The ATLANTIC, JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013

Awakening

Since its introduction in 1846, anesthesia has allowed for medical miracles. Limbs can be removed, tumors examined, organs replaced—and a patient will feel and remember nothing. Or so we choose to believe. In reality, tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. Since their eyes are taped shut and their bodies are usually paralyzed, they cannot alert anyone to their condition. In efforts to eradicate this phenomenon, medicine has been forced to confront how little we really know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. The doctor who may be closest to a solution may also answer a question that has confounded centuries’ worth of scientists and philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?

JOSHUA LANGJAN 2 2013, 8:41 PM ET

Connecting the science of mind, brain, and spirit with perspectives from the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

Connecting the science of mind, brain, and spirit with perspectives from the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

What Is Real?

“So real are the wall constructions of your room that you would freeze in winter without them, yet there is no room and there are no walls. So, in a like manner, the wires that we constructed are real, though there are no wires."
The Seth Material by Jane Roberts

“You create your reality according to your beliefs and expectations, therefore it behooves you to examine them carefully. If you do not like your world, then examine your own expectations. Every thought in one way or another is constructed by you in physical terms." 
 The Seth Material by Jane Roberts

“If you sell yourselves short, you will say, ‘I am a physical organism and I live within the boundaries cast upon me by space and time. I am at the mercy of my environment.’ If you do not sell yourselves short, you will say, ‘I am an individual. I form my physical environment. I change and make my world. I am free of space and time. I am a part of all that is. There is no place within me that creativity does not exist.’ 
The Seth Material by Jane Roberts

"You project your thoughts, feelings, and expectations outward, then you perceive them as the outside reality. When it seems to you that others are observing you, you are observing yourself from the standpoint of your own projections"  
The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts

"Your brain is there to operate your body. You’re in a vessel here. It’s an illusionary vessel that people don’t realize, because we’re creating it in microseconds. From one second to the other, these shutters are opening and shutting, creating all this reality you see around you, but it doesn’t really exist. It’s all spirit. It’s all energy, but we’re creating it. . . . People don’t realize that Man in a sense created time. Time doesn’t exist, in essence. It does when we create it, and we have a beginning and an end to something. We call that time. But in a greater reality, there is no time." 
The Source Field Investigations by David Wilcock

“Real stuff” shows up when enough “virtual stuff” becomes adequately activated by our thought and feeling projections. Then, over time, what we have created with our willful intent diffuses and dissipates from this reality. This occurs in part because we have not developed the ability to hold it in manifestation by loving it enough to sustain its continued existence.
The Physics of Miracles: Tapping in to the Field of Consciousness Potential, Richard Bartlett

When a specific outcome is chosen or observed, all the other possibilities simultaneously decohere in reference to this particular space-time domain. What we do not expect to see does not occur. There is essentially a precise formula that determines what is possible to manifest in your world. What you expect, you will experience. When you begin to loosen your rule set concerning what is probable, you will begin to see a lot of other things. Your “Reality Software” will receive a perceptual upgrade
The Physics of Miracles, Tapping in to the Field of Consciousness Potential, Richard Bartlett

Blog | Can Religion Be Explained Without God? | Closer to Truth

Blog | Can Religion Be Explained Without God? | Closer to Truth
by Robert Lawrence Kuhn (2/11/11 9:40 am)

I want to believe in God, but “religion” stops me. I hope God has less to do with religion, and religion with God, than we usually think. 

Some claim that religion needs nothing supernatural, that religion, without God, can form and flourish. To others, the claim is blasphemous: God exists and religion is God’s revelation. All agree that religion affects humanity profoundly.

Why is religion a force so powerful? Even those who believe in God should understand how personal psychology and group sociology drive religion. 

Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking The Spell describes religion as a “natural phenomenon.” No one naturalizes religion better than Dennett, who defines it succinctly as “belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” He suggests that, “the question of whether God exists is actually of less importance to the modern world than maybe it once was.”

Dennett encourages us “to think not just historically, but biologically or evolutionarily.” He says, “We have to realize that Homo sapiens—us—descended from earlier hominids; we share a common ancestry with chimpanzees going back about 6 million years. Can we see what religion adds to the mix that makes us so different from all other animals?”