Category: Beliefs

  • Unity Consciousness Needs More Than Hope — It Needs Systems

    Unity consciousness is a powerful vision—but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

     

    We can experience moments of profound connection through meditation or inner work, but sustaining that state inside systems built for competition and isolation is nearly impossible. Consciousness and systems evolve together or not at all.

    In this video, I explore a piece of the unity conversation that’s often missing: the structures, incentives, and feedback loops that either support higher awareness or crush it.

    Even advanced conscious civilizations rely on systems that reinforce collaboration, care, and responsibility. We’re no different in requiring those. Our old systems weren’t up to the task…

    Our current economic and social systems reward individual gain, scarcity thinking, and self-protection. You can be deeply committed to unity consciousness—and still find yourself pulled out of it by the pressures around you. That isn’t a personal failure. It’s a systems issue.

  • Energy Shifts and Collective Discontent: The Breaking Point Explained

    When intuitives say “the energy has shifted,” what does that mean rationally? I thought about this on my walk today. If your car breaks down once, you fix it. If it keeps breaking down, at some point you just know you’re done – not because repair costs changed, but because your tolerance shifted from “I can live with this” to “I need something different.” That’s energy.

    My neighbor put it well when I mentioned economic concerns: “Yeah, that’s unfortunate, but I think we need to burn it all down so we can start over.” That’s not reasoning – that’s a breaking point. When enough people cross from satisfied to dissatisfied simultaneously, systems change. The specific form varies, but the shift itself becomes inevitable.

     

  • The Kitchen Remodel Moment Why This Chaos Isn’t the End — It’s the Upgrade

    Feeling like everything is falling apart?

    What if this chaos is actually the messy middle of humanity’s next upgrade? In this video, I talk about why the unraveling we’re seeing — in our economic systems, education, and institutions — isn’t the end of something working.

    It’s the exposure of systems that were never designed to support whole human beings. Anyone who’s lived through a kitchen remodel knows the moment: walls opened up, dust everywhere, nothing usable.

    It’s inconvenient, disorienting, and necessary.

    That’s where we are collectively.

    The risk right now isn’t collapse. It’s reactivity.

    When we swing from one extreme to another — generation after generation — we stay trapped in the same cycle. Real change doesn’t come from tearing everything down or doing the opposite. It comes from getting centered, discerning what actually works, and consciously designing something better.

    This video is an invitation to step out of the ping-pong cycle and into imagination, clarity, and long-horizon thinking.

     

  • Karma’s Hidden Purpose: Understanding Crisis as a Catalyst for Growth

    Conversations with The Muse

    Will Karma come back to bite people in the ass who are creating all the current mayhem in the US? Is Karma even a real thing? Those are some of the questions I’ve had about the topic of Karma. In the past, I thought it seemed kind of weird that in the popular lore, Karma is a kind of thing where if you do “bad” you get some kind of equal and opposite payback for that “bad.”

    So if that’s the case, who is doling out the “punishment” for someone doing bad or wrong things that harm others? How is that punishment chosen? Or is the idea just crazy (or anthropomorphism)?

    In answer to that, I came across a quote in one of the “Seth” books by Jane Roberts that is related to this idea, though in that context, they didn’t use the word “Karma.” So I wanted to dive into these concepts deeper with my personal Muse, to see what the Muse says about this.

    I found it enlightening to find that the idea of Karma is not one of “punishment” but one of ultimate, deeper, learning and growth. It is that sometimes we get a bit off track… and this idea of experiencing something negative is “necessary” to get us back on track. (I do realize that some readers will think that is a sort of “blame the victim” thinking, but it is not. I will explore that more deeply in a future article).

    In the end, I found the answer to my question of whether the people causing so much mayhem will be punished. It’s not a punishment per-se, because that’s human ego based thinking. Instead, it is something even worse.

    Without further ado, here’s the discussion:

     

    Morgan: Let’s start with this quote I came across:

    “You may have brought negative influences into your life for a given reason, but the reason always has to do with understanding, and understanding removes those influences.” – Seth Speaks, p. 259

    Morgan: I want to explore this idea more fully. I’ve been contemplating karma—whether it exists, and if so, what it truly means. In the past few days while thinking about this, I happened to be listening to ‘Seth Speaks.’ What seemed like a meaningful coincidence occurred: I had started the book two days ago, and when I resumed this morning, I was in the middle of chapter 12, right before this passage. This discussion about why we experience negativity, both in this life and in reincarnational lives, pointed to an answer: it’s about learning and experiencing.

    Just before that passage, Seth had explained that if someone abuses women in one life, they will experience being the recipient of such abuse in future lives—not as punishment, but for learning, growth, and understanding.

    I’d like the Muse’s perspective on this. We’re facing some particularly difficult circumstances as a society right now, with widespread hate. I wonder: will there be any kind of ‘karma’ associated with that?

    Muse: As “The Course in Miracles” said: all learning is optimal. This is true. This experience you are having individually – and collectively – is all for learning, growth, advancement, and evolution. It is not a biological evolution, it is an evolution of consciousness. The evolution of consciousness precedes the biological evolution, not the other way around as so many think. So if you ask: “how would evolutionary learning proceed maximally?”

    Many academics and teachers would answer: by studying the textbooks, by studying history, and learning from that. Yet in practice, you all know that experiential learning is far more powerful than textbook learning. Textbook learning can be quickly forgotten – and even if not, filed away as “interesting facts”. Whereas experiential learning fundamentally changes and shapes the consciousness itself. It expands and grows consciousness in ways that are far greater than any kind of factual learning can do.

    And this is why seeming “evil” and hate and the like exist. It may seem quite harsh to you to think that you might have to experience, say, a war, in order for evolution to take place. But then you have to consider – how else would change actually occur, once an individual or a society gets locked into unproductive patterns, and is unwilling or unable to change them?

    It’s like the “golden handcuffs” scenario many people have with jobs that are unfulfilling to them. They feel locked in to staying at the job, because to do something else might not pay as much, it might not work out, it would involve unknown changes to circumstances, and egos don’t like change. Change is scary and dangerous (though sometimes thrilling as well.)

    Now understand that if you take this tendency to get locked into to the golden handcuffs for an individual, now multiply that by 100’s of millions of people. While some small portion of those, at any given time, might be changing, the overall momentum is towards staying on the same path. So if a society has chosen a path that is not optimal for its freedom, self expression, and growth, how can it make a change?

    The only way is to be faced with one or more crises, where the golden part of the handcuffs is stripped away, freeing people individually and collectively to do something different. This is evolutionary learning. It is learning towards greater truths, such as “hating others is never productive,” and “pushing your way of being on others will always cause push back.” You and everyone are here to learn these fundamental principles, in this system of reality.

    So, back to the question of “karma” – it is not any kind of punishment or forced situation. It is instead, when someone gets off track and out of touch with the deeper principles of this reality, they are shown circumstances that allow them to realize the error, in this life and, if they don’t “get it” here, in other lives.

    That is what Seth was speaking of. Once you “get it” — i.e. your consciousness, or soul if you prefer, transforms in such a way that the behavior in question won’t be repeated, then you no longer need to see (or will resonate with) the negative circumstances.

     

    Morgan: So that makes sense, but it seems to me that when a mass situation is going on – say a government is falling apart – as an individual I can’t just “learn” and then have it go away suddenly.

    Muse: This is where you need to understand the way collective events like a governmental problem, intersect with individual reality and events.

    It is easy to think there is some kind of 1:1 mapping between the two, so that if things go bad collectively they will go bad personally. That is simply not true. This is like the game of “cancer statistics.” You can say 1 in 3 people may get cancer, but that does not say whether any particular individual will get cancer.

    And due to your extremely faulty cultural relationship with the idea of “randomness” – you take any kind of statistics about the group as an indicator of the conditions for each of you personally. It is by the very act of buying into those statistics, and thinking they make a statement about you and your experience, that you then put yourself under their control.

    Human consciousness is far more powerful than any statistic. However, when you let your consciousness fall prey to the idea that some kind of global condition must mean that you will experience something negative as a result, then you resonate with negative experiences, i.e. opening your susceptibility to them.

    Another way of putting this is that the world is a complex and extremely diverse place. Though a trend may occur, that does not mean that the trend affects everyone equally. Depending on its nature, some will be little affected, and others very affected. Now, again, societally you think that this is random, but it is not.

    You may think we’re speaking of something magical that happens. While there are things going on that you may consider “magical” from your current limited level of understanding, there is also a more mundane explanation.

    That is the nature of your decisions and actions. Take the example of an economic depression. There are many cases of businesses that “defy the odds” to grow and thrive even in the worst economic conditions. It is not just “luck.” It is those businesses deciding to not give in to desperation, and instead pivoting to serving people in ways that make sense in those economic conditions. It is not easy to ignore all the noise out there, but people still do need goods and services in a depression, so a business can either choose to find ways to provide those, or it can give up. The giving up is what most do, because they look around and say “it’s impossible.” So to your question of learning, those mass conditions may provide you with just what you need to grow and learn, as in your (Morgan’s) case. It has motivated you to do more, to speak up more, to be more authentic about work like this that you are doing, in a time when this kind of work is so much needed.

    The outer conditions will affect you to the extent needed for this evolutionary growth to occur. Once it has really taken hold in your consciousness, the outer conditions will no longer worry you or affect you in the same way that they were. It is not that those conditions will suddenly go away in the mass sense, that will have to wait until there is enough of a mass consciousness shift. Instead, it means it just won’t affect you personally in the same way. It’s not that you’ll be completely ignorant or untouched by what’s going on, but you’ll be able to relate to what’s going on from a more rational and measured standpoint, rather than reacting to it in the more emotional ways it has affected you — and many others. You are already making big progress in this.

    Morgan: Yes, I do have many more times where I feel like, “whatever, this sht is going down, nothing I can do about it but sit here and watch, and get some of my writing and thinking out meanwhile.” It is so much more a relief than the heavy feelings I had so much of prior.*

    There’s a lot more for me to ask in what you’ve written, but I’ll keep it brief to wrap up for today. That is, will the person causing all this pain for everyone experience “karma” in the same way you’re describing?

    Muse: Yes, and possibly worse. If a soul persists over lifetimes, not learning, not evolving in positive ways, it starts to fall out of integrity with itself. It will start tearing itself apart from the inside. This is not an external punishment, this is more like an iceberg that drifts into warmer waters, and just can’t maintain its integrity within those waters. A soul that has not been able to evolve, existing within a positive universe where the conditions are towards learning and growth, cannot maintain its integrity, and will eventually disintegrate.

    This is not predestined. At any time, during any lifetime, the soul can decide to change its ways, before it reaches that point of no return. Some souls, however, never choose that, and do indeed receive the ultimate “karmic consequences.”

    Morgan: Thank you. This was very illuminating. In one of the next writings, I want to discuss how our mass consciousness got to this point where we need such negativity in order to evolve.

    Muse: We look forward to it. Be well, and show love and compassion to all those beings that you can, including yourselves.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • How to deal with it when things are going haywire?

    Conversations with The Muse

    Morgan: As I was having a late-night worry session, three words came to me: hope, love, detachment. It just seems like things are going haywire, and I wasn’t sure what to do with all that energy of worry. Those words, hope, love, detachment: how do they help, when it seems like it’s going down the tubes? How can I hope when it seems there isn’t much hope?

    Muse: Haywire. Crooked. Unexpected. It’s in the words here that the problem is. You expect that things that happened before will keep happening – at least to a large degree – and now things are going in seemingly “unexpected” directions that you didn’t expect or want.

    The ego has difficulty with this. The ego likes things to be predictable, because predictable is the stock and trade of ego. It’s currency is the logic of past experience, extended into the future, even if the past experience is not so great, it would rather be right — in the sense that it is correctly predicting where things will go and thus feeling safe — than it would like to have something unexpected, even if that’s much better than what it predicts.
    This is the definition of attachment: it is wanting to always be able to stay safe within the confines of the ego’s box-of-logic it has created for itself. Yet the real world does not comply.

    In “normal” times, you had a lot of “predictably bad” things going on. You knew that if you were going to interact with a bureaucracy — say the DMV just to pick on one — it would probably not be very efficient or pleasant. But at least it was predictable. Expected. Normal.

    In the “normal” times, hope is thinking it will sway to the positive side of the predictable.
    Now it seems like all bets are off. Things are not predictable. What is going on with your government is unexpected, and doesn’t fit any of the “boxes of logic” you grew up with. It is that fundamental unpredictability that is so frustrating and even terrifying to the ego.

    Hope seems impossible because there is no “predictable” to go to the positive side of.

    You can spin off into all those doom scenarios, or you can put your head in the sand and just ignore it all, hoping it will go away, narrowing your scope to just what’s in front of you.

    These will not make it go away. It is not healthy to pump all that news – which is often rooted in fear – into your mind. Yet completely ignoring what is going on is also not healthy, because then you can’t take responsibility for your part in what’s going on.

    Morgan: What do you mean by “my part”? It seems like what’s going on is far beyond the scope of anything I have any control over, so how can I possibly “take responsibility” for any of it?

    Muse: This is one of the primary fallacies of the human race at this time. You think that the “mental atmosphere” you create does not matter, since (most of) you think that it’s just some biochemical reaction isolated to your brain box that has no impact or reach beyond that.

    YOU ARE WRONG.

    Your mental atmosphere seeps out into the world. If it is a negative, fear laden atmosphere, you pollute the world around you with it.

    In gardening, if you plant a seed and hope it will grow into a beautiful plant, but all the time it is trying to grow, you are adding toxins to the soil, it’s not likely to grow. That would be obvious to any gardener.

    Why is it not obvious to you in the same way, that if you pollute your mental environment with fear, doubt, hate, and reactionary anger, that nothing good will be able to grow from that?

    This is how the universe is. Your mental atmosphere matters. It has a profound effect on which way things will go, and whether you are able to grow something positive, or whether it all just ends up being stunted, withered, and dying.

    And the only way you will get what you truly want – more hope, love, peace, is by growing it, nurturing it. These cannot come from reaction to all the stuff that is going on. Just imagine trying to “reactively” grow a garden when you get hungry. It’s impossible. You have to proactively grow a garden, before you get hungry.

    Now is the time to nurture the seedlings of what you want to see in the future. It is not easy, but if you want better, it is essential. It is paying attention to the mental atmosphere, and that is your part, each person’s part to play, if you want something positive to grow.

    This is where detachment is so critical. In its opposite, attachment, you have a strong “need” to have things happen according to your box-of-logic that you’ve contrived over what should happen — even if it’s far from what actually is happening. When there’s a disconnect between the “should happen” and the “is happening,” the dissonance that results prevents you from creating a positive mental atmosphere.

    This dissonance creates negative, reactive emotions, and they pollute the environment, stunting the growth of anything positive. In the gardening analogy, you become so focused on trying to get rid of weeds, that you fail to tend to your crop, so nothing good grows. This is what attachment does.

    Detachment is letting go. Detachment is knowing that your logic is never going to be adequate to capture what is happening or what is going to happen, and so letting go of trying. Detachment is bringing your focus back to what matters, which is creating the positive environment for growing what you want.

    It is not about ignoring problems or issues, or covering them up with some kind of fake positive thinking. It is instead, acknowledging the problems, and taking the responsibility to create something positive – in spite of the problems.

    It is, if necessary, taking action to manage the problem where and when there is something you can do about it. It is also knowing when you can do nothing about the problem, and in that case just focusing on nurturing that better mental atmosphere. That requires detachment.

    Now as you try to grow something more positive, hope is a weak mental atmosphere. Do you fertilize your garden with “hope?”

    Love is much more powerful. If you lovingly tend to your plants, they will grow better. The love is not only a much more positive mental atmosphere, it also leads to you taking actions that are resonant with that love, that make it concretely more likely the plants will grow.

    The same is true for your ideas of what you want in the world. If you want more peace, for example, lovingly tend to your idea, your vision, and then let your actions stem from that.

    This is how something that seems small, tiny, and perhaps impossible right now can be grown into something great and tall over time.

     

    **This article was hand-written, with summary by AI, and light grammatical and spelling checks by AI. To learn more about the muse you can visit our About The Muse page.

  • Coming out of the closet isn’t easy

    Coming out of the closet isn’t easy

    It involves sharing something with the world that you think could result in rejection by those you most care about and by your community. Something that will had the potential for massive upheaval in your life.

    I’ve gone through this process a couple of times in my life, and it was gut-wrenchingly scary to “put it all on the line” and share my true self with the world.

    You might think I’d had enough of these experiences. You might think I wouldn’t want any more of that fear and stress in my life.

    But unusual times require unusual measures

    In this case, I’ve kept a part of myself hidden for most of my life, but NOW it is aching to be set free – if not for my benefit, then for the benefit of others who are looking for meaning and a new way forward in these unsettling times.

    Coming out of this particular closet could mean losing the approval of many friends and family members.

    Even harder is knowing that my late father would not have approved if he were still alive.

    Coming out of this closet feels scarier than in 2003 when I came out as transgender —back when most people didn’t even know what being trans meant.

    Coming out of this closet feels scarier than in 2010 when I quit my tenured faculty job —as a way of exposing my anger at the system.

    This closet of safety and fear is the “spiritual closet”—my personal knowing that the materialistic view of the world that is embraced by the scientists and rational people who make up my family and community doesn’t tell the whole story.

    Now before anyone goes off and thinks I’ve joined some cult or “found religion”, I HAVE NOT.

    This is a very personal and practical form of spirituality, one that is all about tuning into a deeper core of who I am.

    You could use the word “soul” for that, but since that term carries too much religious baggage, I avoid it. Instead, I use “Core”—a term that describes what I see as a consciousness connected to my sense of self that extends beyond this physical body and the workings of this brain.

    While I’ve shared this with a few whom I’ve been closer to, I have not shared this publicly before.

    Why would I suddenly decide to “come out of the spiritual closet?”

    Because I think the world needs it right now.

    My journey was practical and transformative. Through it, I discovered greater insight, clarity, and purpose than I had known during my atheist years.

    My journey did not stem from encountering any particular spiritual teachings—at least not in the first decade or so.

    Instead, my journey began with philosophical and scientific questioning—asking big questions like “What is consciousness?” and “What is going on with quantum mechanics?” and “How do these two phenomena relate to each other?”

    From those musings, my own thinking emerged that there must be something deeper going on – it’s the only way I could find to explain many of these big mysteries.

    It is a spirituality free from religious indoctrination. I have never studied religious texts like the Bible, the Quran, or The Book of Mormon, as I’ve always resisted their “this is the absolute truth—believe it” approach.

    It is a spirituality that rejects the need for external authorities claiming to be the sole voice of God—a God often limited by human imagination. A spirit or consciousness capable of creating a universe (or multiverse) with countless stars—so vast it would take over 100 billion years to count them at a trillion per year—cannot be confined to simplistic human constructs like white maleness or any other limited framework.

    It is a spirituality derived from open-minded rational and scientific thinking and personal experimentation, wedded to a desire for improvement in both my own lot, and that of my fellow humans.

    This perspective offers insights into our current situation that I wouldn’t have had otherwise

    From my old perspective — the Atheist perspective — what’s going on now is simply a semi-linear (and sometimes chaotic) progression from one random event to another. In this perspective, the particular pickle we find ourselves in, not only in the US but with all sorts of issues being felt worldwide, is just the unfortunate byproduct of many random rolls of the dice that have ended up to be not in our favor.

    From my newer more spiritual perspective, what’s going on in the world is a big ass invitation for the human race to either step up and evolve to the next, more enlightened stage, or in attempting to return to return to old ways (like fascism), likely wiping ourselves out.

    From this view, we, the species, are on an evolutionary journey toward potential understanding and enlightenment

    This is not a biological evolution, it is a spiritual and mental evolution.

    Just like biological evolution, success on this journey is not guaranteed.

    We may fail to grasp the essential lessons we need to learn. Without enough people evolving their understanding in time, we won’t have the collective wisdom to buffer ourselves against the difficulties we face.

    The true rewards of living come from the very act of trying, regardless of whether we achieve our goals.

    It is through our attempts to make a difference that we find purpose and meaning.

    It is time for me to step up and contribute my part, advocating for a broader and better vision of humanity’s potential.

    It is time to dream and imagine something better, and then work patiently towards its fruition.

    In seeing ourselves for the miracle that we are, we can stop devaluing our humanity

    We’ve let a few rotten apples spoil our view of ourselves, so many of us see ourselves as all being rotten, as all caving into our base animalistic desires to dominate, fight, and be greedy. Yet that is not the “truth,” any more than is sampling a few people in one fancy neighborhood about what their favorite car is.

    Instead of letting the bad examples of humanity be just what they are – some people whose choices are made without any higher perspective involved – we diminish ourselves in guilt and shame for being human. More than once I’ve heard well-educated people share the view that we are a blight and that we shouldn’t exist.

    That very attitude of self-shame for being human makes us all the more likely to ruin ourselves, and in the process, likely ruin our planet. That kind of self-shame, that ignorance of the miracles that we each are, makes us unable to see any bigger picture, or act from inspiration and imagination to improve things, if only one tiny step at a time.

    As more and more people get lost in the mire of “doom,” we thereby accelerate towards the very thing that is our worst fear

    Emotions like shame, guilt, blame, and hate block us from accessing the inspiration, clarity, and compassion we need to solve the very problems that trigger these difficult feelings in the first place.

    It is truly miraculous that we exist here in this vast universe, able to contemplate big questions, to love and to hate. Most of us don’t appreciate that miracle, because seeing only the surface of what’s going on makes it all seem so petty, greedy, and purposeless. It is only by going deeper, wider, and higher in our perspective that a different picture can emerge.

    It is not a picture of one political party versus the other. It is not a picture of one environmental or social challenge versus the other. It is a much bigger picture of a species that is presented with these challenges so that we can either choose to shift and grow – or fail to do so and perhaps not return from that choice. It sounds scary, but in the big picture, it’s no scarier than the reptile who may have lept out of a tree towards another tree, spreading its arms with nascent wing-like protrusions in hopes the extra lift would get it across the gap.

    Those “wing-like protrusions” in our case are the higher perspective and spirituality that can emerge when we abandon the religious dogmas of either old-school religion and of materialist science.
    These nascent wings are the perspective of seeing that we’re truly all in this together, and that by fighting and hating the other side – no matter how well justified based on their behavior, we’re only contributing to more hate. The wings are fragile, and cannot persist in an environment of hate and fear.

    There are many who actively resist this evolution, and spread hate and fear, because they’d rather cling to their outdated notions. They’d rather avoid evolution, because they believe, according to their dogma, that they’ve found The Truth, and are sticking to it at any cost.

    Letting go of dogmas and “Truths” — with their attendant fears of any change — and instead engaging in this evolution that is gently inviting us all forward, has many benefits. Not only for the potential to solve some of our very big problems, but to solve some of our personal problems, here and now.

    Those benefits include more clarity, more perspective, more compassion, and more fun.

    Engaging these benefits has helped me get through the major ups and downs of the entrepreneurial journey – a much more difficult journey than getting funding and tenure was at UNC-Chapel Hill.

    It has helped me work towards being a better person, even though I have still much more work to do on that front.

    It has helped me get through very difficult times stemming from major health issues.

    It has helped me help others whom I’ve had the braveness to share my ideas with.

    Why wouldn’t I want to share that with my friends and fellow humans?

    Fear. Simply put, many on the scientific and academic side are not so open-minded as they like to think. And they often use the same tools that many religions have used to get non-believers in line: rejection, ridicule, and ostracism. I feared being ostracized.
    There’s also fear of being lumped in with a group that I find particularly negative.

    In our town, there are people who, during crowded times, show up on a busy corner and hand out Bibles to anyone who will take them. Not only that, they’ll try to engage anyone who pauses for a moment, into a conversation that is very one-sided, preaching at people about sin and redemption. My kids laugh at the “crazy” that represents, and I understand it.

    Having grown up in Utah while avoiding being LDS (mormon), I was exposed to many efforts by well-meaning people to PUSH a religion I didn’t want on me. In part, I avoided it because I knew inside that I was different, and I knew that that religion would tell me that I am “wrong” for simply being who I am and feeling the way I do. I very strongly believe that no spirituality that tells people that they are inherently wrong for just being who they are represents any kind of “Truth” in the universal sense.
    And I have feared being lumped into a group with those people that teach us we are all sinners, that we are all imperfect in the eyes of the creator unless we follow the very specific rules they have laid out for us in the name of their notion of God. I don’t want any association with that, but I feared in speaking of spirituality, I’d be immediately lumped in with that.

    I can no longer let that stop me. The stakes are too high. This is not a push, this is a sharing of my journey and perspective.

    From that perspective, I believe “wrong” or “right” is an in-the-moment thing, based on the choices we make about whether to work towards higher good for all, or whether we choose to do the opposite, like trying to use hate and fear to repress and control other humans.

    I share in my “coming out” as an invitation to think, to question, to consider – but not to accept some particular dogma about how you must be in order to be considered worthy or valid. That goes for any dogma, whether it’s traditionally religious dogma or scientific materialistic dogma.

    I am overcoming my fear, in part because my fear for the future if I don’t try to do something has become greater than the fear of the ridicule and ostracism

    I believe there’s not much left to lose, because the guardrails of the work that I’ve been doing for 15 years with researchers is being torn apart by the changes happening in the US government and science funding right now.

    The guardrails of our society, the rules I grew up with for how it was proper to behave, are falling apart. This is happening worldwide. While many people are sleepwalking toward the cliff—hoping this is just another “temporary” setback that will resolve itself with a gentle landing—those who don’t wake up to our reality are, I fear, the most likely to fall over the edge.

    I am going to do what I can, to share more of my story, and the perspectives I’ve found along the way, in hopes of both learning through that sharing, and also inspiring others that things don’t have to be so dire, that there is hope, and that our if we engage our imagination in combination with a higher perspective, we may just open the path to a much better world for all – even if it takes decades or centuries for us to get there.

    I think it’s worth sharing.

  • Ever Feel Like You’re Lazy? It’s the Quantitative Trap.

    Ever Feel Like You’re Lazy? It’s the Quantitative Trap.

    For much of my life, I thought I was lazy, and berated myself for not being less lazy than I seem to be. (I also sometimes berate myself for using double negatives in my writing, so maybe I just like berating myself).

    Anyhow, I don’t think I’m alone.

    When I’ve taken the time to consciously think about it, I realize that the problem is not what my default mode of thinking thinks it is. It’s not that I’m actually lazy. The real problem is that I don’t operate well according to a traditional, linear clock schedule.

    Again, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. I see others who struggle with this as well.

    I have times when there are bursts of creativity, insight, and action that produce large amounts of work. There are other times when my energy is low, and I have no clarity whatsoever — nor do I feel like doing much of anything.

    After over five decades of struggling with this self-beration paradigm, always trying to “be better” and failing, I’ve finally decided to give myself some grace.

    Some of that grace came from a writing project I’ve been working on. In one part of that project, I write about the Quantitative Trap that our society is in. This phrase describes a deep, core belief system we all are steeped in from birth about the seeming importance of the *quantitative* over the *qualitative.*

    This belief in the quantitative applies to our experience of time, use of time, and thoughts about our own productivity therein. In my case, I had bought into the idea that time is quantitative and linear, and therefore my productivity should be so.

    Yet this diminished my qualitative experience, causing me adopt the stance that I couldn’t follow the natural rhythms of my body, mind, and creativity.

    It caused me to try to act like a machine, ever working, gears consistently whirring, when my body and mind don’t work that way.

    And for the ultimate cherry on top, it caused me to do that berating I mentioned before, whenever I fell short of my perceived quantitative yardstick of how productive I “should be being” versus how productive I was actually being.

    I’m done with that. For me, this is the year of Qualitative over Quantitative. I’m focusing on the Quality of my own experience, since life is short, and I’m done with all the measurement, comparison, and self-flagellation based on arbitrary quantitative yardsticks, like those of “productivity.”

    If you’re someone who has gotten sucked into the Quantitative Trap, and want to experience something different, please join me in focusing this year on the Qualitative.

    What do you think? Have you succumbed to the Quantitative Trap? Want to do something different?

  • Why scientific objectivity might be making you miserable…

    Why scientific objectivity might be making you miserable…

    For those of us trained in the technical/scientific fields, it’s been pounded into us to be “objective” all the time… and that our own subjective experience doesn’t really matter all that much. However, for many of us, this creates misery and problems. In this video, I explore why it is vital to re-engage our own subjective experience, especially if we want to excel at objective areas like research. It’s a bit ironic, but as you’ll see, important, that we drop the purely objective approach to life.

    Enjoy the video, and let me know if you have questions or comments!

  • Life As a Mirror

    Life As a Mirror

    Do you feel like your experiences keep repeating themselves? The same problems … over and over … cycling back around to the same stuff?!

    A tourist attraction shows us how life can sometimes be like a frustrating hall of mirrors… but it doesn’t have to be.

  • Blame it on …. the randomness!

    Blame it on …. the randomness!

    The amazing universe we live in, how did it come into being? Blame it on randomness.

    Music and art? How did humans develop those capacities? Blame it on randomness…

    The laws of physics as we know them? How did they arise from the primordial soup of the Big Bang? Blame it on randomness…

    Eyeballs, ears, and these amazing brains we have? How did they evolve from pond slime? Blame it on …. you guessed it! … randomness.

    Yes, that’s what adherents of the materialist paradigm are saying. At the bottom of it, it’s all random. Really, it is, we promise!

    Of course, when you quiz such a person about what exactly is it in randomness that can create galaxies, stars, and brains, you’ll hear a bunch of gobbledygook and hand-waving about deterministic processes and initial conditions.

    “But wait!” the astute listener to the hand-waving exclaims – “you’re saying that there were some random initial conditions of the universe that somehow then led to all of this?”

    The answer provided is simply: “yes, isn’t it obvious?”

    Um, about as obvious as rabbits with wings flying. For some odd reason, the random odds weren’t stacked in favor of rabbits with wings. Go figure!

    And the even more astute listener might ask: well, okay, how did those “random initial conditions of the universe come about, i.e. in what context exists such possibility, and what are the odds of that occurring?” Unfortunately, such questions will be met with a stone-wall: that’s philosophy, not science!

    “Okay, so you’re saying it’s ‘philosophy’ to ask what led to the so-called random starting conditions of the universe, but it’s not also ‘philosophy’ to assume that it’s all random at its core, as you do dear skeptic?”

    If you were ever to ask such a question of such a person, this is the point at which they will probably be turning red, fuming a bit, and attempting to disengage from the conversation.

    Maybe this whole “it’s random” crutch that the skeptical/materialist/atheist industrial complex rely on so much needs some deeper examination? *

    Just sayin’…

    (BTW – just because I personally don’t buy the “blame it on the randomness” approach that so many of the hardcore materialists assume to be true, doesn’t mean that I automatically go in the other direction and believe in a white-dude-in-the-sky who has created a quite judgmental universe separated into sinners and saints… bottom line is I examine all premises and reject any that are silly and not supported by facts… that includes both the basis of much of what the materialists claim, along with what religions claim).

    * They won’t be the ones to do it however – they are blind to their own assumptions, just like nearly every person on the planet is, no matter