"In the future an emergency medical technician might give hydrogen sulfide to someone suffering serious injuries and they might become a little more immortal giving them time to get the care they need."

A little more immortal??? What kind of maniacal screwball scientist could come up with that gem of wisdom? Immortality is, without question, already within our own individual psyches -- it has always been! death is merely a renewal and a change of form -- no one can escape immortality.

This work is not only awesomely inspired and pioneering, it validates the most commonly held Eastern spiritual belief & awareness; namely that at the quantum level, reality plays myriad wondrous games with us (we are everywhere at once); we are the universe and the universe is enfolded within us (see Fractal Universe), there is a realm beyond our physical world that echoes ripples of a higher cosmic / universal consciousness. We are defining the pure meditative state, an alertness to how our intelligent and sentient God within experiences itself subjectively. Buddha enlightenment has now been scientifically validated.

The one fallacy that Western cultural & scientific dogma betrays of itself is its dogged assumption that all the constituent parts that comprise our reality are absolute: God either is or isn't, true or false, can or can't. However, it seems inevitable now that we cannot escape the undeniable fact: all states are possible simultaneously, & consciousness is the sheeit.

No baiting, fuzzli, I'm merely bringing 'coherence' to the science-spirituality relationship. Let me ask you something: if you acknowledge that science is an empirical movement, reliant only on observations and sensory measurement (usually sight), then how do you know you have feelings and thoughts? Have you ever seen them? Have you ever heard them ringing inside your bones or throbbing in your cranium? No, they are experiential, much like the divine. A taste of the Universal Truth is absolute -- there's no going back from there. Try a psychedelic like DMT or mescaline some time, or perhaps sample a wee bit of meditation. The point is, man has always had the capacity to transcend the narrow confines of our physical reality, within which science revels. However, cast aside our restricted worldview, and we're suddenly thrust into the world of the intangible, the formless, the ground of being. Quantum mechanical superposition is merely our way of saying 'higher dimensions of existence'.

I must admit, I find it appalling that a lot of hardcore scientific pushers fail to acknowledge that it's time to break boundaries. Separation is illusion, my friends, you have all been submerged in dualities for far too long.

We all come from the same Omega point source, that immense, impossible nothingness from which the material universe sprang forth. All matter was once connected. That awakening is an intimation of the wonder of universal oneness, of transcending our dualistic definitions to achieve a state of unity. Separation is your ego's way of keeping it's identity, and it will cling desperately to all notions of being 'apart'. This isn't religiobabble either, it's what saints and mystics have been postulating ever since the earliest tribes sampled natural hallucinogens, to have their first realisations of a higher intelligence and expanded consciousness. This isn't a high horse upon which I place myself, I'm only trying to unseat your fervent science-based zealotry.

kasen, it comes as some consolation to my existential angst (or lack thereof) that there are others who have pondered the subject, and tried to find connective pathways between such differentiated fields.

However, I firmly believe that science, if it looks inwardly as well as at the whole holistic picture of reality, can validate the deepest, most profound mystical / metaphysical / philosophical / spiritual truths. Ultimately, differentiation is only a construct, a vestige of the human mind, programmed to compartmentalise and pigeonhole. Really, there is no distinction between these apparently distinctive explanations for our reality. Science and religion (as you describe) aren't mutually exclusive. Bill Hicks, the famous stand up comic, said it best: "Matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, & we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves."

fuzz, i would like to thank you for your info -- i've been chasing the dream for a while now. i've seen some fantastical and magical real life events that have left me stumped for rational scientific explanations, including UFOs, heavy rock levitations, 'miracle' healings and manifestations of group consciousness. if i could only make a million off it, my life might just be radically changed.

but then again, it's never about the money. when one immerses oneself into the spiritual realm, you realise the fallacy of the reality around us -- war, politics, financial institutions, power, greed and fake life incentives. money happens to be the foremost example of the latter, the archetypal anomaly that creates only the most abhorrent feelings within a human. i could never strive for the prize, for the simple reason that it betrays my sense of doing what's right.

so, the other alternative would be to change people's lives in a more subtle way, by firstly introducing them to themselves.

This is the probably THE biggest discovery to come out of quantum weirdness. I've been espousing the idea for ages that the whole universe is one colossal fractal (including us humans), and this encoding of spins at the quantum level shows that this underlying Phi symmetry is scale invariant. That is, the golden ratio is universal and can be observed at all levels of reality. Intelligent design, anybody?

Wow, practical applications as well as theophilosophical implications. Firstly, if our computer systems can be made to function non-locally, as in employing entanglement to communicate signals, then we've basically got no upper limit on speed. The evolution of the AI doesn't appear to be far away.
On a more optimistic note, if non-locality is validated, it shows us there are most aspects to our physical reality than our 'human' mind can grasp. In such a situation, it only makes sense that we now, more than ever, need to be evolving and expanding our collective consciousness. Nirvana, or the state of the attainment of the true self, is not only a necessity, it's a must.

Professor Chang, a reputed genetic researcher at the Human Genome Project, has this to say about our origins:
http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/08/01288.html

Perhaps if this really is the case, then all this 'contamination' is utterly irrelevant, as life has been cultivated in accordance with biological necessity. It doesn't therefore matter where life is 'found', but rather that it happens to exist at all.

This postulate reverberates with truth. This reminds me of Tim Leary's claim of a communique sent by an alien intelligence, using meditation and astral projection techniques. A snippet as below:

"It is time for life on Earth to leave the planetary womb and learn to walk through the stars.
Life was seeded on your planet billions of years ago by nucleotide templates which contained the blueprint for gradual evolution through a sequence of biomechanical stages.
The goal of evolution is to produce nervous systems capable of communicating with and returning to the Galactic Network where we, your interstellar parents, await you.
At this time the voyage home is possible. Mutate! Come home in glory!"

Is the universe a breeding ground for similar life, seeded by higher powers?
Amazing to think of comets as far-flung cosmic nurseries of life.

The plausibility of 'Earth as a womb' is undeniable, in that it has facilitated and harboured life for millions of years, as evidenced by our fossil record. More pertinent, however, is the question of whether Life can be perceived as an interstellar communication network, disseminated through the galaxies in the form of nucleotide templates. These "seeds" could potentially land on planets, become activated through high temperature and pressure bond formation, and evolve nervous systems over the course of time.

I think the truth might be right under our very noses, in the form of chemical imprints in our structural DNA. We just don't know how to identify them as yet.

This isn't the only instance wherein a species can seemingly communicate with the collective almost instantaneously. Bees have been known to use techniques in 6-dimensional quantum manifolds to describe the location of food sources to the hive. Photosynthesising plants use quantum superposition to calculate the fastest / most efficient paths for solar energy transfer. Even Carl Gustav Jung used analysis from dog behaviour to describe what he called the 'collective human unconscious'. My guess is that flocks use some mode of non-local communication, akin to quantum entanglement, or information sent in superpositioned states which can then collapse to form coherent and synchronous flock behaviour.

Wow, scientific condescension at its finest! Sometimes I think PhysOrg is like some sort of elite clique, an anonymous herd of nay-saying pedantics who will snarl at the slightest mention of anything outside the realms of the empirical.

I'm continually astounded at how you pledge allegiance to scientific endeavour, and yet forget that the very underpinning of it is that we know *absolutely nothing* as yet.

You might want to revisit the idea that the universe, being fundamentally quantum in nature, employs the sharing of information and energy in ways that we haven't even begun to fathom.

I am certainly not bandying words around. Aside from having a Masters in Particle Physics, I've been a scientific warrior for more years than I care to remember.

It's doubters and radical sceptics like yourselves that give the quest for knowledge a bad name.


This post is probably going to remain unscrutinised, but I pose this question to you all; what if we already know that light speed ISN'T the ultimate speed limit. Quantum entanglement describes a state of instantaneous transmission of 'information' across the Universe independent of space-time. We even have higher-dimensional theories explaining how folds in our fabric of reality can lead to the access of more complex phase spaces, 'phase' in the sense of frequency bits emerging from neuronal structure. So why the reluctance to accept fundamental Truth. The universe, an intelligent and sentient entity, would never set unsurpassable limits on itself.


Antialias, I think we come from two non-overlapping viewpoints on the same topic: entanglement has been shown to indicate the presence of non-local systems, following no causal principles and usually involving some sort of self-organisation that we can only hope to understand. There is much, even in mainstream literature, of theoretical wormholes and higher dimensional branes, cosmic holography and unified fields in the form of vacuum energy. Even statistically, there is now strong evidence suggesting a positive bias toward the existence of some ESP / paranormal phenomena (see Dean Radin's books); we've even set about demonstrating that brain patterns can now be used to switch on and off hierarchical states of consciousness, some of which involve a very real world 'objective' experience of mystical and spiritual realities. Of non-dualities and ecstatic states of Oneness, and even (believe it or not) encounters with otherworldly beings (DMT: The Spirit Molecule is one helluva eyeopener)

Antialias, it's as much speculation as the proposition that you're sat at your computer typing your flimsy ripostes. Until you've experienced expanded consciousness, your brain will continue to be tied up in the knots of its own denial. I'm afraid, antialias, that your closed mindset is symptomatic of the very funk our species has landed itself in, stubbornly refusing to evolve to a deeper understanding of the universe, and you as an expression of its dynamism. Just drop the facade of stoic empiricism (which is tantamount to nihilism), and embrace the reality of seeing the inherent connectedness of EVERYTHING. You and I are part of the same continuum, that ocean within which we're all ripples. In fact, we aren't really separate at all -- merely differentiated. The universe is a countless multitude of information pathways and systems, all of which give rise to this wondrous fabric of experience. Cast your doubts aside, and take heed: Nature is you.

Callippo, from your article: While I am convinced of the critical importance of historiography in the study of esotericism (and for this reason all of my academic books are firmly grounded in historical method) I do not believe that historiography is adequate in itself to convey the complex, multivalent nature of esoteric thought, traditions, or most of all, experience. "

Well, nothing is adequate to convey experience. Not even language. We might as well have a caveman code of expressing our base instincts through grunts and groans. Esotericism is just the intellectual toff's way of (again) describing and classifying memes as the opposite of mainstream. That's what we do, as a general rule -- compartmentalise, pigeonhole, put into boxes. But the ideas expressed through language and through esoteric thought are far greater than the ability of human contact to convey -- they simply have to be experienced.

All you consciousness-deniers, here's something for your inadequate neurons to chew on:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20978-drug-hallucinations-look-real-in-the-brain.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

Nerdyguy, the point I try to raise is that the mind is already capable of accessing superluminal states. Try yoga, meditation, psychedelic exploration, tantra, tai chi, of even prolonged breathwork -- all these mechanisms are merely conduits to exploring higher dimensional realities which are ALREADY PRESENT within our universe. The skeptics on this site will try to apply their reductionist perspectives to dismiss this sort of claim as 'piffle' or 'codswallop', terms which are by the way wholly unscientific. This cynicism is part of that global media propaganda machine which will have us all remain passive, disempowered and wholly unaware of these truths. Science has barely begun to scratch the surface of what reality truly is, and sages, mystics and spiritual seekers over millenia have propagated the very same ideals that I now try to bring to this forum. The world we inhabit is so extravagantly implausible, and yet we fail to see our universe as the ultimate mythological construct.

This ties in to the article I mentioned on drug use: scientific tests now indicate that the states accessed by psychoactive drug users (including feelings of timelessness, contact with beings & intelligences beyond our own, spirits and visions, feelings of oneness and ecstatic bliss, and seeing reality from the perspective of the 'Whole') are now wholly OBJECTIVE experiences. The same brain areas are awakened as those when we see what we would classify as 'real' objects. We cannot cast aspersions on this any longer -- as a species, we have now come full circle, and the very tools of understanding we use nowadays like Quantum Mechanics completely validate the oldest religious and spiritual traditions. Try and read stuff by Schrodinger, Bohm and Capra -- they all speak of Truth as looking through the eyes of the Cosmos. In such a perspective, there is no such thing as 'separate' objects, or even time. Boundaries between inner and outer worlds dissolve, and the veil is finally lifted.

Which is, and will forever be, a wholly subjective opinion. Castenada tried this already.

Youre just another superstitionist looking for ways to escape his inescapable corporeality. Try jesus - at least they have refreshments.


Castenada was many generations ago my friend -- do you for a moment believe that humanity's understanding of itself is limited to efforts made during earlier epochs? You must be blind to not see that the line between objective and subjective is continuously and increasingly beginning to blur, and that hope, belief, fear and doubt will always play a part in the creation of our lives. Remember, each of us comes from a unique reality tunnel that will never be wholly understood by anyone else.

Castenada was many generations ago my friend -- do you for a moment believe that humanity's understanding of itself is limited to efforts made during earlier epochs? You must be blind to not see that the line between objective and subjective is continuously and increasingly beginning to blur, and that hope, belief, fear and doubt will always play a part in the creation of our lives. Remember, each of us comes from a unique reality tunnel that will never be wholly understood by anyone else.
Do you feel hard done by and resentful that there are people out there who are living on completely different planes of existence than yourself, people at the forefront of the human consciousness project? It isn't escapism as you say, simply because when you see as the Whole, there is NOWHERE to escape to. Have you ever experienced ecstatic bliss? Or is your life a never ending series of mundane occurences and trite rituals, in the hope that they will eventually amount to something? If you haven't tasted the nectar, you have no legitimate basis to knock it, whatever your biases and preprogamming. It's great that you're on your path, whatever that might be, but if you had ever in your life witnessed events that have flown in the face of all that is rational, you might be feeling rather different.

It's a shame that we aren't all on the same plateau, simply because I wouldn't have to had to spend the last few minutes of my life typing this; this knowledge would simply be implicitly understood by everyone. You are everything, and everything is you. There's no measurement problem here -- it is pure experience from the viewpoint of an observer who is fundamentally intertwined with the observable. You ought to know enough about science to understand that concept. And with the passing eons, hopefully enough skeptics like you would see the light of dawn, and the birth of a new phase in our quest for self-acceptance.