For more than a century, scientists have been trying to figure out exactly what consciousness really is, how it works and where it comes from. And while many questions remain to be answered, it appears some researchers have now discovered what they call an “on/off switch” for human consciousness.
The study published in the Journal of Epilepsy & Behavior, Aug 2014 claims the scientists discovered the “switch” on accident while working to pinpoint the cause of the patient’s seizures.
New Scientist reports the research group was targeting the claustrum, “a thin, sheet-like structure that lies hidden deep inside the brain”, with electrodes.
Gizmodo explains that’s when the women unexpectedly lost consciousness:
Unlike a seizure, where a person’s activity immediately stops, the patient seemed to ‘slow down,’ speaking more quietly and moving more slowly until she was silent and still, unresponsive to voice or visual stimulation.
Once the electrical stimulation was turned off, she regained full consciousness but with no memory of what just happened.
This study is incredibly intriguing but it is one brick in a large edifice of consciousness that we’re trying to build … Ultimately, if we know how consciousness is created and which parts of the brain are involved then we can understand who has it and who doesn’t. – prominent American neuroscientist Cristof Koch – Huffington Post
While the presence of this on/off switch has only been recorded in one patient, this discovery has potential to help people with epilepsy or who are in a semiconscious state.
Human life throughout history has developed in alternating waves of migration and settlement. Navigating this duality between exploration and settlement, movement and stillness is a fundamental essence of what it means to be human.
In the aftermath of global wars and natural disasters, the world has witnessed the displacement of millions of people across continents. Refugees seeking shelter from disasters carry from their homes what they can and resettle in unknown lands, often starting with nothing but a tent to call home.
Designed by Abeer Seikaly, “Weaving a home” reexamines the traditional architectural concept of refugee shelters by creating a technical, structural fabric that expands to enclose and contracts for mobility while providing the comforts of contemporary life (heat, running water, electricity, storage, etc.)
Design is supposed to give form to a gap in people’s needs.
This lightweight, mobile, structural fabric could potentially close the gap between need and desire as people metaphorically weave their lives back together, physically weaving their built environment into a place both new and familiar, transient and rooted, private and connected.
Structural Fabric Weaves Refugee Shelters into Communities
In this space, the refugees find a place to pause from their turbulent worlds, a place to weave the tapestry of their new lives.
Drug addiction is not a moral failing or mental malfunction, but an adaptive response to circumstances. It would be cruel to put rats in cages and then, when they start using drugs, punish them for it. That would be like suppressing the symptoms of a disease while maintaining the necessary conditions for the disease itself.
Are we like rats in cages? Are we putting human beings into intolerable conditions and then punishing them for their efforts to alleviate the anguish? If so, then the War on Drugs is based on false premises and can never succeed.
Here are some ways to waste human potential and create a society of mass consumption:
2.Destroy community bonds by casting people into a society of strangers, in which you don’t rely on and needn’t even know by name the people living around you.
4.Divide the world up into property, and confine people to spaces that they own or pay to occupy.
5.Move life, especially children’s lives indoors. Let as many sounds as possible be manufactured sounds, and as many sights be virtual sights.
6.Remove as much as possible all opportunities for meaningful self-expression and service. Instead, coerce people into dead end labor just to pay the bills and service the debts. Seduce others into living off such labor of others.
7.Cut people off from nature. At most let nature be a spectacle or venue for recreation, but remove any real intimacy with the land. Source food and medicine from thousands of miles away.
8.Destroy the local stories and relationships that build identity, and replace them with celebrity news, sports team identification, brand identification, and world views imposed by authority.
9.Replace the infinite variety of the natural and artisanal world, where every object is unique, with the sameness of commodity goods.
Cannabis and psychedelics can directly induce nonconformity, weaken consumer values, and make the prescribed normal life seem less tolerable, not more. The growing movement to end the drug war might reflect a paradigm shift away from judgment, blame, war, and control towards compassion and healing.
It can be tough to take the psychedelic plunge and still remember to bring a bit of that often indescribable essence back with you, to the real world. Fortunately, Nisvan’s ability to recall his Ayahuasca visions is in full display.
Enjoy Nisvan’s incredible visionary art inspired by his psychedelic shamanic ayahuasca ceremonies.
Nisvan’s Ayahuasca Visions
Inner vision
Letting go of physical restrictions, shifting into a multi-layered consciousness of sound/light vibrations.
El Rey Leon
Power animal, giving strength and protection on the inner levels.
Flight of the Eagle
Travelling with lightspeed to the outer realms.
We are star-princes
Two elders appear, offering healing to the soul.
Spectral bat-insect
Trying to hide in the folds of my memory.
Galactic knights assembling
Entering the inner-space dome
Palace of light
Dark Chrissalis bird of habit disintegrated at the treshold of the palace of light.
Healing Buddhas
Appearing in caleidoscopic mandala vision, beaming their love directly from the source
All your thoughts and feelings are energy, and energy is vibration. Learn to raise your vibration and watch your life change dramatically.
Find Something Beautiful and Appreciate It
Beauty is all around us, from the morning dew to the evening stars and everything in between. Many go through life not noticing all the beautiful things that are around them, and yes it’s everywhere, so appreciate it when you do.
Whether it’s the scent of a flower or the way rain ripples in puddles of water, appreciate the beauty life has to offer.
Make a List of All You are Grateful For
Making a gratitude list shifts your vibrations from focusing on what you do not have to what is already abundant in your life.
There is more to be grateful for than you can imagine.
Meditate
Sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes and breath in and out. Too often we rush through our days with a scattered brain leaving us in a state of anxiety and stress.
Meditation helps to calm your spirit down and put you in a peaceful state of mind. 10 minutes of meditation a day can change your life forever.
Giving to someone else shifts your thinking from “I don’t have enough, to I have more than enough to give to others.” Abundance is a high vibration.
Stop Complaining and Gossiping
Complaining and Gossip puts you in a very low vibration. Ask yourself “Are the things you are talking about bringing you more of what you want?” if not stop complaining, and start finding ways to rejoice.
Move, Exercise, Get Active
Vibration requires movement, the more you move the better your vibrations move. So Get Active!Dance!
The happier you feel, the more you will draw happy experiences to yourself because you are operating at a different frequency.
You are not a victim to circumstance, past, family upbringing, trauma, or anything else. You can change your life in an instant.
In many wisdom traditions this is called “total responsibility.” No one is responsible for how you feel right now, but you. It isn’t a curse. It’s a blessing because it gives you your power back.
Just sit and try to make your breath longer, fuller, and more relaxed. It has a direct effect on your nervous system and helps to calm you down. A calm vibration is a high vibration.
Fear holds us back from being in a state of love and happiness, and facing those fears opens you up to a greater world of possibilities. Fear of Heights? Go skydiving. Scared of public speaking, say a poem at an open mic.
You’ll begin to realize your fear was worse then the actual problem, and a sense of relief will wash over you.
Talking about these things with someone helps to raise both your vibrations by thinking big. If you don’t have someone to talk to, there’s a community of higher-minded individuals right here.
What we need is a massive coming out of people who have done psychedelics and accomplished a lot. – Rick Doblin, Founder of MAPS
Dorian Yates Comes Out of the Psychedelic Closet, Talks Ayahuasca and Smoking DMT
One of the most important issues we strive for is our collective freedom of consciousness, we dearly need a psychedelic renaissance.
This is only to come about if we reach a level of social acceptance where reason thwarts taboo. Therefore, it is imperative that more and more people like Dorian step up — we may find our consciousness revolution materialize faster than expected.
The educational value of entheogens and psychedelics may be their capacity to reliably evoke experiences of wonder and awe, to stimulate transcendental or mystical experiences, and to catalyze a sense of life meaning or purpose. – Kenneth W. Tupper, Ph.D.
Humans experience an array of emotions, from joy and severe depression and everything in between. Each one of these emotions create a distinct feeling in the body.
That’s why Power Poses can be such a great way to influence your brain’s release of chemicals.
That raises the question, what happens when we have negative thoughts consistently?
Positive or Negative Emotions, it’s All Perspective
Imagine yourself driving down the street when suddenly you are cut off, what happens next? Do you react in anger? Or do you simply apply the brake slightly and move on with your day.
The same experience can yield two very different results based on how we define our experience.
Tune Your Perception
With that in mind, we realize that positive or negative emotions are only defined as such by us.
This reminds me of a wonderful Zen Parable:
The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life.
A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.
This made her parents very angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.
In great anger the parents went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.
After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else the little one needed.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fishmarket.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask his forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back again.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”
The Mind Body Connection
The unseen connection between your mind and body is very powerful and the effects your mind can have on your physical body are profound.
Our emotions and experiences are essentially energy and they can be stored in the cellular memory of our bodies. Have you ever experienced something in your life that left an emotional mark or pain in a certain area of your body? It is likely you have residual energy stuck in that area of your body that you have yet to acknowledge.
It’s all a learning and growing process that we don’t have to judge nor fear. Positive or negative thoughts, the choice is yours!
The ability to become lucid during a dream and gain control of the dream itself has been coveted, examined and practiced for centuries; resulting in many methods and exercises that cultivate lucid dreams. The opportunity to consciously explore the dream-space can provide insights into the mysteries of the unconscious mind; lucid dreaming can also be used therapeutically to address traumatic memories or chronic nightmares.
Recently a team of scientists led by psychologist Ursula Voss of the Goethe University in Frankfort, Germany successfully induced lucid dreams in test subjects by stimulating specific brain regions with an electrical current. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience in May, provides some of the first data necessary to understand the biology of lucid dreaming.
Voss’ early studies found that participants’ reports of lucid dreams tended to occur during REM sleep. At the beginning of a sleep cycle, the brain slows from high frequency gamma and beta waves associated with waking, processing and alertness. The patterns of brain activity progress through slowing alpha waves to deep sleep’s delta and theta frequencies.
Paradoxically, the sleep cycle apexes in REM, and the brainwaves speed up. Dreams normally occur during REM sleep, when many regions of the brain appear to be functioning as if it were awake. When subjects reported a lucid dream, there was distinct gamma activity, the highest frequency range of brainwave, in the frontotemporal region.
The frontotemporal region is associated with executive functioning, decision making, processing complex stimuli, and self-awareness. Voss and her team theorized that lucid dreams occur when the frontotemporal region of the brain is active at a gamma level during REM sleep. To test this theory, they used a non-invasive method called Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation. TACS uses electrodes placed on the scalp to stimulate the surface of the brain. When they sent an electrical current in the Gamma frequency into the frontotemporal region of the scalp, the participants overwhelmingly reported a self-aware dream upon waking.
The ability of physicians to induce lucid dreams could provide new treatment models for sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress, and even anxiety and depression. Sleep, especially REM, is vital to the formation of memories, the consolidation of stimuli into larger concepts, and the regeneration of the brain. If Voss’ research provides a consistent method of psychic exploration, scientists and psychonauts will be able to further understand the mysteries, mechanisms and potential self-discoveries of dreams.
Lucid Dreaming with Electrical Stimulation
Elliot Hill seems to miss the point in the video above, but I’ve left it in since some people would rather see a video about the study rather than read about it.
Elliot glosses over the multitude of benefits lucid dreaming offers and instead says he doesn’t want to be alertly conscious all of the time, claiming dreams are his last bastion of unconscious musings. It is laughable that Elliot believes he is fully conscious and aware throughout his entire waking life, a feat that many of us struggle with hourly!
Much like psychedelics, lucid dreaming can be a tool to help further your understanding of yourself and the universe, and honestly, what is more important than that?
For those uncertain of taking the mental plunge into lucid dreaming or psychedelics or with experience on the subject sound off below with your thoughts.
Buddha correctly recognized that suffering (duhkha) originates through ignorance and craving, the Noble Eightfold Path is a guide to eliminate ignorance and craving, and by extension, suffering.
The 4th Noble Truth, the Eightfold Path deals with the cultivation of wisdom, moral conduct, and mental discipline.
These Eight guide posts are not commandments, they are vows. For anyone interested in the path to liberation, these ways of life serve to accelerate the process.
The aim of the path is to live a fully balanced life; consider following each part of the Eightfold Path simultaneously, as each step on the path is not meant to be a linear progression.
1. Right View (Wisdom)
Having the wisdom to see things as they really are. Observing and accepting the impermanence of reality and the duhkha (suffering) that is caused by craving for a separate, permanent existence.
2. Right Intention (Wisdom)
Defined simply, it is the intention to act only out of love and compassion. Having a wrong view of reality, where one sees things as separate and permanently enduring causes a person to wrongly grasp for what appears to contribute to their form of identification: a separate/permanent self. The false belief that happiness comes by avoiding what appears to threaten the self.
This way of thinking gives rise to craving, hatred, and violence. Those with right intention instead see the interdependence of all things and processes, correctly identifing that cultivating love and compassion for all beings will bring happiness.
3. Right Speech (Ethical Conduct)
Generally, right speech refers to the avoidance of all talk that will hurt either oneself or others and to speak pleasantly in ways that will help overcome suffering.
It’s negative forms can be interpreted as: lying, slander, character assassination, talk that might bring about hatred, jealousy, enmity, discord, harsh or rude talk, impolite or abusive language, idle or malicious gossip, etc.
It’s positive forms are: telling the truth, speaking in a kindly and friendly way, and using language meaningfully and usefully.
By realizing the time and place for certain language, it implies that at times “noble silence” may be ideal.
4. Right Action (Ethical Conduct)
Based on the idea that no beings have independent existence, then all are dependent upon each other. With this understood, selfishness no longer has any basis.
Negatively, right action can be interpreted as killing, hurting, stealing, cheating, etc.
Positively, it means promoting peace and happiness, and respecting the well-being of all living things.
5. Right Livelihood (Ethical Conduct)
This extends the two former tenets to how one earns a living, prohibiting those careers that bring harm to others. Specifically: drug dealing, using and dealing in weapons, making poisons, killing animals, dealing in prostitution or slavery, etc.
Positively, right livelihood requires that one’s living is earned by means that are honorable, useful, and helpful.
6. Right Effort (Mental Development)
The above developments require discipline, which includes right effort and the two tenets below (right mindfulness & concentration).
Practicing Right Effort includes:
Preventing evil and unwholesome states of mind from arising,
Getting rid of evil and unwholesome states of mind that may already exits,
Bringing about good and wholesome states of mind,
Developing and perfecting good and wholesome states of mind already present.
7. Right Mindfulness (Mental Development)
Consists in being aware of and attentive to all of one’s activities.
Including:
Activities of the body,
Sensing and feeling,
Perceiving,
Thinking and consciousness.
This means understanding what these activities are, how they arise, how they disappear, how they are developed, controlled, gotten rid of, and how they are related to each other.
8. Right Concentration (Mental Development)
Refers to a focusing of consciousness that enables one to see deeply into something. Both ignorance and enlightenment, which produce suffering and happiness respectively, have their root in one’s mental activities.
Because one’s mental states determine everything one does, it makes sense to concentrate on purifying one’s mental activities as a means to achieving happiness.
1st Stage:
Concentrate on getting rid of lust, ill-will, laziness, worry, anxiety, and doubt.
These unwholesome mental activities are replaced by feelings of joy and happiness.
2nd Stage:
Concentrate on seeing through and getting beyond all mental activities.
Retaining an awareness of joy and happiness.
3rd Stage:
One goes beyond the mental activity responsible for the feeling of joy.
Achieves an equanimity pervaded by happiness.
4th Stage:
Complete equanimity and total awareness.
Alan Watts on The Real Eightfold Path
> Source(recommended for further philosophical study)
It was inevitable, we should have seen it coming! When the Baby Boomers hit middle age, the smoke hit the fan. Americans over age 50 are using marijuana in record numbers, according to statistics from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
The NSDUH Report, from 2011, indicated that 6.3 percent of adults between the ages of 50 and 59 use cannabis; that number has risen from 2.7 percent in 2002.
Marijuana use was more common than the “non-medical” use of prescription-type drugs both for adults 50-54 (6.1 vs. 3.4 percent) and those aged 55-59 (4.1 vs. 3.2 percent).
This shouldn’t come as a great surprise; after all, it stands to reason that folks this age, with a wealth of life experiences on which to base decisions, would make safer choices.
Marijuana use, in fact, was more common than non-medical use of prescription drugs among all males over 50 (4.2 percent vs. 2.3 percent). Among females, the rates of marijuana use and non-medical use of prescription drugs were very similar (1.7 and 1.9 percent).
Pot smoking grandparents don’t give a fuck, and why should they? They’ve raised their families and retired, it’s their time to do what they enjoy.
Mason Tvert, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), said he started consuming marijuana about two years ago with his grandparents, Helen and Leo Shuller, who are 82 and 88, reports Alyson Krueger of The New York Times. They “have a little bit off the vaporizer,” Tvert said, either before of after dinner.
Those who have moved on from corporate work might now feel more comfortable revealing and sharing their marijuana use, according to Cher Neufer, 65, a retired teacher who said socializing with her friends means using cannabis.
Most of us are either retiring or retired, you don’t have to worry about your job knowing, so it’s a little easier for us. I don’t care if you use my name; I don’t care if they know! – Cher Neufer
Another factor is that most seniors are empty nesters, no longer worried about setting an example for their children.
They’ve raised their families, they’ve done their careers, and at this point I think they are saying, ‘OK, I’m not jeopardizing my family. – Diane-Marie Williams, executive director of administration at Moms For Marijuana International, a grandmother herself.
All of my friends are as educated on the subject as I am, and if they aren’t, I keep trying to make them. I can do more things. We play croquet. We do things out in the yard, and if I don’t have it I can barely walk across the floor. It’s a big pick-me-up. – Vickie Hoffman, 46, grandmother and organizer of the Missouri chapter of Moms For Marijuana International
While the federal government refuses to acknowledge that marijuana has a legitimate role as a medicine, in particular one that can offset many of the symptoms and conditions associated with aging, it is nevertheless apparent that a growing percentage of the public — and older Americans, especially — are becoming increasingly aware of this plant’s safety and efficacy. – Paul Armentano, deputy directory of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
Igor Piačka’shighly detailed slightly erotic illustrations are stunning.
They straddle the thin line between life and death, simultaneously capturing the struggle, clarity, and joy of dualistic thinking and it’s ever widening perception that carries us all towards higher connectivity and shared love.