Pure Knowledge - A Quality of Pure Consciousness

"Knowledge has two extremes. The first is the pure natural ignorance in which all men find themselves at birth. The other extreme is that reached by great minds, who, having run through all that men can know, find they know nothing, and come back again to that same natural ignorance from which they set out; this is a learned ignorance which is conscious of itself."
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662). French scientist, philosopher.

I am strapped for time. This is not an unusual condition. I worry too much about it sometimes. Worry that there isn't enough time, that it will run out. Time does not run out, of course, not literally. I just make the mistake of trying to cram too much into a day. Or others try to cram it for me. There's quite a bit of that going on.

In the end, we are as busy as we want to be on the assumption that we can become clear on what we really want to be like, that is. One way to resolve this, is through Stephen Covey's model laid out in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

It goes like this. Think of yourself as dealing with tasks that can be classified as either urgent or not urgent, or important or not important. This will give you four basic combinations:

1. Urgent and important


2. Urgent and not important


3. Not urgent and important


4. Not urgent and not important

You know what? This simple little scheme works remarkably well.

Most of us are driven by a sense of urgency or what we think is urgent. Like phone calls, requests from other people that just pop up and weren't part of our plan for the day. Then we spend - or even waste - a lot of time in trivial stuff that is neither urgent nor important. Like TV and many of our phone calls.

What gets left out is a lot of important stuff that is not urgent. Which is why so many people wake up to a midlife crisis. They just realized that a lot of important stuff was left on the back burner for too long. Life passed them by - or so they think - and now it's an unhappy time.

Highly effective people have simplified their lives so there is little urgency and most of the time is spent on important things. And they have a clear idea of what is important to them. Clarity is a good thing and so is purity; two ways to look at the same thing.

So let me segue into today's focus: pure knowledge, one of the Qualities of Pure Consciousness.

I interpret pure knowledge to mean an infinite awareness of the way things are. This is attained not from learning more and more, but from remembering. That's a bit if a challenge for most of us, I'm struggling with it, too. The idea is that everything important that we need to know is already stored in our memories. As human beings we share the collective record of memories of our race, and even the universe. It is not necessarily an easy thing to connect with, but it's a pretty fabulous carrot. IMHO, it's a dream worth chasing.

Lest I be taken too literally; I am not suggesting we could ever hope to skip school and just squeeze our DNA instead. What I'm talking about here is a remembrance on a different level altogether.  ⊕

Infinite Silence - A Quality of Pure Consciousness

"Deep in that inner temple listens the fortunate pilgrim,
Low where the red lilies tremble he lies while the still hours pass by him,
Baring his brows to the silence, the dear and intimate greatness,
The touch of the friendly air, like a quiet and infinite hand."
Milicent Washburn Shinn. Yosemite

Up to bat today, from our Qualities of Pure Consciousness, is infinite silence!

I see this as a reference to a silent mind. This is a goal of all meditation: to still the mind and calm its incessant thinking and speculation. Depending upon your sources, the mind thinks about 60-70,000 thoughts each day. The bad news is that 90-95% of those were the same thoughts that you had yesterday.

In a state of pure consciousness, there is no need to think. Everything just is, and so are you. The mind is silent. This does not mind it is inactive. The mind is aware. The distinction is that you do not need a thought to be aware as awareness transcends thought altogether. Remember, you are not your thoughts; you are merely the thinker of your thoughts. Still your mind and your awareness is heightened.

Doesn't sound so hard if I say it quickly, does it? I meditated this morning. And no, my mind wasn't infinitely silent even though I did drop in deep during the sitting. I am learning to work through that, though. My mantra, such as it is, is "Effortless". I try just to listen to the body and be aware of the it. This is moving me forward. I like it. Try it.  ⊕

Infinite Dynamism - A Quality of Pure Consciousness

"The child's true constructive energy, a dynamic power, has remained unnoticed for thousands of years. Just as men have trodden the earth, and later tilled its surface, without thought for the immense wealth hidden in its depths, so the men of our day make progress after progress in civilized life, without noticing the treasures that lie hidden in the psychic world of infancy."
Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori is, of course, she of the Montessori School. I rediscovered her because I was thinking about infinite dynamism, one of the Qualities of Pure Consciousness.

Infinite dynamism speaks to us about how everything that is infinitely connected will change as a response to any change elsewhere in the structure. This structure that we are talking about is a very dynamic structure. With infinite content and infinite possibilities for change, it is infinitely dynamic. Think of this as an example of the kind alluded to in the saying about the butterfly in the Amazon flapping its wings thereby causing a weather change in Canada.

Maria's words tell us something important about that dynamism and how it manifests in our own immediate surroundings. Children are not born with mental boundaries; they learn them from us. If we could prevent unnecessary boundaries from forming in their minds, could we keep that dynamic power – the true constructive energy - vibrant and unfettered for a longer time in their lives? Maria thought so. I think so, too. And I wonder what our world could be if whole generations grew up like that.

As Mary Kay Ash of cosmetics fame, put it "Aerodynamically the bumble bee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn't know it, so it goes on flying anyway."

So ask yourself this: What kind of bumble bees are we, you, I? What do we most need to unlearn to become infinitely dynamic, to learn how to fly? That's my thought, idea, notion for today. Do you like it?  ⊕

Clueless research - when will it end

I am bored with the research I come across in the areas of food, nutrition, wellness, healing or complementary medicine. Academic research is so unidimensional. More often than not we are offered little but platitudes in terms of recommendations.

Do we need any more research that tells us that whole food is good for us? That compounds in food can heal us? I don't think so. This isn't news. All these research reports just confuse us. One day this thing A is good, the next A is bad. What is going on?

Well, I think what is going on is research without regard for you and I. This research is looking for cause and effect relationships, a noble enough goal I should say. The problem arises when the researcher tries to isolate an independent variable and measure the effect on the dependent variable. Suddenly he realizes that food contains many, many active ingredients (phytochemicals to the initiated).

It gets worse when he considers that the body contains trillions of cells that may react individually to the food (stimulus to the initiated). It's impossible with our current knowledge to control for that many variables. The body is a difficult laboratory, indeed.

So the researcher resorts to isolating compounds and measuring effects on something he or she decides is a useful proxy for the effect in the body. And we get a lot of uninteresting research results reported in the media by clueless people. This kind of research ignores a whole host of conditions that are and will be present in real life. Like when you or I get sick.

OK, so I have a bone to pick. Here's how I see it.

The first mistake is this: All bodies (heaven forbid we should call them people) are considered equal. I.e., if I feed you a pill, it will work the same in your body as it will in mine. This is patently false. There are similarities. of course; we are after all humans, not trees and so on. But for more than 5,000 years we have known that there are more than one body type. Ayurveda has a whole system built up around three basic body types (called Doshas) and their combinations. Qi Gong has somewhat similar, but arguably a little more complicated, system. What would we learn if the subjects in these studies were classified on body type before measuring effects?

The second big mistake is this: Results are averaged over a certain sample. Well, how do we know that is useful? Imagine that you are a tailor or suit manufacturer. You want to break into a new market and wonder about what sizes you should concentrate on. So you commission a survey and are told that the average height of adult males (your target market) is 5 feet 6 inches.

You know that height is usually more or less normally distributed in most populations so you could be excused to think you would be safe to build your sizes around the average. But what if I told you that in this market there are two ethnic groups; one averaging 4 feet in height and the other 6 feet? Now you have a discontinuous population where you might find almost none 5 feet 6 inches tall. This is pretty obvious and would probably be caught in our example. However, do you see that introducing body types into the research equation also introduces discontinuities (categories) where averaging may not work?

The third mistake is this: Consensus science assumes that effect varies proportionally with the dose and that no effect will occur at all below a certain dosage threshold. This is a disturbing assumption. On the face of it, it looks reasonable. Linear logic leads us to believe it is true. Didn't Paracelcus say: The poison is the dose?

Well, above we just showed that life is often discontinuous, categorical and nonlinear. Could there be an alternative interpretation? Try this on for size: Homeopathy has built a very successful healing regime around the otherwise perplexing notion that the effect is increased the more you dilute the active ingredient(s). Homeopathy works famously and shows with all abundant clarity that linear logic does not necessarily apply to healing.

The fourth mistake is this: I sense a pervasive assumption that nothing but the active ingredient in the stimulus can produce a healing effect or outcome. The only exception is the pesky placebo effect which is normally controlled for (in so called good research) by doing a double blind study. The placebo effect is often tried explained away as an effect of people in the study "who would have gotten well anyway". The notion that there could be any kind of mind-body connection of any sort is usually rejected out of hand.

There are studies now that are beginning to come around to the fact that the placebo effect is not so easily dismissed. More than one bright person has clued into the idea that it would actually be pretty cool, not to mention cheaper, if we could understand how some people get well without medication. So I fail to understand why it is so outlandish and unreasonable to include consideration of the subjects' mental states and belief structures about their own health situation and the prospect of getting well.

The fifth mistake is this: A lot of research is not out to help you or I to heal. It is out to further a researcher's career or find new products (drugs) for pharmaceutical companies or both. The underlying assumption is that the way to go is with more and better drugs or invasive procedures of other kinds (like surgery).

This attitude can be likened to the story about the mountain road with a broken guard rail where cars keep running off the road and down the mountain side. The emergency services were always begging for more money to help the accident victims. The real solution would of course be to mend the guardrail. This gem of a thought is called prevention. How about trying to reverse a tide or two by dealing once and for all with some well known root causes of human ailments rather than focusing all the time on intervention in acute cases?

There are some careers waiting to be made out there for people who can pull together what I have alluded to above and run a few studies. Because I see a trend to fund more research into nontraditional healing modalities, I am somewhat hopeful.   ⊕

What is a medical service provider really for anymore?

From the Psychiatric Times comes this disturber: "I have just finished reading another recruitment letter, looking for a psychiatrist to provide medication management and evaluations for a mental health care group in Anywhere, U.S.A. In this day of managed mental health care, the role of the psychiatrist is to diagnose mental disorders and to prescribe medications. When patients become 'stable,' the psychiatrist sees them at approximately three-month intervals for 15-minute medication checks.

My job is to pronounce the name of the disorder and to write the prescriptions to fix it. I receive financial incentives to evaluate and medicate as many patients as possible. If psychotherapy is called for, then I must refer my patient to a psychotherapist. Never mind that I have received excellent training in psychotherapy. Never mind that my particular gift is in bringing a person to wholeness through the realm of the spoken word."

Not a good trend. If medical service providers become nothing more than a front for pharmaceutical companies, then we are in for a rough time health wise.  ⊕

Out of disturbance rises hope

I have been out cold with a cold. Silly statement, but it's true. It's been making the rounds in town affecting lots and lots of people. Me, I have slept away an amazing number of hours in the last few days. No energy for posting or even worrying about email.

When I am sick like that, just about the only thing I can handle is reading. I don't watch TV; we cancelled cable last year and haven't looked back. Running a little low on the book shelves, I got into some stuff I had been looking at for years, but never opened up.

First up was Lawrence Durell with Mountolive, one of the books in his collection known as the Alexandria Quartet. Alexandria here refers to the city in Egypt. Very enjoyable and fairly easy reading. When that ran out of pages, I go onto Emil Zola's Germinal.

Zola was a disturbing acquaintance to make. I wasn't really ready for an in-depth account of life in and around the French coal mines around 1850-60. Oh, he wrote well, Zola did, but now my head is full of some very disturbing images of people who lived under truly horrible conditions.

In this Penguin edition, the introduction by some learned scholar or other goes on about how Zola described conditions that had passed even as he wrote about them. Well, maybe things changed in France, but child labour is still with us to this day. The geography may have changed, but not the principles.

As a single individual there is not a lot I can do about this state of affairs. But I can do a little. Our family sponsors a foster child. We're on our second one now. Our first was a little girl in the barrios of Cartagena in Columbia. Recently the sponsorship was transferred to a little 5 year old boy on the interior plains of Equador. Most of the children in that area are stunted in growth due to malnutrition. There is not much in the way of jobs in that area and the winter weather is harsh at 3,500 meters altitude up in the Andes even on the equator.

The pressure on the kids is immense to quit school at first opportunity so that they can work and contribute financially to the family. With no skills to speak of, there are few opportunities beyond crowding into a niche already full to overflowing. So generation after generation stays trapped in poverty with little hope of breaking out.

A Foster Child plan can help get some much needed proteins into some little person's diet. It's hardly a guarantee of any sort of solution, but it does offer hope. I believe in hope. Hope gives you the idea that something is possible. Knowing something is possible removes doubt and frees you from imagined constraints. Without constraints the possibilities are endless. Thus hope moves mountains where all else fails. I am beginning to get Zola out of my system. I hope.  ⊕

Infinite Correlation - A Quality of Pure Consciousness

"We have been brought to the idea of such a correlation between the two impulsions that the action of the one establishes and limits at the same time the action of the other, and that each of them, taken in isolation, does arrive at its highest manifestation just because the other is active."
J. C. Friedrich von Schiller. From Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man

So with that for a starter, what's on for today? It's infinite correlation, one of the Qualities of Pure Consciousness. It speaks to the connectedness of our true beings with everything around us.

In Schiller's letter, he was talking about what he termed the idea of man's humanity. By "the two impulsions", he refers to a sensuous impulsion and a formal impulsion. His argument is that we need both to resolve who we are.

Here's another quote from Schiller on how these impulsions work for us (or against us as the case may be):

"When we welcome with effusion someone who deserves our contempt, we feel painfully that nature is constrained. When we have a hostile feeling against a person who commands our esteem, we feel painfully the constraint of reason. But if this person inspires us with interest, and also wins our esteem, the constraint of feeling vanishes together with the constraint of reason, and we begin to love him, that is to say, to play, to take recreation, at once with our inclination and our esteem."

I like the reference to love. Love is the solution. Now, where have we heard that before, and how often? If we let our sensuous and formal impulsions guide us, will we conclude we hear it so often because it is true?

Close your eyes and try to say yes. How did that feel? You're on the right track.  ⊕