http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/business/04unbox.html

Note this passage from the above cited article, which is related to a point I've been making for quite a while...

"Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”

Paying attention keeps the perceptive brain awake. It also slows down the passage of time, producing some traction on the slippery slope of mortality. To keep the decades from flying by, wake up regularly under a different sky, in a different climate, hearing a different language. If you can't travel the world, at least take a different route to the shower every morning. Stop; the new day is a DIFFERENT DAY than all the others you have lived; proceed to shower.

This awareness helps to mitigate the redundancy through which many repetitions become a single experience. How many times have I stumbled from my bed to the shower? Thousands, but it's as if it is a single experience, and all collapse into a single moment, a flash of time. Decades of mornings go by, with only the differences registering as meaningful. That which changes from day to day registers in life's journal. The rest is a chain of dittos. This is one reason I refuse to "watch the news" at 6 pm every day (there are plenty of others...)

Conscious Deliberate Awareness. Awareness is the body's sensual perception. Deliberation, the rational mind, and Consciousness the core perceiver. To be fully functional in all three is the key to a calm, centered life.

The NYT article also talks about "... a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements".

Indeed. To be like an interplanetary spaceship, making, tiny, instantaneous course corrections based on new information which we receive as we proceed. Realizations that as one proceeds, our destination may well change along with the landscape. This is the big problem with religion, and other such spiritual "practices". They are systemically incapable of subtle self-correction. The Path has never been trodden. The Destination is forever new. This is the ancient core! What more is worth seeking?

'Branes' (membranes) are the extensions of 'strings' which are a sort of infinistemially fine threads left over from the era of the big bang. While the three spacial dimensions expanded into the apparently boundless local universe we know today, time (and the other dimensions beyond it) has a type of length, but has no measureable quantity of 'thickness'.

It appears to me that the many worlds bubble universe must relate to the infinite potentials of events. That is, if there are truly an infinite number of universes, there must be a universe which, at some point in time, absolutely replicates the one I am currently in UP TO THE MOMENT THAT I TYPE THIS PERIOD

.

and not any further... It now spins, or expands its future in a bifurcation of realities.

and in another universe, a split second later, the (also simultaneous) thunderstorm lets loose a bolt which leaps through the keyboard on the Powerbook, and fries me to a crisp.

However, I'm proposing that consciousness only exists in one of these worlds at a time. If consciousness is a type of mutable standing wave in a higher dimension -- certainly, the mystics have proposed this for generations, and now the brane-theorists are providing the dimensions which vibrate! -- then that dimension would permeate those below it. However, just as a rope passing through a series of grates which are arranged in grids would vibrate more in a grid cell with an impulse in it, with only minor wavelets travelling beyond the grate into contiguous cells, consciousness may become focussed into one universe at a time. However, perhaps when the link is broken there, the wave energy is free to travel to another.

I'm not talking about What the Bleep here. It's just physics. And while consciousness may indeed vibrate on a different plane than, say, Radium, that doesn't make it more or less 'spiritual'. "Spiritual" is the awareness of and action taken toward the unity of all beings.

I'm also not taking about reincarnation, since consciousness is ALWAYS moving from one cell to another, as events in the local universe are affected in random fashion by the spontaneous generation and dispersal of matter.

So, my awareness may be able to slip between simultaneous cosmos with the focussed sympathetic vibration of will and intent creating the motive force, a pattern upon which like attracts like.

Perhaps our fates are determined absolutely by what we wish for, whether consciously, or not.

Certainly, whatever the mind concentrates on eventually will manifest, given the appropriate initial conditions.

In talking with friends the other night, the perennial question arose regarding 'karma':

Why did that thing happen to me, what did I do to deserve that, why is this loved one or that suffering, why do we have to face loss and death? Does Karma mean "cause and effect" implying that all suffering is, after all, due to our 'original sin'? What about reincarnation?

Karma and reincarnation, in my view, are immediately and constantly acting on our consciousness. Events outside of our control are always affecting us, in a neutral and non-specific manner. That is, fate, or 'the gods' are NOT testing us, or throwing things in our paths. However, we must inevitably deal with adverse events, whether physical, or internal and psychological.

I believe that bodily reincarnation is not necessarily a part of the cosmic plan, but since the Tibetans believe very strongly in the literal reality, I will give it the benefit of the doubt. However, until somebody comes up wth a way to do a double-blind study and prove it one way or the other, I personally don't find it necessary to incorporate a transcendental soul or spirit into my world view, let alone one which travels through the astral worlds between death and the next birth. Seems to me that all these phenomenon can be viewed with Occam's Razor as the manifestation of the dissolving thread of consciousness in a dying -- or otherwise altered -- brain... [1]

Nonetheless, reincarnation offers a useful metaphor. The universe that we perceive is in some very literal way, recreated before our eyes every single moment. Every quantum fraction of time (a Planck moment?) our consciousness is slipping away -- dying -- from the past moment and moving into -- reborn -- the next.

Karma, in this context, is our reaction to the immediate event at the moment of "death and rebirth" -- every instant in every breath. That is: the world line stretches into the future, but it divides into an infinite number of options as it moves forward. Our 'karma', so called, is determined by how we react, how we deal with the events and the actions of others. If we return love and kindness for hatred and spite, we will surely smooth the path of our own consciousness. Perhaps the events around us, the events outside of our control, may flame into greater fury, but the only thing we have any real control over, after all, is our own state of mind.

I am not a Christian, but as a literate human, I am aware of the basic mythology -- in fact, as a mythtic, I may well know thee story better than thee believers!

I think that the essential nature of the Christ myth is exactly this: after all, did Jesus "deserve" to be nailed to a cross? For that matter did six million Jews and Gypsies deserve to die in Nazi death camps?

No. No. No. Don't get me started!

It's not about 'deserving', it's about how we accept and acknowledge the loss, the challenge, the death -- our own death -- even as we feel it's unjust, it's framed on a falsehood, it's a crying shame -- we can still maintain a clear mind, our consciousness that by remaining true to our deliberate awareness even to the last, we'll send some type of coherence back into the cosmos, where it may strenghten the power and energy for change. Perhaps it would even trip the trigger for some other being's bullet -- a half-second early or late, and change the history of the future...

Jesus says, "Forgive them, they know not what they do." Indeed, how many persecuted in his name have had need to consider the same?

In any case, the lesson is valuable.

Instant karma is all there is. Our immediate reaction to events is the seed upon which our future instantly begins to crystalize. [2]

P

Erik Reece writes about the relationship apparent between Thomas Jefferson's "Bible" and the ancient Gospel of Thomas.

Jesus without the Miracles Download the PDF

"this file is for personal use only, not for distribution"

Or, another way:

We can't start where we want to be. We have to start where we ARE.