing, they go through life fearing the destruction or the diminishment of the self.  Not knowing that we are all the same Self, they take pleasure in bullying and domineering others, and derive self satisfaction from thinking of themselves as higher up on whatever ridiculous hierarchy they think is important to them at the moment.  Not knowing that love of the Self and through love of the Self, the love of all others and the love of the cosmos, can be discovered within, they desperately seek out relationships, believing that only through relationships can they find any happiness at all.

Someone with Self realization participates in this world without fear, because they know that whatever the outcome of their endeavors, the Self, the observer, will not change.  They may be involved in hierarchies, but they don't take them seriously.  They relate to others as if they are brothers and sisters, because they are.  They do not enter a room with trepidation waiting to see if they are liked or not.  Their happiness does not depend on anyone else's opinion of them.  They enter a room of people to enjoy them, to share with them, to celebrate with them our common humanity and to discover with curiosity the unique path that each of them has taken. The Observer looks out at the world with fully conscious, open eyes.  The unrealized person looks out at the world with a certain tentativeness, because their sense of self (as opposed to their Self) depends, they think, on how the world will react to them.

As always, I welcome your comments.

BRAIN SCANS, COMAS AND CONSCIOUSNESS

In hospitals and care facilities around the world there are thousands upon thousands of patients lying in a comatose vegetative state, their basic biological functions being maintained by life support systems.  After being in such a state for a period of time, the question uppermost in the minds of their relatives, loved ones and care givers is: "Is there still anyone in there?" If there is some voluntary movement that the patient still has control over: the ability to wiggle a toe, to flex a finger, to clench a jaw, etc., then at least yes and no questions can be asked to establish a line of communication and determine whether or not there is still someone in there.  Yet for those patients completely paralyzed, the determination of this question, until very recently,  has been impossible, even though those closest to the patient often have strong feelings as to whether or not their loved one is still there.  An eye that is open but unmoving can appear vacant at one moment and then focussed and present at another; a feeling of extra alertness, a different kind of energy,  can be communicated to loved one's even if there is no observable movement.  Yet at some point, even if some family members have a sense that he or she may still be in there, because of the enormous costs of maintaining a patient in this condition and the huge emotional strain for loved ones who find no ultimate resolution to this question, a heart rending decision must be made.

As upsetting as this situation is for so many people, it is also, in a way, deliciously ironic.  In this age of rigid materialist thinking, with the finest measuring and observing devices for examining the human body and brain inside and out, there was no way of knowing whether or not the person, the being, was still dwelling within that body.  And mind you, if, God forbid, a child of uber materialist Steve Pinker or 'man is just a computer' Richard Dawkins, or a child of any of the whole cult of neo-Darwinists, were in this condition, then Pinker and Dawkins and all the neo-Darwinists would be just as desperate to determine if their child (not their child's body but their child)  was still dwelling inside that body.

Adrian Owen, a neuro-scientist from the University of Cambridge, UK, now working in Canada, has dedicated himself to finding measurable answers to that daunting question.  A patient named Kate Bainbridge  contracted a viral infection that had put her into a coma for months.  Doctors determined that she was in a vegetative state and the time for answering the 'dreaded question' was quickly approaching.  Meanwhile Owen had been using positron-emission tomography in healthy people to show that a part of the brain called the fusiform face area (FFA) is activated when people see a familiar face.  When the team showed Bainbridge familiar faces and scanned her brain, "it lit up like a Christmas tree, especially the FFA," says Owen.  "That was the beginning of everything."  Bainbridge responded quickly to rehabilitation and now in a wheelchair but otherwise active wrote to Owen to thank him for the brain scan, "It scares me to think of what might have happenned to me if I had not had mine.  It was like magic, it found me."

What is most intriguing about all this for me, is who and what is this person that all these people are desperately seeking within this comatose body but are not able to directly observe?  When Ms. Bainbridge declares that it found 'me' what is the 'me' that was found?  The most fanatic of the materialist cult may say that it is her brain, especially her cerebral cortex, capable of complex activity, that was found.  But was it Kate Bainbridge's cerebral cortex, especially her FFA, that was excited to see her relatives and loved ones?  Does the cerebral cortex get excited when it sees familiar faces?  Does it feel lonely when it doesn't?  If it does, which part of the cerebral cortex, even which part of the FFA is experiencing these feelings?  Is it the electrons that are running through it?  Is it the nerve cells or some chemicals within the nerve cells that were feeling so lonely and isolated and longed so deeply to establish contact?  When Ms. Bainbridge describes the unspeakable torment of being so completely paralyzed within her body that she could not establish any contact although she desperately wanted to and knew that her loved ones desperately wanted her to as well, is it, once again, the chemicals and electrons in her brain that were feeling all this?  And there are hundreds of billions of neurons in the brain and exponentially more electrons.  Did Ms. Bainbridge experience all these feelings as if there were many billions of parts of herself communicating this isolation and then this exhilaration at making contact?  Or did she experience this experience as we all, all living beings, experience our experience, as a unitary consciousness; as one being, one self?  Did she say, "It scares all of us to think of what might have happened to the hundreds of billions of us if our multitude had not had ours (the brain scan).  It was like magic.  It found the entire horde of us"?    Or did she say, "it scares me to think of what might have happenned to me  if I had not had mine.  It was like magic. It found me".  Is the FFA experiencing Kate's excitement, or is it recording Kate's excitement?  Are the complex wirings of the FFA assisting Kate in defining and recognizing those familiar faces, or is the wiring recognizing the faces by itself?  Can wiring do anything by itself or is wiring merely matter, and like all other matter, can do nothing by itself because it has no self, and must be used and designed by a being that does have a self that desires and experiences things.  And is this self the very same self that all of Ms. Bainbridge's loved one's were so anxious to make contact with, an unobservable self, a self that is the context of experience and the milieu of desire, and which expressed her gratitude by writing a letter to Dr. Owen?

Although the positron-emission tomography test was able to show that patients were still alive and present, it did not yield any information beyond that.  It was not a method whereby Dr. Owen could ask questions of the patient and find out how they were feeling, if they needed more analgesic medication or less, if they would like to listen to the radio, to listen to a particular channel, etc. He started testing healthy individuals by asking them to imagine playing a vigorous, competitive game of tennis for thirty seconds.  Then he asked them to imagine walking through their homes, also for thirty seconds.  These imaginings were being done while the patient was receiving an fMRI brain scan.

The brain is, I believe, the only major organ in the body that does not have a way of storing fats in the form of glycogen to be converted to glucose when needed to be burned for energy.  So whenever we do mental activity we are directly using the sugar, the glucose, that is already present in our bloodstreams.  That is why our thoughts and emotional levels can change so dramatically when our blood sugar level dramatically rises and falls. (That is also why our energy and emotional level becomes much more stable when our diet is rich in complex carbohydrates, such as are found in whole grains, which slowly break down in the digestive system and enter the bloodstream over a period of hours, rather than rely on lots of sugary food and drinks which enter the bloodstream within seconds, creating a huge spike in our blood sugar level and stimulating the production of large amounts of insulin which continues to drive down the blood sugar level for hours after the initial surge, creating the craving for a new sugar hit).

Playing a competitive tennis match and recalling wandering through your house are two very different activities.  Tennis requires much more adrenaline, a keen and expectant focus on the ball, and the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system with energy moving into the musculature of the limbs and away from the digestive system.  Imagining walking through one's home is not adrenalizing, but requires memory of objects and spatial relations and by recalling various objects and rooms stimulates many connected memories laden with personal meaning.  When healthy people imagined playing tennis, more blood would flow to a part of the brain called the premotor cortex or the supplementary motor cortex.  When they imagined navigating through their house, more blood would flow to the parahippocampal gyrus, associated with memory and feeling.

By doing the same test with patients in a vegetative state, some of them responded exactly as did the healthy patients.  The increased blood flow to the premotor cortex meant not only that they had heard the instructions, but that they had understood the words and remembered something about what the game of tennis was like and what it required.  The increased flow to the parahippocampal gyrus also proved their ability to hear, to understand and to remember.  In those responsive patients, Dr. Owen followed with further testing.  He gave the patients a series of yes and no questions asking them to imagine playing tennis if the answer were yes and wandering through their house if the answer was no. At first they were asked a series of questions to determine beyond any dispute that they were in there and conscious.  For instance, "Is your name Harry?,"  "Is your name Joseph?,""Do you have a brother?," "Do you have a sister?," etc.  Then they were asked questions that were relevant to their care:  "Are you in pain?,"  "Would you like the radio on?,"  "Would you like the window open?," etc.

Dr. Owen is still working on refining his technique so that it can be done more efficiently and economically and become common practice in the care of comatose patients. This is certainly wonderful news for people in so-called vegetative states and their loved ones, but it is also, to my mind, amazing news to anyone who is in the possession of a brain and a body, healthy or otherwise.  Let's look at the first part, imagining playing tennis.  The subject, whether healthy or paralyzed, at some point decides whether to follow these instructions or not.  This decision is probably made before the instructions are given.  The healthy patients are either volunteers who have some interest in science and believe in the potential value of the research or are getting paid for their involvement and want to do the job with integrity.  The comatose patients, one would guess, would probably be willing, even extremely eager, to follow these instructions because they promise to provide a way of making desperately desired contact. But once the patient decides, he or she commits the energy necessary to do the task and that commitment, in the case of the imagined tennis game, results in a reapportionment of the blood flowing through the brain, a reapportionment that can be measured by the fMRi equipment. And it also results in the precise hundreds of millions of neurons of the premotor cortex that would lead to an actual game of tennis if the circuits going from those initial neurons were allowed to continue moving to the precise muscles that would make all the required movements possible.  With the healthy patients those signals do not continue because they are asked to stay still and just imagine the game and in the comatose patients there is some break or damage that connects those circuits leading from the premotor cortex to the actual musculature.  In either case there is no outward observable movement.   So just by deciding to imagine such a thing, we humans (whether mobile or paralyzed) are able to rearrange the cranial blood supply and cause the firing of the precise millions of neurons that would initiate the activity that we are imagining.

Now you may have heard of psychokinesis or telekinesis.  This is the supposed ability of people to move or bend objects just with the power of their minds, with no physical contact between the person and the object.  Uri Geller made an entire career of either doing this or tricking people into believing that he was doing this.  Whether or not Uri Geller, or anyone else, has such an unusual gift or is really a trickster, is of very little interest to me.  I am not concerned so much about unusual people with unusual gifts.  I am much more concerned about the amazing gifts that usual people, that all people, that even totally paralyzed people have and exercise, whether they realize it or not, at every moment of their waking existence.  Simply by deciding to do something, by wanting to do something, we immediately rearrange the blood flow to the brain to energize the exact pattern of millions of neurons that enable us to do, or to imagine doing, what we want to do.  Now I said that 'we' rearrange the blood supply to the brain, but, of course, we have no direct involvement in this process at all.  It is being done for us.  We cannot appear on the Jay Leno show to show off this amazing gift, because everyone has it and no one, unless they are in the possession of very sophisticated medical equipment, can observe it. Never the less it is no less amazing, in fact, far more so, than Uri Geller bending a key from five feet away.  On a microscopic level millions of utterly precise changes are being initiated just by our decision. Whether you call this process which takes place every moment we decide to do anything, whether we are deciding to imagine playing tennis, deciding to go to war with Iraq, or deciding to scratch our nose, whether you call this psychokinesis or telekinesis, it doesn't matter.  But what is going on is that merely your decision, prior to any force, prior to any movement, prior to any re-arrangement of energy, just your decision, made without any physicality what so ever, engenders millions of utterly precise physical processes.

Ready! Get set! Go!  Go is the actual burst of muscular energy that begins a race and unfortunately, of course, it is beyond the ability of a totally paralyzed person.  Get set is the movement into the exact physical position that the runner wants to be in to commence the race, and this too is beyond the purview of the paralyzed.  Ready is the inner preparation, the sharpening of the focus (you are the focus), the distribution of the blood supply, the re-arrangement of energy and the stimulation of the precise array of millions of neurons of the pre-motor cortex, prior to any external movement at all; and all of this, thanks to the findings of Dr. Owen, is, through the instrument of their will alone, within the purview of even the totally paralyzed.

The common modern day view of the human body is that it happens to be there as a result of an enormous series of freak accidents that gradually took place over billions of years in the random interplay of physical forces, and that the purpose of the human body is to conduct basic biological tasks to insure its survival and its replication.  This view of how our bodies arrived, particularly from the perspective of the mind boggling level of complexity and syncrhronicity that we now know exists, a very small part of which  we are now just beginning to understand, is ludicrous for many, many reasons which are elucidated in several other posts of this blog. Also, and importantly, the body, by itself, does not want to survive.  The body, even the brain, does not want to survive and does not want to replicate.  The body, even the brain, are matter, are molecules and electrons, and proteins and fats and sugars, and like all matter, they do not want anything, and they do not care about anything.  Neurons don't care if they are idle or if electricity is flowing through them.  The digestive tract doesn't care if it is empty or full.  There is no such singular entity as 'the body.'  There are, however, literally quadrillions of parts and simultaneous processes in this body that are all working  synchronously with each other.  This sychronicity is not the result of an actual unit called 'the body' but of a unitary consciousness.  When people say that there is a transcendent conciousness, a cosmic consciousness, they mean that there is a being, not a physical entity, but a being, which, among other things, has designed and evolved your body, each organ of which is the result of an idea to allow the organism to deal more effectively with a changing environment and which allows you, among many other things, to arrange all the precise neurons and alter the blood flow and prepare the energy flow which allows you to do whatever you want to do the moment you decide to do it.

Then there is our consciousnes itself.  There are several current scientific theories as to what is the 'cause' of consciousness: the patterns of electricity in your brain, the patterns of magnetic fields surrounding the brain, the patterns of gyruses and sulci (hills and valleys) of the cortex; the patterns of chemical deposits within the neurons, etc.  Whichever pattern or combinations of patterns is responsible, what is the organ that allows you to translate those electric or magnetic or chemical or shape patterns into the sunsets and concerts and hot dogs and birthday cakes and complex relationships and the smell of jasmine, and a myriad of other experiences which you experience at every moment of your life and is the real content of your life? allows you to translate these electrons, this magnetism or these cortical shapes into your life?  There is no such physical organ.  It is again, the cosmic consciousness that is the translator;  that enables you to experience your experience.

What of  the genes, which, by themselves, are merely codes for the manufacture of strings of amino acids.  What or who makes sure, or sets up the fantastically precise and intricate mechanisms to make sure,  that the genes are fired at the precise time they are needed (the timing system being far more complicated than the genome itself), that these coded strings of information are transcribed into movable messages and delivered to the precise place they need to go to be translated into amino acids,(again both the process of transcription and translation being fantastically precise and complex),  makes sure that these strings of amino acids are folded in an absolutely precise way with the absolutely precise addition of sugar and fat molecules when needed, into the absolutely precise protein molecules, each of which, and there are many quadrillions of them at work in your body at this very moment, are utterly precise microscopic machines designed to perform an utterly precise and specific function; takes these protein machines, many of which are structural, and forms these structural protein molecules into all the shapes and shapes within shapes and shapes within shapes within shapes, that form the contours of your body, your organs, your organelles, your bones, your cappillaries, your villi, etc., etc., etc.

It is this very same cosmic consciousness that adds new genes to an existing organism (Darwinian evolution has no explanation for the addition of a new gene) which entails the rearrangement of a gene firing system which is far more complicated than the genome itself, entails the re-arrangement of the blood supply and the nervous system to supply and support whatever new organs or adjustment to old organs are engendered by this new gene, requires the reapportionment of the real estate of the brain, and often the reapportionment of the structure of the whole body to maintain the same equilibrium with the addition of new organs and the modification of old ones, and is undertaken not because of a random collision of molecules or a 'mistake' in the replication of genes, but because of a cosmic decision that a new material is needed in order to execute the new ideas that cosmic conciousness wants to introduce; these ideas including new organs, enhanced brain  capacity, and whatever improvements to existing organs are envisioned (a new gene providing, by itself, not a new organ, but a new raw material which is used in all cases in the body for many new applications and requires the unfathomably precise and unfathomably synchronous adjustment to all these organs and systems and firing patterns). Not the body, but the cosmic consciousness wants you to survive, and either supervises the growth and development of your body and the evolution of all bodies, either directly, or by creating the fantastic equipment of transcendent complexity and synchronicity that breathes us, that allows us to digest food, to replicate ourselves, to eliminate wastes, to maintain our metabolism and our body temperature, and provides us with a set of biological desires, so that, with no biological knowledge of our own, we are able to survive simply by eating what we want when we are hungry,  drinking what we want when we are thirsty, sleeping when we are tired,  warming ourselves when we are cold, cooling off when we are hot, and partnering with the being that we want to partner with when we are horny.  And on top of all this, and especially with humans, this equipment provided by the cosmic conciousness, allows us to do, at every moment, what we want to do, which is the real purpose of our body brains, of evolution.  The purpose of our bodies is not just to survive, but the survival of our bodies and brains is provided for us so that we can have an experience of doing what we want to do when we want to do it.

Not that we all enjoy perfect freedom, far from it.  Others impose their will upon us and force us into situations which we had no part in choosing and would never have chosen for ourselves.  The world is plagued by people who exploit their power to force others to do what they want with no regard to what the rest of us may want.  Yet even in these forced situations we do, certainly with no eagerness, what we choose to do.  We perform a slave wage grindingly dull job because we prefer that to starving.  We are forced at gunpoint to do things which are abhorrent to us, again because we would rather endure that indignity than get shot, etc. Yet still, although we may not have chosen the situations that we find ourselves in, within the limits of the options those situations provide us, we still do what we want to do; or prefer to do over even less desirable options.

What we desire is a certain kind of experience, for ourselves or for others.  Desires come from the non-material world of beings, and the goal of desires is, by somehow using or manipulating the world of matter, to be able to enjoy for ourselves or provide for others, a  certain experience in the non-physical world of spirit. The material world is the intermediary between desire and experience.

It is because we have bodies and brains that are instantly responsive to our wishes, that we, the human race, has enormous freedom, to make what we want to make with our own lives, with our societies and with our planet. Will we create a world of shared happiness and mutual provision, or will we destroy our world by pitting ourselves against imagined competitors (thank you Charles Darwin) and ruthlessly pursuing goals that are antagonistic to the happiness of others?  This is the great experiment.  This is the drama that all of life, including brilliant and purposeful biology and brilliant and purposeful evolution has created with infinite care, patience and transcendent intelligence, to prepare us for.

Dr. Owens work with comatose patients is a remarkable step forward in the care of these patients and in improving the quality of the existence of those who still abide in those paralyzed bodies, and it so clearly shines a light on who we are and who and what we are not.

Your comments are always welcome.

THE CENTRAL DOGMA

Frances Crick, one of the co-discoverers, along with James Watson, of the double helix formation of the DNA molecule, put forth what he called, and later regretted calling, 'The Central Dogma.'  He didn't regret or rescind the ideas put forth in The Dogma but just the use of the word 'Dogma,' (too dogmatic, perhaps?). The Central Dogma  is basically this: that all genetic information begins in the nucleus of a cell, in the DNA molecule, and is carried out from the nucleus by mRNA messenger molecules and is then translated with the use of tRNA translator molecules into a string of amino acids that, when folded and further manufactured with the addition of possibly fats and sugars, carries information out to the rest of the body.  So, then, all genetic information, and by that Crick means all the information necessary to construct a living new born infant, starts in the DNA within the nucleus of the cell, as a string of coded nucleic acids,  is transcribed and transported out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm of the cell where it is translated into a string of amino acids which are then further manufactured into protein molecules which either do their work within the cell or are transported to the exterior of the cell, and it is solely this information and this direction of the flow of information, from the nucleus outward, which is responsible for the construction and function of the entire living body, at least until birth, at which point the newborn is subject to environmental and cultural and nutritional influences which will effect, to some degree, the further development of this newborn into maturity.

Now an entire newborn body begins with one fertilized cell, one ovum, which contains one human genome; and it is, according to this Cental Dogma,  from this one genome in this one cell that all the information required for the construction of that one miraculous human new born containing perhaps five trillion cells, including at least two thousand different types of cells, and all sorts of incredibly complex and synchronous and coordinated systems  like the digestive system, the reproductive system, the metabolic system, the circulatory system, all the sense organs, the system of locomotion, to say nothing of the many billions of coordinated neurons of the brain; all of that, all of it, according to Crick, begins with the information in that one genome, in that one fertilized ovum, and proceeeds out from there.  And please notice that Crick is really saying two things in The Dogma. He is saying as to direction that information moves from the nucleus out and not the other way; and he is saying as to origin that all this information begins in the nucleus.

Just what is the information that Crick was referring to that originates in the DNA molecule?  This is information transmitted through the genetic code which consists of four nuceotide molecules and it is simply the arrangement of these molecules that codes for amino acids. Every three successive nucleotides that are part of a gene is called a codon and each codon is coded for the manufacture of a particular amino acid. The large majority of nucleotides in the DNA molecule are not directly part of a gene sequence, although many of them are signals that trigger and help execute the transcription of genes to the mRNA molecule which transports this coded message out of the nucleus.  All the nucleotides that comprise a gene are coded for all the amino acids that are necessary in the manufacture of a particular protein.

As with any code, the intelligence of that code, the brilliance of it, does not lie in the code itself.  The alphabet is a code,  but the brilliance of a novel, an essay, a play, lies not within the alphabet, within the individual letters of that code, but in the author who arranged those letters in a certain way to convey ideas.  The same is true with numbers, a different code.  If an equation is brilliant, it's brilliance does not lie hidden somewhere within the numbers and symbols of the equation, but in the ideas that the equation represents, ideas that were communicated by the author of the equation by arranging certain of those numbers and symbols in a way that communicated his idea.  And the same is true with computer code, Morse code, or any code.  Codes are vehicles for the communication of ideas. Sometimes these ideas are communicated directly to another intelligent being, and sometimes they are communicated to a machine, intelligently if not brilliantly constructed in a way that enables it to "read" that code and respond to it. In the case of telephones, recording devices, digital cameras, computers and electrical clocks, signals sent in a code of electrical impulses are read by equipment in these devices which allows them to respond in certain ways that produce recognizable voices, sounds, pictures and written words.  But again, in these devices there is no 'intelligence'.  The intelligence lies in the arrangement of the equipment, in the fashioning of the equipment by using certain materials and shapes and in the arrangement of those materials and shapes in a way that allows that material to respond, but not consciously or intelligently, to the incoming signal.

Crick considered the genetic code to not be brilliant at all, in fact, to have no intelligence even associated with it.  He did not consider the genetic code to have anything to do with the communication of ideas, but simply with the delivery of information as to the construction of proteins.  And he also concluded that this information, the information as to the amino acid recipes of proteins, was all the information necessary to complete the construction of a fully developed human new born from one fertilized egg.

Is that true?  Are the recipes for the amino acid content of proteins (because that is what the genes are, at least that is all that one can conclude they are by observing a functioning gene) all that is needed for the development and construction of the fetus?  Remember that from the same genome every organ of the body, every cell type, every organelle, every system is manufactured.  The same genome can create so many different results because different parts of the genome are fired at different times and in different combinations.  The butterfly and the caterpillar originate from the identical genome, just with different genes and different combinations of genes fired in different patterns.  As complex as the genome seems to be, the firing patterns of the genes are exponentially more complicated.  Where are these firing patterns?  Many observable gene firings, (but perhaps not all gene firings, and we will discuss this later) are executed by the manufacture of protein molecules which, once constructed from a gene in the nucleus, have the capacity to re-enter the nucleus and trigger the firing of another gene or a whole set of genes.  These genes, in turn, may initiate the manufacture of other trigger proteins which, once constructed, will, in their turn, re-enter the nucleus and fire still different genes which will begin the manufacture of still new proteins.  As complicated as the genome is, these firing patterns and the mechanical sequences that engender them, including the conditions necessary in the cytoplasm of the cell to stimulate trigger protein molecules to migrate back to the nucleus and bond with specific nucleotides that will trigger the firing of new genes, all of these sequences, entirely different sequences of which are present in the two thousand different types of cells in the human body, are exponentially more complicated than the genome itself.

Further, the genetic information, first conveyed by an mRNA molecule must be delivered to the right manufacturing center (called a ribosome) within the cytoplasm of the cell where it is translated into a string of amino acids and then must be delivered to other organelles within the cell for folding and further manufacture (the addition of fat and sugar molecules, for instance) and then the finished protein molecule must be delivered to that spot within the cell, or delivered to that part of the body external to the cell, where it is needed to do its work. The information to construct and synchronize this delivery system, which includes a tail of nucleotides added to the gene sequence which acts as a zip code and allows the mRNA molecule to pass through certain portals and ducts and to avoid others, the whole system of portals and ducts and membranes, and the shapes and charges of these portals and the charges within the ducts, all of which allow the precise movement of amino acids, protein molecules and nucleotides to where they are needed within and without the cell, all of this must also be added to the timing system and the genetic information itself, as part of what is necessary to the construction and development of the human fetus.

Then there is the arrangement of the nucleotides themselves.  There are three billion nucleotide base pairs tightly and precisely folded over and over into the nucleus of each cell in your body. In fact if this ball of nucleotides were unraveled it would yield one amazingly thin string of nucleotides ten feet long.  That is ten feet of nucleotides folded over and over in each of the one hundred trillion cells in your body, or a string of nucleotides, if they were all attached, one to the other,  long enough to stretch to the sun (not the moon, but the sun) and back three times.  Because so many nucleotides are folded over and over so tightly in the nucleus, the great majority of them are not able to be accessed by the trigger protein molecules and other molecules that aid in transcription that float through the fluid of the nucleus. Each type of cell regularly fires certain gene sequences to produce certain proteins and enzymes, as opposed to other types of cells which fire different genes.  Therefore, the nucleotides must be folded in a distinctive way in each type of cell so that the genes commonly fired, and the nucleotides that assist in the triggering and transcription of those genes, are exposed to the nuclear fluid and accessible to those protein molecules.  Often the triggering molecules are located hundreds of thousands, even millions of nucleotides away from the genes they are triggering, but because of the precise folding of the nucleotides they wind up adjacent to or abutting those gene sequences that they assist.   So there is also the information to govern this gargantuanly complex (see post 'JUNK DNA') job of folding the three billion nucleotides in each of the five trillion cells of the new born, into two thousand utterly precise and distinct patterns.  Among the twenty-five thousand or less recipes for proteins that make up the human genome the information that guides and governs all these amazing folding patterns is nowhere to be found.  So this information regarding the thousands of different folding patterns of nucleotides within the DNA itself, must also be added to the timing information, the delivery information and the protein recipe information.

And let's not forget the amazing series of twists, turns, undulations, foldings and unfoldings, the formation of ridges and layers, that the growing cell mass of a newly fertilized and mitotically dividing egg makes as it develops.  Where is the information that governs this?  Certainly it is related to the genome.  An egg containing a human genome goes through its own particular acrobatics and a sparrow egg goes through its own distinct, but equally precise series of acrobatics.  Each species has its own system.  But where is the information governing all these amazing gymnastics? All of this information is absolutely vital to the development of a newborn human or, in fact, to the development of a newborn of any species.  Does it really make sense to say that all this information is 'within' the nucleus of that one fertilized ovum?

And all of this fantastically complex information still has nothing to do with the shapes that these protein molecules and amalgams of protein molecules and sugars and fats, form themselves into. I remind you that a gene is just a recipe for a string of amino acids.  Where is the information to shape that string of amino acids into a protein molecule?  And where is the information which shapes those manufactured proteins into the organs and organelles and bones and body contours, and shapes within shapes and shapes within shapes within shapes, all of which are absolutely essential to the functioning of a healthy newborn?  And it is the shape of all of these biological components, just as much as the materials that they are made out of, that makes humans human, and that allows all the literally quadrillions of simulatenous biological processes to take place that are absolutely necessary to the healthy functioning of a newborn baby.  Everything that we have described so far, and it is complex enough to probably give you a headache just reading about it, pertains only to the manufacture and delivery of the building materials necessary to the construction of the body.  Everything, everything, must be precisely shaped and this has nothing directly to do with the genes.  Each gene is involved in the manufacture of a material, not a shape; and many, if not most genes, are involved in the manufacture of material that is used in numerous differently shaped organs and organelles within the body.

At the risk of turning the headache that I have already given you into a raging migraine, I must tell you that there is still much, much more information needed to have a functional, living newborn.  A baby is born with a set of desires.  First it is hungry or thirsty (I never know whether to refer to the desire for breast milk as a hunger or a thirst, but if there were such a word it would include both , perhaps 'thunger').  Then it is tired, which is the desire for sleep.  It desires to stop pain or discomfort when it feels pain or discomfort and it desires to continue feeling comfort, safety and pleasure when it experiences comfort, safety and pleasure.  All of these desires may be related to sense organs which are made from proteins and conduct electrical signals to the brain, but the desires are not identical to the sense organs and nerves that they are related to.  Sense organs and nerves are made of proteins and conduct electricity.  This electricity which results in a pattern of neuron firings must be translated into an experience, an experience which is not physical, which cannot be directly measured or observed, which the newborn experiences as a desire.  Every living body needs things from it's environment and the pursuit of those things requires behavior.  Living beings behave, in other words, use energy to accomplish things, not because the body needs them (the great, great majority of living beings, with the exception of a tiny fraction of those who have studied biology know nothing about their body's needs).  They may not 'know' anything, but they 'experience' desires, and we, every living being, is the recipient of a set of desires which is ingenuously calibrated to satisfy our biological needs.  In other words, we do things because we want to do them, and the things we want to do (until and unless our human culture convinces us otherwise) are the very things that will fulfill our needs and guarantee our survival.

So this system of desires, which cannot be directly seen or measured, but which can be deduced from our behavior, even though there is no physical organ that translates sense organ and neural stimulation into experience, is a system without which we could not possibly survive (imagine a being which had no desire to eat or drink; no desire to avoid pain; no desire to seek the things it needed) and which must be designed and created with enormous detail and precision.  So the koala when it's body needs nutrients climbs a eucalyptus tree, not because it needs nutrients but because it is hungry and when it is hungry it desires eucalyptus leaves. The wood beetle, also in need of nutrition, and also experiencing hunger, climbs the same tree but goes no further than the bark, because the bark is what the wood beetle craves just as the leaves are what the koala craves.  To maintain its health and survival, for the koala, eucalyptus leaves are the perfect food, and for the wood beetle, eucalyptus bark is the perfect food.  And when the koala feels sexual desire he seeks out another koala, not to insure the survival of his species, but because he feels horny and when he feels horny he desires to be with another koala, just like the wood beetle, when he feels horny, desires to be with another wood beetle.  Both of these, totally ignorant of their own biology, their own species, or having any idea or interest in what is needed for the survival of their species, have an experience which has nothing to do with knowledge, but which drives each of them toward another member of their own species.  Their survival as a species is assured not because of testosterone and estrogen, but because when there is a lot of testosterone and estrogen in their bodies this translates into a desire, a non-physical desire, to sexually encounter a koala in one case and a wood beetle in the other.

These desires which lead us to the very things we need to insure our survival, are so specifically and brilliantly calibrated to insure our survival, and are so inherent in our understanding of life, that we don't ever stop to realize what an incredible, bewildering, brilliantly designed and specific system it is.  And, of course, it could never have 'evolved.'  How long would any creature last which did not experience 'thirst,' or had to develop thirst over thousands of generations of evolution, or had to 'learn' over thousands of generations more that the experience of thirst is satisfied by water; and had to learn through thousands more generations how to recognize water, how to move toward it and how to ingest it?  All of this is absurd.  All life forms have to begin with a set of desires that draws them to the things they need and with the ability to get to, ingest or use the things they need in a way that satisfies their desires but also, without their knowing it, guarantees their survival.

Evolutionary theory postulates a competition between species and within species for survival, and through this competition, the most functional, best adapted organisms survive and the less functional, less well adapted organisms fall by the wayside.  Modern science has discovered that organisms don't live in vacuums, but in eco-systems and there is at least as much cooperation as there is competition.  Even the pursuit of selfish desires,  from the broader context of the eco-system, is the very behavior that maintains the balance and insures the survival of the eco-system.  More importantly, for there to be any competiton, the competitors have to be functional on some level; in other words they have to be viable in order for there to be a competition.  No organism can be viable, can compete for survival at all, unless it is alive in the first place.  And to be alive, an organism must have a way to metabolize energy, to translate and transcribe nucleotides into amino acids and form amino acids into protein molecules; each protein molecule being, by itself, a precise microscopic machine perfectly designed to accomplish a specific task within the body; the organism must have a way of recognizing nutrient and energy sources in its environment and have a way of reaching those sources and then incorporating them into its body; must have a way of eliminating wastes, of circulating nutrients through its body and of sending electrical signals through its body as well, signals specifically designed and calibrated to conduct all the biological processes that need to be conducted and which allow the organism to do what it wants to do when it wants to do it.  All of these are prerequisites to life.  There can be no competition between living organisms until all these prerequisites are met.  So evolution, whether or not it is random at all, cannot even begin until all these systems are in place; systems which have no randomness in them whatsoever, but which are amazingly precise, specific and purpose driven.

Still everything we have described so far, with the exception of desires, exists on the material plane. Everything we have described, except desires, could be present in a stillborn baby as much as a live one. Everything we have described is the equipment that we use, but it is not us. We are consciousness; we are that which uses our bodies and brains, which experiences the world through our bodies and brains, but we are not our bodies and brains.  Somewhere in this process of fetal development from fertilized egg to new born, we arrived.  This is the thrill that parents experience when they feel the first fetal kick, because they then know that this physical mass that has been growing in the mother's belly is not just a physical mass, it is a living being that has its own desires. It is kicking because it wants to kick and that is our first proof that there is an 'it' there, separate from ourselves, that wants to do things, like kicking, because it, not us, but it, wants to do them.  So this consciousness which is the milieu of our desires and the non-physical bowl within which we experience all of our experience, and which is really who we are, this must arrive also.  Is it created from genes, and by genes, from within the nucleus of a cell, or do the genes and all the related information mentioned above,  create a perspective, a point of view, a way of experiencing the world which we, consciousness, choose to experience by committing to being born and living in this body?

If that is too 'spiritual' for you, then let's return to the discussion of all the other information. The truth is that we have no idea how all this information is communicated to the growing embryo.  We  can deduce that there is obviously an enormous amount of information that is being disseminated, but we cannot observe this information directly and there seems to be no physical organ or organelle or any set of molecules which are part of any observable mechanics through which this information is disseminated.  Does it then make sense to say that all this information begins in the nucleus?  Certainly all this information is associated with certain gene sequences, but how can we say that it is caused by these gene sequences?  Isn't it true with every other code that we know of that the information in the code does not begin with the code, but begins with the being that is communicating his or her ideas through that code?  And the observable code and the manufacture of proteins is only a small part of the information necessary to the construction and development of a newborn from a fertilized egg.

Can we say it is 'within' the nucleus or is it better, or more realistic to say that all these ideas, synchronicities and information perhaps pass through the nucleus but probably do not 'originate' in the nucleus; just like all the coded information necessary to play Brahms, Mahler, the Rolling Stones, and the lectures of Frances Crick, may pass through the wire that goes into your CD player, but it does not 'originate' in that wire. Wires, just like nucleotides, are not transcendentally brilliant.  Wires and  nucleotides have no intelligence at all.  They are intelligently constructed and arranged to convey all the 'brilliance' that you enjoy by listening to your CD player and by living in your body; but the wires and the nucleotides are utterly oblivious to what is being communicated through them.

It is around this time that some of you dear readers will begin to say to yourselves, "Wait a minute!  This guy doesn't understand evolution!"  Do you understand evolution?  Please tell me what is the creative process in evolution?  I understand that there are supposedly occasional random copying mistakes in the replication of gene sequences (averaging one mistake in one hundred million replications) and that these "mistakes" sometimes confer an advantage to the organism that is the recipient of these mistakes.  This makes perfect sense when we are looking at one celled creatures like microbes who have not changed their morphology, their shape, since their inception on this planet over four billion years ago.  It also makes sense when we are talking about genes that are not involved in the construction of bodies, but are enzymes that work, not in conjunction with other proteins, but by themselves, floating through the blood stream or through the digestive fluids and aid in our digestion and our immune system.  Yes, 'accidental' changes in these molecules may aid either our digestion or our immunity, because these molecules work simply by having the shape and pattern of charges that they have.  When they encounter a food molecule that needs to be digested, or a pathogen that needs to be removed, it is their shape and arrangement of positive and negative charges that allows them to bond with this molecule so that the process of digestion (in the case of food molecules in the digestive tract) or the process of elimination (in the case of pathogens in the blood sream) can begin.  Yet are these accidents? When a microbe 'accidentally' inherits a mutation which confers safety from an environmental threat or allows that microbe to digest something in an environment where the usual food source that this species had become adapted to is not available, then the microbe shares this genetic material with other microbes by developing pilli, or ducts, that transfer the genetic material from the microbe with the mutation to other microbes that need it in order to survive.  You may argue that the mutation is  'accidental,' even though the exact mutation that is needed always seems to arrive just in time during the course of the four billion year history of microbes and the four billion years of dramatically shifting environments; but how can you argue that gene sharing, that most amazing, sophisticated and precise process, billions of years old (when do evolutionists say that 'intelligence' begins?)  how can you possibly say that gene sharing, where the precise genetic material that is needed moves through a duct or pilli, into the precise place in another organism that needs this material, a process far more precise than what our twenty-first century surgeons are capable of, and a process that occurred billions of years ago, at the very inception of life, how can anyone possibly say that this is random, or that it evolved over many millions of years?  This is a process that was necessary to the survival of the microbial community.  That community would never have survived the millions upon millions of years necessary for any such process with that kind of amazing precision to develop randomly.  It is so obviously purposeful that it just becomes absurd to even think of it otherwise.

According to evolutionary theory changes are supposed to happen very, very slowly, over hundreds of thousands of generations, even though all historical evidence points to 'saltational' or sudden changes.  Life suddenly appeared; oxygen metabolizing organisms suddenly appeared; all the basic body plans that exist today suddenly appeared during the Cambrian Explosion.  Evolutionary biologists argue these points, but in recent experiments where soapberry bugs, for instance (there have been similar experiments with other creatures*) have been exposed to a new food host, without having access to the food host that they were previously adapted to, amazing changes in body size, beak length and the rhythm and speed of their whole cycle of reproduction has changed in less than one hundred generations.  Is this evolution?

The researchers in the soapberry experiments that I have read about define any change in the genetic makeup of these bugs as "evolution."  Wow!  Good thing for Darwin that he is deified.  If Newton was deified, Einstein would still be just a weird clerk in a patent office in Switzerland in need of a hair cut and socks.  Heisenberg would have been run out of town as a heretic.  Yet, when it came to Newton, the tiniest discrepancies in his theories and predictions caused the scientific community not to close ranks, but to search diligently for new answers and new theories that would explain these phenomenon; hence, relativity and quantum theory, hence, the use of atomic energy and space travel, transistors, lasers and atomic clocks.  Yet here we have a case of, not small discrepancies, but enormous ones.  We have organisms, soapberry bugs, and other organisms in different experiments,* adapting at a rate at least a thousand times faster than Darwinian theory would have predicted.  And this, of course, doesn't perturb the researchers in the least.  They just define evolution as "any change in genes" and their results are published as further proof of evolution.  If, upon measurement, we discovered that an action did not produce an equal and opposite reaction, but produced a reaction that was a thousand times stronger or a thousand times weaker than the initiating action, would we still blithely say that this was Newton, or would we look for a different theory?  Would we say, "Oh,yeah, that's Newton alright, of course it's Newton. Good ole' Newton.  It's just a very fast (or a very slow) Newton."  Folks, wake up!  All this information points to something that is deeply, inherently, basically wrong with Darwinian thinking.

At this point all we are really saying when we use the word evolution to refer to a biological change is that it is random; that there was no guiding principle involved.  Yet if there were no guidance, how did all the changes in the soapberry bug occur so quickly, changes not just in alteration of genes but in new beak shapes and new proportions within those beak shapes, new metabolic changes and distributions of energy throughout the body, new firing patterns of genes, new rhythms of enzyme discharge so that the newly adapted bugs grew to sexual maturation much more quickly than the originals, and were no longer capable of flying.  How do all these changes take place, changes which quickly and perfectly change the soapberry bug from a creature that was perfectly adapted to living in harmony with the rhythms and challenges of the soapberry plant, to a creature that is perfectly adapted to live in harmony with the rhythms and challenges of the new host?  Were all these processes random?  If so, where were the millions upon millions of 'mistakes' until the new adaptations were the perfectly appropriate ones for the new host?  Even if natural selection were at play, natural selection only operates among viable competitors. Selection has no influence over what genetic copying 'mistakes', what mutations, will occur.  Where were the new offspring, even if they didn't survive to have progeny, even if they were still born, who flew further instead of not at all; whose rate of reproduction was slower rather than faster; whose beak size was longer rather than shorter; or fatter or narrower rather than longer; whose new beak shape didn't work at all, because the beak of the soapberry bug is so long (seventy percent of its body length) that it is constructed in three parts that unhinge when it eats and fold up when it doesn't.  How many beaks were created where the hinging didn't work at all; where the size and weight of the beak prevented the animal from any locomotion what so ever; where the nervous system connected to the beak was misconstructed so that the bug could not control the movement or the positioning of the beak and did not have the ability to use it to pierce the covering of the plant seeds or no longer had the ability to grasp food in the front of its beak, move it to the rear of the beak and swallow it? All of these are enormously complicated mechanical processes and any change in shape must be accompanied by changes in nerves and blood vessels and precise adjustments to the part of the brain that these nerves connect to in order to have a newly functioning beak of a completely different size; and the amount of processes that have to take place for an organism to change from a reproductive cycle that is annual to a reproductive cycle that takes place two or three times a year, is so complex in all its details that it becomes overwhelming to study it all, much less to actually execute such changes.  I'll tell you how many mistakes from this random 'hit or miss' process:  none, zero, zip, zilch, nada, niente!  Not a one.  This whole process of dazzling complexity proceeded with no mistakes, no trial and error, not even a scintilla of evidence that there was any 'randomness' involved.  Instead it shows clear proof to anyone except those fundamentalists who worship at the church of the great god Darwin, that all of these changes  took place in a perfectly straight line with absolutely clear purpose and transcendent intelligence.

It is interesting to note that Frances Crick and James Watson who spent a good deal of their lives just studying the genetic code that produces proteins and did not study or think about all this other information that I mentioned above, were both utterly and deeply bewildered as to how just the genetic code and the system of protein manufacture could have originated.  Frances Crick's answer was 'transpermia,'  the theory that life began in some other part of the universe and arrived here embedded in an asteroid or a comet.  Crick figured that since the universe was billions of years older than the earth, that life could have had the time to evolve elsewhere and then be shot out, embedded in a meteor or meteorite, from another planet, or moon or asteroid by an explosion.  Then this life form, after managing to survive an explosion powerful enough to hurl it across space to our planet, and managing to survive the journey of several light years, because don't forget our entire solar system, not just the earth, is somewhat over four billion years old, so this life bearing meteor would have to have originated on another star system if not another galaxy, and then, of course, it would have had to have managed to survive the heat and force of it's crash landing on earth.  As utterly fantastical as this explanation is, even if it were true, it does not answer the question of how life originated at all.  It is just like going to a restaurant and after falling in love with the cheesecake, you ask the waiter if he would mind telling you how the cheesecake is made.  The waiter responds that, in truth, all the deserts are made at a commercial bakery downtown.  So your question remains unanswered.  You wanted to know 'how' and you got the answer 'not here.'  Research partner James Watson, when asked the same question, replies that it had to have taken 'a miracle.'  And, of course, there are some scientists in the field, foremost among them, Richard Dawkins, who see no problem at all.  The origin of life is so clear to this 'genius.'  He goes on and on about the perfect correlation between the transcription and translation of the genetic code and the workings of our most sophisticated computers, and since we, are identical to sophisticated computers, what is the problem?  Well, perhaps we are not identical to sophisticated computers.  Computers, to my knowledge, do not grow, do not replicate, have no desires of their own, do not read their own e-mails, watch their own videos, or experience anything in any way.  And even if they were identical to life, doesn't that fool Dawkins realize that human intelligence and ideas that were conceived by human intelligence, were at the core of every aspect of the creation, evolution, engineering and use of these computers?  He doesn't see a problem because, while he may have been exposed to the same biological information that Watson and Crick have been exposed to, the true depth and mystery of what he has been observing and studying for all these years has eluded him.  In the same way that attending Beethoven concerts your entire life does not guarantee that you will be a musical genius, spending your life in and around biological research labs does not guarantee that you will have any more depth or real insight than the shallow fool that you were when you first arrived.

In the time of Crick's major research, the cytoplasm of the ovum (the material outside of the nucleus) was considered to be one undifferentiated mass of albumen (think egg whites).  And it is true that within the albumen there are no visible structures, no organelles, no membranes or scaffolding to hold any interior structure together.  Yet, scientists have discovered more recently that there are within this supposedly undifferentiated cytoplasm, thousands upon thousands of protein molecules that, even though they are not held or bound by any visible structures, are arranged in the most precise and amazing way.  In the human ovum, once it is fertilized, it will begin to undergo a process of mitotic divisions so that one cell will become two, then four,  then eight, and very soon hundreds and many thousands of daughter cells that were once considered to be identical.  Yet all these cells will very shortly begin to differentiate into the two thousand different 'types' of cells that compose the body of the fully developed new born.  The reason that they differentiate is because they contain different distributions of protein molecules in their cytoplasm and these protein molecules are called 'trigger' molecules, because they are able to re-enter the nucleus of the cell and trigger the firing of certain genes which in turn causes the manufacture of specific proteins.  Since groups of these daughter cells contain different configurations of trigger proteins than other groups, different genes will be expressed in different cells leading to the manufacture of different proteins which, by itself, according to the common assumptions of most biologists, leads to different cell shapes, different shapes of organelles within the cell, and different cell functions, each cell's shape and composition being best suited to the function it will perform whether that cell becomes a nerve cell, a muscle cell, a skin cell, a heart cell, etc.

Going back to the original fertilized ovum, that cell, will quickly divide into a many-celled mass, will undergo an amazing series of twists and turns, the formation of clefts and layers and ridges and hollowed cavities; which will be twisted and turned, involuted and convoluted as it continues to expand and mitotically multiply. So the arrangement of trigger protein molecules within that first fertilized ovum, which are not held in place by any visible structure, that arrangement has to be so amazingly precise and it must be arranged with foreknowledge of where future cells containing those molecules, after all the twists, turns, multiplications, division into layers, convolutions and involutions, will end up. When Crick saw an entire genome of information within a nucleus surrounded by an 'undifferentiated' cytoplasm, of course, he surmised that all the information began in the nucleus.  But current research shows that the thousands of protein molecules and their amazing positioning within the egg cytoplasm contains the information necessary for the differentiation of the one fertilized ovum into two thousand varieties of cells and each in exact proper proportions.

So what we are left with is not a simple direction: starting from inside the nucleus and going outward, but a 'which came first' quandary, which is the same quandary that we come up with whenever we ponder the creation of anything in a spiritual vacuum.  We cannot imagine genes, whose sole observable function is to manufacture proteins, existing without the protection and structure of proteins, and we cannot imagine proteins being created without the expression of genes.  In the same way we cannot imagine suckling without mammary glands and newborns who already know how to, have the mouths and gullets and lips that are coordinated to, and the desire to suckle.  So what came first?  The chicken or the egg?  Proteins or genes? Suckling or mammary glands?  Locomotion or the desire to reach something?  Computer code or the machinery that had the ability to read that code?  Screws or screwdrivers; hammers or nails? The truth is that all material things begin with an idea, an idea that is the solution to a problem.  And that idea often contains at once several interrelated parts.  So the answer to what came first, proteins or genes, is neither one.  What really came first was the idea to have a sustainable life that could be built on the interplay of proteins and genes.

And now we arrive at the huge question of how can anything begin with an idea if there were no brains, no intelligence, to conceive this idea?  Can ideas precede life?  Can there be an idea without a brain?  Can ideas and intelligence even precede matter?  Can the material world as well as life be the materialization of an idea?  Can the materialization of the physical universe and life be the manifestation of the same idea?  This topic could easily be contained in another post, but since the first part was dedicated to a critique of Crick and the Darwinian world view, I want to offer another view that, to me, makes a lot more sense.



First, let's talk about the brain.  In our materialist society we have come to think of the brain as being the organ of our body that thinks, remembers and with the help of sense organs, that sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches.  The proof of all this is that whenever we do think, remember, see, hear, smell, taste or touch, clusters of neurons fire in different parts of our brains. The brain is made up of billions of neurons which, when fired, conduct an electric current through them and that current connects up with other neurons through extensions of the neuron called axons.  Since science is based on observation and measurement, and there is nothing else there that is observable or measurable, then it must be that the brain is doing all these things.  Yet when ever I speak into a voice recorder there is electrical activity also; and whenever I drive my car there is electrical activity in my odometer.  The voice recorder is not speaking, however, and the odometer is not driving.  They are both recording and measuring my voice and the distance I am traveling. I am talking and I am driving and these devices are recording and measuring that activity.  What I am saying is that the brain is recording our experience and defining our experience, but it is not experiencing our experience.  We think, we remember, we see, we hear, we smell, we taste and we touch things, but the big problem for science is that we, which is the ground of our experience, which is consciousness, which is context rather than content, which is the non-physical bowl which contains all our experience and is the milieu of our desires; this real We, cannot be seen, observed or measured. So if you adopt the scientific point of view, then we do not exist at all,  because there is no direct, observable evidence for our existence; and if you adopt the other point of view based on experience and not on measurement (because experience cannot be measured) we obviously do exist.  In fact our existence, our consciousness is the most obvious, realest, part of our experience, realer than any thing that can be observed or measured which is altered by the filter of our sense organs and is effected by our instruments of measurement.

 So we either do not exist and are a delusion of our brains, a delusion that developed at some point in time accidentally and hung around because it aided in our survival, which is what many evolutionary biologists believe; although if we don't exist and are merely a collection of cells, of proteins, fats, nucleotides and sugar molecules, then who is it who is trying to survive?  Who is it who cares?  Does your body, including your brain, really care whether it is dead or alive, functional or non-functional? Do your neurons care whether or not there is electricity running through them?  Do your heart cells really care whether they are contracting or not?  To my mind it is obvious that matter does not care what form it is in.  Machines don't care whether they are operative or broken or rusting.  I put gas in my car not because my car is 'thirsty' and wants gas, but because I want to get some place.  My car could care less.  And the same is true with all this fabulous, unfathomably complex equipment that I have been given, but that is not me.  My body and my brain do not want anything, and are not conscious of anything.  My body and brain are the interface of two beings.  One is the Cosmic Consciousnes, or God, or the Universal Intelligence, which designs and coordinates the literally quadrillions of simultaneous biological processes occurring in my body and brain at every moment, the purpose of which is to keep me alive.  And my body and brain are also the servants of me, my self, and are designed to do whatever it is that I want to do: to move when I want to move; to look at something when I want to look at something; to eat when I want to eat, to think about something when I want to think about something; in other words my body and my brain are the servants of my desires; designed, created and controlled by the Cosmic Consciousness or God to be able to survive as a working unit as long as possible to continue to be able to be the servant of my desires.

I am going to talk about those parts of our brains that are connected to how we experience things, to consciousness. It is important to note that a lot of the wiring of the brain is put there to conduct the automatic operations that guarantee our existence.  That wiring that coordinates all the literally quadrillions of simultaneous biological processes within cells and between cells, that sustain us and that we are not consciously aware of,  that wiring was designed by our Creator, or by the Universal Intelligence, and we inherit that.  But the wiring that is connected to defining our experience and the emotional content of that experience, and what is important and what is not; that wiring was initially put there by our experience.

Our brains record and define our experience, but they do not experience our experience.  Our brains are made up of neurons, or nerve cells, which conduct an electric current.  This is the same current, at the same voltage that flows through the neurons, when fired, of the visual section, the auditory section, the 'thought' section, the 'memory' section, the 'heat' and 'touch' sensation sections of the brain, etc.  Through all the various sections that researchers have recently discovered, flows the same electric current at the same voltage through almost identical neurons and leaving almost identical chemical deposits.  The amazing richness, depth and variety of our experience comes not from these similar patterns but from the way that we, not the brain, but we, us, consciousness, interpret these patterns, depending on their location in the brain.

 When the brain records our experience, it records our entire experience, not just what we were seeing and hearing at a given moment, but what we were feeling and how we were experiencing these sensations.  In this way the objects in our environment including the other people in our environment are associated with what we felt and thought when we initially encountered them.  Neurons have axons which extend from the body of the neuron and attach to other neurons.  Axons can stretch from one neuron all the way across the brain to another neuron, and one neuron can have  many hundreds or thousands of axons connecting to hundreds or thousands of neurons and creating an almost unfathomable number of possible pathways of curent.  So these experiences are recorded in a pattern of interlocking neurons.  Everything that we learn about an object: whether it is hard or soft, edible or inedible, friendly or dangerous, etc., accumulates in neural connections, so that every time we see the same object it becomes more familiar and known to us.  In this way the brain helps us define our experience, helps us create a world of seeming solidity, reliability and familiarity, and helps us learn to negotiate with more and more comfort and specificity in the environment that we have chosen to be born into.

 And we can change old neural connections by replacing them with new ones.  We can learn by ourselves or with others help, that what we once feared is not really fearful; that what was once so important to us is not really that important. These new understandings create new pathways, new axonal connections between neurons, so that our relationship to certain objects, activities and people can change over time. But it is important to note that an axonal pathway is initially created by our experience.  Once it is created, then the existing pathway can define our experience, but axons attach to neurons as a result of our experience and not the other way around.  In other words the way we experience something creates the wiring in our brains.  It is important to note that a lot of the wiring of the brain is put there to conduct the automatic biological operations that guarantee our existence and that we are not even aware of.  But the wiring that is connected to recording and defining our experience and the emotional content of that experience, and what is important and what is not; that wiring was initially put there by the way we first experienced things.  The wiring in our brains does define our experience, but that wiring was initially put there by our experience. And it is important to realize that we can change that wiring if we have the will and the desire to make that change. 

One final thing about brain structure.  I don't want to give the impression that we are the 'victims' of our earliest experiences and that these connections are made and built up solely by repetitive early experiences that we have no control over.  You may think of it this way, but I believe that we arrive here with a set of desires, of things that we want to accomplish or experience in this life; that we chose to be born to fulfill a destiny with a specific set of desires that we wanted to be realized.  These things may be negative or positive or a combination of both, but it is our desires, even in earliest infancy, that shapes the way that we experience, or define our earliest experiences.  A childhood of abuse leads one child to live a life of submission  and passivity, while leading another child to rage and rebellion, and another child to become a leader of others in the cause of social justice.  We arrive here with a mission.  We choose and make the commitment to the family and the setting and the genome that we are born into.  We want to live the life that we are living and to experience it the way that we are experiencing it; unless we decide that we no longer like the way that we are experiencing it and then we choose to change it.  Yet all of it, the serene, the constant and self-accepting life, or the turbulent, dramatic life of self struggle, are the scenarios that we chose when we decided to be born.  Why would anyone choose a truly difficult life when we could choose a truly comfortable one?  From the perspective of this life on earth being our entire existence it makes no sense at all, but from the perspective of eternal life it makes perfect sense.  When you go to an amusement park do you choose to ride the roller coaster or to sit in the lounge?  Neither of these choices makes sense if you had to choose one of them for your entire existence. The 'agony' of the roller coaster only makes sense when you know that it is short lived and you will come out the other end without permanent damage.  Then it becomes exciting.  Exactly the same thing is true with this life.  If you know that you will emerge from this experience with your consciousness not only in tact but expanded by this experience, then you will experience  the experiences of your life in a completely different context; with more courage, more inner serenity, more passion, more joy and less fear, anxiety and desperation.

Now let's talk about ideas.  Many, if not most, of the ideas we come upon are not original.  They come to us from others: from teachers, parents, friends, or we read about them in books or other media.  When we are young we often struggle to grasp an idea, but then finally "see the light." For instance, a teacher may be trying to introduce us to the idea of addition.  She may take an orange and say , "see, this is one orange."  Then she grabs another orange and puts it alongside the first and says, "and now we have two oranges" She may then try the same thing with one and then two books, one and then two pencils.  At some point we get the idea that one plus one equals two.  We see, although we may not be able at that young age to articulate it, that we don't need oranges or books or pencils; that the numbers are symbols for the amount of any object we choose.  In other words, we get it. At that moment of getting it,  an axon extends from one neuron to another and a new connection is made.  We have made an indelible record of this connection, of this idea.  What is important to realize is that we, not the brain, but we, made the connection.  The connections we had already made in the brain brought us to that point where we understood the words of the teacher, could count to two, and knew what oranges, books and pencils were.  But the new connection to what we already had wired and connected, was made by us.  We did it, and our brains recorded it.

If anyone wonders how having a thought can directly effect the material world without any other physical intervention, look no farther than the brain.  You make a connection, you grasp an idea, all of which takes place on a non-physical level, and an axon extends out from a neuron and attaches to another neuron to record that connection.  While we are on it, the brain is the interface between the self, which is non-physical, which is consciousness and which contains within it your desires and experience, and all the wiring which is activated and records that experience.  When you desire to actually do something and not just experience something, the precise hundreds of thousands or millions of neurons necessary to initiate that action will fire.  Whether it is a desire to scratch your nose, to get up and get a glass of water, or to invade Syria, the precise and multitudinous pattern of neurons necessary to initiate the first step of those actions that will bring you toward your goal, will be fired at the moment you decide to begin.  Again, a non-physical desire resulting in a non-physical decision,  automatically initiates the firing of the precise group of thousands or millions of neurons needed to carry out that decision in the material world.  And then there is memory.  When you remember something you try to locate within your brain, the precise neural connections where that memory is stored, and the moment you locate that particular group of neurons, they will fire, which results in you being able to instantly translate that pattern of firings into a conscious memory of the sights, sounds, tastes, touches and information that you experienced at that time in the past when you experienced that experience and your brain recorded it.  Exactly the same thing is true when you simply move your focus (which is really you and is non-physical) to your nose, to your arm, to your leg.  Simply by bringing your focus to an area and moving nothing at all (since focus is not a thing) then the neurons in that area will fire and you will be able to 'feel' your nose, your arm and your leg.  Further, it is never just the pattern of fired electrons that you experience, but it is your reaction to that firing, your translation of that firing, done not by any physical organ, but by you, non-physical consciousness, that allows you to recreate earlier experiences from neural firing patterns. If anyone questions the ability of spirit (by spirit I include everything which is non-physical) to initiate a physical event, then they are either unfamiliar with the workings of the brain, or have not really thought deeply on the subject.  The movement from non-physical to physical and back is the very essence of our existence at every moment.

What about the case of 'getting' a new idea, where you are not learning something that is communicated through the agency of another human intelligence, but where you are getting an insight that has never occurred, at least to the best of your knowledge, to anyone before? Here is a quote from an earlier post of mine called 'Through The Microscope':

"Yet, many of us have had unusual or abnormal experiences of consciousness, will and intelligence. These 'supernormal' experiences of consciousness, will and intelligence, are usually experienced as coming from without; as something received. Soldiers on the battlefield, fire fighters and police officers in critical situations, have had the sudden experience of an extra rush of energy, clarity and determination. No one is more surprised at their heroism than they are, and they describe that moment when that extra energy and determination overtook them with a kind of awe. They consider it something that came into them, something received. These are examples of being touched by the cosmic will that sustains us all at every moment, but usually works separately from our conscious will. Great writers, artists and scientists, as they labor at a problem, as they obsess on the same information, or the same scenario to no avail, pray for an inspiration (atheism does not diminish the artist's enthusiasm for prayer at this juncture). Inspiration literally means the intake of breath. They pray for a gift to be taken in, to be received. They certainly don't pray for an expiration, which means breathing out and is associated with death. Einstein wrote a fascinating account of how the idea, the insight, of the theory of relativity entered his body; how he could feel it coming up through his legs and into his brain, and then getting it. Archimedes, having received a thunderbolt of inspiration, lept from his tub shouting 'Eureka' as he ran wet and naked through the streets of ancient Syracuse. Horowitz, the great concert pianist, when asked what he does in the moments before an important performance, said that he just tries to relax and hope that the winds of inspiration blow through him that night. Moments of great insight, great heroism, great performing, are considered by the people that experience them to be, not their own, but gifts from without, some thing unseen, yet extremely tangible, in fact always among the most vivid experiences of their lives. And, of course, spiritual seekers, people in deep prayer, fasting, chanting and/or meditation, report being transported to a new level of consciousness, which led to a new sense of themselves. Not so much that something was received, but that a boundary, a sense of separation between their limited consciousness and the unlimited cosmic consciousness, was momentarily dissolved. They were still themselves, of course, but they had a much greater, more expanded sense of who they were; of being an inextricable part of something infinitely greater than their individual bodies and brains"



If new and revelatory ideas come not from within but are received from without, this should not imply passivity.  A human being must be in a position and must be ready to receive this new idea or inspiration.  No one thought longer or harder about the discrepancies between Newtonian theory and the latest findings of astrophysicists than Einstein.  No one worked more diligently in preparation for concerts than Horowitz.  When King Hiero II of ancient Syracuse suspected that the goldsmith who made his crown had substituted lesser metals in the crown for some of the gold which the king had supplied, he turned to Archimedes, the foremost mathematician and inventor of Syracuse to find a way to determine the purity of the crown.  The King sought out Archimedes because he was the one person who had dedicated his life to figuring out physical problems.  If there were a way to solve this problem, Archimedes was the person in the best position to receive this insight.  Under the pressure of this royal assignment, Archimedes obsessed on this problem night and day.  He knew that gold, being the heaviest metal known at that time, if he could determine the volume of the crown he could weight it against an equal volume of pure gold.  If the crown weighed any less he would know that the gold had been diluted with lesser metals by the unscrupulous goldsmith.  Yet, how to determine the volume of a shape as complex and unusual as an ornate crown without melting it down and thereby ruining it?  As he was stepping into his bath, he noticed that the water rose as it was displaced by his body.  He suddenly realized that he could measure the volume of the crown without damaging it in any way, simply by measuring the amount of water it displaced.  This bolt of insight which was the solution to a problem that he had been wrestling with for weeks, supplied the energy which lifted Archimedes out of his tub and sent him running through the streets of Syracuse yelling, "Eureka, I've got it!"

Ideas that are new and revelatory to humans, are not new to the universe.  They already exist.  Every discovery, every new idea of computer technology already exists in stunningly complex applications within living bodies.  Every discovery regarding nuclear energy and the functioning of atoms, and every discovery of modern astrophysicists, was a revelation of ideas that already existed in the cosmic consciousness; that existed prior to the creation of Big Bang explosions, atoms, stars, planets and galaxies. Focussing on a problem, obsessing on a problem, looking at all the known facts related to that problem, prepares the inventor, the scientist, the seeker, for that insight that is the solution to that problem or that explains that disparity.  But the idea is already there and is revealed to the seeker.  He did not 'create' the idea, and his 'brain' certainly did not create the idea.

It is the nature of these blog posts, that I am forced to repeat things mentioned in other posts to clarify a new idea (revelation).  The speed of light, as Einstein determined, is the fastest speed that an object or a wave can move and still be an object or a wave.  If you think, though, of the speed of light not as a cosmic speed limit, but as a cosmic threshold, then waves and particles that pass that threshold stop being 'things' and enter the world of spirit, of cosmic consciousness.  This is a world beyond space and time.  Once past the speed of light, there is no 'thingness' to inhibit speed and infinite speed is achieved. At infinite speed everything is impossibly fast and completely still at the same time, since it takes no time, traveling at infinite speed, to traverse the entire universe and return to the same spot.  And there is no space, because space is measured by the division between one thing and another, and since there is no 'thingness' to separate things, it is all a unity, or one-ness.  Also, and most important to this discussion, if in space-time (or in the world of yin and yang, or Shiva and Shakti, or where the force of Heaven interplays with the force of Earth, all of which are better and more encompassing ways of saying the same thing as the fabric of space-time) information can move no faster than the speed of light; then out of space-time, out of the world of matter and in the world of spirit, information moves at infinite speed, which means that all information exists and is accessible at every point in the world of spirit, or cosmic consciousness or the Godhead.

Consciousness is not really divisible.  Living bodies and brains are a way of creating a seeming separation of consciousness.  When we commit to being born we commit to experiencing the world through the 'limitation' of a particular body, a particular set of sense organs and a particular brain.  A brain is a way of organizing a limited amount of information in the service of a particular point of view. God is not a human type being with a gigantic brain.  God does not need a brain and does not have a body.  God is the infinite ocean of spirit that contains all ideas and all information which is instantly accessible at every point.

We participate in this physical world but we are not of this physical world.  We are consciousness, we are one aspect, one perspective of an infinite number of perspectives of the divine.  But we are not that which we perceive, but the perceiver.  Prayer, meditation, chanting, various spiritual practices, separates us from our own perspective, our own point of view, and gives us an experience of our true selves,  a glimpse of the boundless, limitless consciousness which is our true home and identity.

Getting back to Frances Crick, all the information for the construction of a living body begins not in the nucleus, but in the Cosmic Consciousness, as all information for the construction or creation of anything begins in the Cosmic Consciousness.  How that information is applied in the shaping of cells, and organs and organelles, and whole bodies themselves, is yet to be determined.  But we live in an ocean of intelligence, we are surrounded by intelligence and the proof of it is the utter brilliance with which everything, animate and inanimate, is created and functions in harmony and balance with everything else.  In addition to supplying the recipes for proteins, the genes may act as receptors to attract from the Cosmic Consciousness all the information necessary, information that I enumerated above, to the growing embryo; but it is ludicrous to imagine that a string of nucleic acids, by themselves, supplies all that information.  Crick had wanted to rescind the name of the Central Dogma.  He should have rescinded the whole idea.

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*Writing in Science Magazine, Portugese biologists Lidia Perfeito and Isabel Gordo report that beneficial mutation rates in Escherichia coli bacteria, not when they are measured in a stable environment as they usually are, but when they are measured adapting to a new environment, are A THOUSAND times higher than one would have predicted by random replication accidents. And these are beneficial mutations. Of all the possible accidents that could happen in gene replication, how many of those possibilities would be beneficial, if these accidents were truly random. Here we have a thousand times the rate of any mutations, and the mutations are beneficial. Whole colonies of bacteria are undergoing the same mutations that are moving them to an adaptive balance with their new surroundings. (EVOLUTION).