Re: [Futurework] RE: But where's the mind?

[Darryl and Natalia]

Hi Keith,   When I said, leave it to the scientific mind to ask & then try to prove the obvious, I simply meant that I'm amazed that the scientific mind demands proof of existence of what is obvious, and will waste valuable time pursuing what cannot be realized in terms of a physical or objective validation. Scientists are primarily focusing on finding the mind within the brain, and I'm saying that it is mind that controls brain, so the work would have to somehow overcome the limitations of linear thought, which the foundation of science does not allow for. You cannot measure or seek out an energy whose force is eternal. It requires no physical confirmation from science; it simply is.     Further to that part, I'm saying that mind is behind creativity. Brain is the machine which carries out the needs of actual physical operations and physical communication. Music, art, design, literature, dance, laughter, love and compassion are not measurable and your capacity for these will never be found in a physical mechanism. Your brain is incapable of becoming one with creativity, as was suggested by Ray in talking about art and the artist becoming indistinguishable once involved in a piece.     The soul is what is alive, the brain is but a puppet. You just have to look at the face of a loved one who has just died to know that that's just not who you knew.     I knew a kitten called Stuey, who stayed at the side of his ailing dog companion day and night, until the moment his buddy died. He got up and left the dog's side at once, recognizing, it seemed that what was his companion was no longer there. He never returned to the body. I'm not certain whether the kitten was raised in a religious household, or whether or not his "genes" had the programming or capacity for sensing soul energy.     Love energy is that which is the sole force of what is real. What is real is eternal. Nothing exists that can overcome its extensions. Love is the only force that creates, and is at peace forever in this knowledge. Love is the condition for true creativity. Power-over is not genuine power, and its self-serving directions always stray into the avenues of destruction--of self-esteem,  society, or environment. Arriving at the "end game" of the industrial era, we can see the price. The mind that has been taught badly can mis-create, but miscreations do not last, their basis being founded on illusions of fear. Fear and its derivatives appear to be real, but are always overcome by love, just as peace is the only answer to war. Peace is recognized as truth once it is experienced. Mind weighs love against fear throughout our physical existence, but only experiences a fruitful life by the laws of love. Again, love cannot be measured; your capacity is eternal.      I realize that what I'm saying is not being expressed in scientific language and that it is  in opposition to it. Science's inability to consider what they cannot see or measure accounts for its inability to make requisite progress. It has to open up to evolve. Unfortunately, where money  is involved, creativity is stifled by the need to produce publishable work--which depends on supportable data that other scientists deem to be traditionally acceptable. This does not mean that science is generating an accurate representation of all data, and I will use the pharmaceutical industry as a relevant example.      In an interview about her controversial book,          "The Medical Mafia: How to Get out of it Alive and Take Back Our Health and Wealth" Guylaine Lanctot, M.D., discusses her experiences with the medical system.            "The bottom line is that the medical systems are controlled by financiers in order to serve           financiers. Since you cannot serve people unless they get sick, the whole medical system           is designed to make people sicker and sicker."            " "Social marketing" or "social engineering" is a science that gets people to buy ideas that           make no sense, whose goal is the submission of conscious, to put consciousness to sleep           in order to influence. Medical social marketing is designed to sell sickness to people in-           stead of health!"     Dr. Lanctot cites one of countless examples of gross misconduct around the polio vaccine and its contamination with VS-40. Since 1960, authorities have known that polio vaccine is contaminated with VS-40, which, amongst other things, can cause brain tumours. The culture of the vaccine is grown on monkey kidneys, and those monkeys are (were) contaminated with VS-40. A 1989 publication by Edward Shorter called, "The Health Century", remarkably no longer in print, proved the repressed information and that authorities knew it. Scientists were told by researchers not to use those contaminated monkeys, but they did it anyhow, in 1960. Dr. Lanctot has been banned for life from practicing medicine because she dared to speak out in direct conflict with what mainstream medicine recognizes. Her excellent work prior to publication earned her a wide following, and she is at least content that she managed to expose the system despite media opposition.     Joel Lexchin, M.D., wrote a book called "The Real Pushers", about the incestuous relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical system. As Jim Harding, School of Human Justice, University of Regina writes:                      "Perhaps the book's most challenging conclusion is that it is the expansion of the pharma-            ceutical market by the multinational corporations, and not the advancement of pharma-            cological research per se, which explains the escalating number of prescription (and over-            the-counter drugs) to which the public is exposed. As in other commercial sectors, brand            name marketing--not fundamental innovations--is the core strategy behind the drive            toward power and profits in the pharmaceutical industry. ... ...the World Health Organization            has stated, "In recent years there has been a tremendous increase in the number of pharma-          ceutical products marketed; however there has not been a proportionate improvement in health."           ...As more people face the disruption of unemployment, pollution, poverty and cutbacks, it will           become even more vital to be critical of the medicalization of social problems and its role in           social control."     Lexchin states that in an effort to expand the use of drugs, the industry has even tried to create new diseases that require drug treatment, termed "medicalization", in the examples of Valium and Ritalin. Drug advertising encourages doctors to view social or family problems like loneliness or de- pression due to unemployment as medical concerns, and anti-depressants are the answer. It's the easiest solution in the ten minutes they spend with a patient.     He cites that a 1977 report by W.H.O. found that only about 230 of the many thousands of drugs marketed at the time were really indispensable for health care. In the U.S. the F.D.A. set up scientific panels from NAS & NRC to evaluate claims for all drugs introduced prior to 1962. Of 16,000 products' therapeutic claims, from both large and small companies, 66% of the claims could not be scientifically substantiated.     Today, the market is off the charts, and still festering. They can't afford studies that would expose the industry tactics. Tactics such as releasing drugs to control schizophrenia with a very low positive response rate, but great patient manageability value in hospital settings, thereby keeping the patient unreleasable and drugged. A popular thing to do is to change a patient's drug at Christmas time, according to the countless patients I worked with. Sudden changes to chemical alignment often results in devastating depression, and even suicide. All patients are introduced to the bottom of the line drugs first, and climb the ladder every 6-12 months to a more effective one because the government is encouraged to buy up an abundance of drugs at cheap prices, so they must use up the surplus first, and provide costly evidence to the patient and the system to support the use of the next level of control drug.     Dr. Lexchin goes on to quote pharmaceutical industry reps admitting that manufacturing does not target uncommon diseases as they would not generate sufficient profits.     Another top motivator is whether or not a product can be patented. Lithium was first discovered as effective in 1949, but the industry waited to research and manufacture it until the late 60's, once a slow-release process was compounded. L-Dopa, has been known since the 30's, derived from fava beans, a natural substance not patent-able. Once the drug companies could  synthesize it, Parkinson's patients were finally treated with it.     It was also revealed, by a U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee classifying 176 important drugs, that countries not issuing product patents performed substantially better than those that did. Also, Lexchin suggests that directing research toward patentable chemical therapy results in discouraging research in the fields of nutrition,public health, biochemistry and preventive medicine since funding is not available. He asks, How much does the knowledge of where funding can come from influence the kind of questions that researchers are even willing to consider?     Right from college, companies like Eli Lilly provide students with medical handbags full of medical utensils, offer free vacation seminars to promote their company products, and continue to bombard the graduate with extensive perks and freebies. The manipulative literature appeals to doctor's ego's, and the influx of new products precludes the physician's time to properly investigate new products. Advertising works subconsciously well.     I do have a lot to say about research, and the motivations behind it. Universities are known to produce some of the best work only when the large corporations are not behind funding. In these hard economic times, governments are telling universities to go into the business of fund raising to carry out their programs of training minds. Pharmaceutical/petrochemical companies account for a very broad range of smaller industries, in addition to the commonly accepted definitions. In Canada, at Guelph University, renowned for agricultural research, almost all funding is derived from the diverse pharmaceutical giants, and consequently most research is now looking at their agendas of genetic modifications and better killer pesticides. Even when government kicks in, it will very often specify the type of research to conduct because pharmaceutical companies will have lobbied elected representatives within the responsible ministry, or worse still, government agendas will promote research that is solely commercially viable.     From the above, you can deduce that scientists and researchers are at best nothing more than human; some responsible and innovative, others once employed mostly not--just like most other professions...     I never said that there were separate pathways for the different types of memories. I was merely trying to account for the activity you described prior to response in the experiment cited. Why are you surprised that the response seems to be almost immediate? Thought is the fastest energy possible, but being magnetically attracted (for lack of a better analogy) to the brain's electrical energy, it gets a bit filtered in time by our memory data.     As to, How do you know you are free to "take" decisions?--barring mind control, you are free to think what ever thoughts you wish, just as you are free to absorb and process new information in order to reformulate what you once believed or hypothesized. Freedom will, I must say, be a condition that may be difficult to arrive at under certain economic and social restrictions. A child born to a war-torn starving country may never have the opportunities of middle-class America, yet within its sphere of existence, will still have the ability to feel one way or another about its own experiences. I'm free to change my mind about all of the above, but reason and logic have led me to this place, and it had nothing to do with publishable science.   Cheers, Natalia                   ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: Darryl and Natalia Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 06, 2003 8:04 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] RE: But where's the mind? Hi Natalia, At 01:06 06/06/2003 -0700, you wrote: Hello Keith,     You wrote, How do you know you are free to change mind from moment to moment? Leave it to the scientific mind to ask and then try to prove the obvious! I'm not sure I understand you.     Just because electrical potential builds up in relevant brain cells *before* "taking" (did you mean extracting or making?--either way, doesn't matter) a decision, does not mean brain is behind creating thought or offering response. Electrical potential building up in brain cells will also be responding to input, and how to sort & store same prior to response. Yes, this is true. The point is, however, is that it is quite clear that when we think "we" are deciding to do something it has already been decided. How much "we" have had to do with the preliminaries is a moot point. I happen to think that "my" decisions are "joint" decisions between me and what David Bohm called a "quantum field", but that is purely a personal speculation for which there is no proof nor ever likely to be. Recent work on brain shows that women use more areas of the brain in functioning compared to men, and also that for everyone--certain sections do more than they originally thought and that more tasks are shared than originally thought. Yes, brain studies show that this is true What was conclusive before is subject to new conclusions. I will concede that brain is a vessel of communication.     Brain will pursue pathways of subconscious & conscious memory, There's really no difference between conscious and subconscious memory. There's no separate mental "box" where the unconscious lies -- as implied by Freudian theory but a myth which still lingers on in the way that people think about the brain. Conscious and subconscious memories are both in the same place -- the cortex. There are some memories which are easier to recall than others. and possibly collective conscious in order to process new stimuli or questions or whatever researchers are providing to people used in these experiments. Again, I suspect this type of research is the pre-amble to more advanced studies aimed at trying to measure mind energy You're posing a concept which you called "mind energy". How do you define this in terms which can be measured? Do you mean the total energy that the brain uses?  -at which they will never succeed, mind's abstract qualities alone precluding that. How do you suppose they are going to research love energy? Or creative energy or capacity for art, music or design? How are they going to figure out appreciation for beauty? I am afraid that I have no idea what you mean by "love energy".     Though they may have some success at measuring brain energy output or intake, even to some extent physical processes--mind function, as opposed to brain function, will remain a mystery to science. I'm afraid that you will have to prove that there is "mind function" in opposition to "brain function".     When you were growing up you were constantly changing your mind due to new information. Then you got to university, and the same applied, but you were trained to back up everything you put to paper so that you could be taken into the commonly accepted paradigm of "scientific". From there, the scientific self-censor insisted that you back up everything with usually other people's proof.  I think you have the wrong angle on what scientists regard as "proof". There are no scientific laws or beliefs which are considered to be proved once and for all. There are really only "working statements" which are amended from time to time if and when (and it's nearly always when) they (or parts of them) fail to be corroborated by well-designed experiments which probe the the weak spots in the "law" (and sometimes succeed in finding them!).. Questioning everything is good, so that you understand something for yourself, yet believing only that which has been proven in the lab is not only limiting your consideration of other possible factors, holding you back from using your mind freely, it is expecting you to relive someone else's past in for future work to proceed, thereby slowing you down. Once again, you are misunderstanding what is meant by "proven in the lab". Nothing is ever proven. A scientific fact or law or truth is always provisional. How do you know you are totally "free" when taking decisions or believing something? It feels like that, to be sure, but it isn't always so --  for example, a person who's been hypnotised says he is free when carrying out a post-hypnotic suggestion.     Scientist becomes mostly historian, designing "better" nukes and a more marketable pain reliever. Significant research is hardly ever conducted because the petrochemical/pharmaceutical companies providing most funding even to universities have greedy agendas. Historical evidence has therefore been suspect. Not at all. Independent foundations and governments fund much more research than petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies added together. I don't know the figures but I would have thought that the ratio is at least 20:1. I'm afraid I don't understand much of what you write below, though every now and again you use phrases which suggest that you believe that it is desirable for an individual to make an act of faith, and in this I agree with you. However, I believe that any act of faith must be minimal, and it should always be consistent with current scientific language and not in opposition to it. Keith     I'm certain you are familiar with the concept of projection in psychology. All people, not just those deemed to have mental illnesses, internalize thoughts or feelings they would rather not have, and, not wishing to harbour such feelings due to guilt, will project them onto someone else in order to alleviate the guilt. Of course, this results in further guilt, fractured and projected again onto others in an endless nightmare of projections until such time that you acquire a great psychologist who is able to help you recognize what you've been up to. With luck, meaning a success rate of about one in two hundred and fifty-six, you will recognize why you create scapegoats out of everyone who fits the bill, and get over it.     Our minds are, I believe--because it's the most logical theory in metaphysics I'm aware of--fractured ideas of one collective mind, further fracturing in chaos and projecting our primary fear of separation from the source- mind of a Creator. Liken it to the Big Bang theory. What great force could have initiated that kind of event, from alleged nothingness? Matter born out of nothing? Our Mind (collective use, implying also one creation of Creator) being created in the image of the Creator (--Who is spirit alone--love energy) able to create in form though not in content (eternally), is capable of such an idea. Yet like all forms, the universe in all its seeming timelessness, cannot exist eternally because of its physical nature. Mountains will crumble, and suns get cold. Nothingness is only true in the sense that it's the playground of the imagination. Actually there is nothing out there that has a basis in reality--or eternity. The universe is one big projection of an insane thought of one tiny idea of the collective mind that the created (or effect, the one creation of the Creator) could also become the Cause. Said universe seems absolutely real because we created it, and one tends to believe in one's own creations, even when they are but illusions. This accounts for the fact that prayer to God doesn't really have an effect--because the physical universe is not part of God's realm (which is eternity). To acknowledge pain, wholly non-existent in Heaven, would be to acknowledge illusion as fact. It is an impossibility. Ask for guidance, and you will get it.      Hence a puppet show of physical bodies, using for our example those of homo-sapiens, dancing to the bidding of the puppeteer mind, projecting fear thoughts resulting from its separation from the source. Yet we know that ideas never leave their source, but as children do, we become convinced that what is projected is quite real. Further fracturing or filtering of the divine energy occurs and we split fear into new parts again, continuously acting out in different ways. What the mind can conceive, it can create ( and most typically on Earth--mis-create).  It must also, by means of free will, arrive at the conclusion that only eternal energy is real and that we never really left the source. Because we made the world we see, we need help to dispel the illusions of separation and the permutations of endless fearful pathways. Perpetually trying to prove its existence simply perpetuates fear. It is tantamount to assigning control over an illusion.     Search for truth is admirable, and reason must help you decide, but try giving up control and ask the unknown to guide you there. No one rests until the point that faith takes over.     Believing in God is not essential. It is, however, a genuine belief, rather than imposed, if you arrive at faith because of reason backed up by personal experience. The only alter is in your mind, devotion only by thought and action. The deity described in most religious books (a jealous God, a vengeful God, a schizophrenic God) could never have created Mind, let alone created in eternity or truth. The true Creator wouldn't even be aware of our fearful imaginings because they are non-existent in a realm of peace. Love is where God resides, and your right-thinking mind is still safe in eternity. Now, kick-start that free will, and wake up to Heaven. There is no where else.     Obviously, there's a lot of unlearning to do before the Big Crunch is possible.     Just as you concluded, I claim the right to my mind.     Natalia     ----- Original Message ----- From: Keith Hudson To: Darryl and Natalia Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 12:27 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] RE: But where's the mind? At 16:40 02/06/2003 -0700, you wrote: <<<< Hello Arthur, Your remark about mind being a process that goes on in the brain echoed back at me in a meditative moment yesterday. You were wondering, Where is the mind?, and if indeed we have one. I really enjoy these kinds of questions, and ask that you consider the following: Mind is quite apart from brain because you are free to change your mind moment to moment. You can do so because, unlike brain and body, it is unfettered by physical laws. >>>> How do you know you are free to change your mind from moment to moment? Brain studies show very clearly that electrical potential builds up in the relevant brain cells *before* you are conscious of taking a decision (and apparently exercising your freewill). This was a counter-intuitive discovery by Libet some 15 years ago of explosive significance to philosophy and has been more thoroughly investigated -- and confirmed -- than almost anything else in neuroscience   If the mind is unfettered by physical laws and outside their ambit, then how come you can think or say anything at all about it? Everything you think or say is governed by the neurons in your brain and these, in turn, are governed by exactly the same physical laws that govern every other activity. If one persists in thinking of the mind as some sort of free-floating entity then you can have an infinity of different hypotheses about it and every single one of them can be thought to be true (if anybody believes you) simply because it can't be tested. Keith Hudson Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England