| << Oxymoronica - sounds of silence | 2004 > August | Zobo Funn Band - Live at The Haunt >> |
Sunday, 22 August 2004
What the #$*! Do We Know!? ::
I saw What the #$*! Do We Know!? (film’s site) last night. Part documentary, part drama, it explores the nature and meaning of what we experience as reality. Some of the bits I liked best:
The brain’s activity patterns when looking at an object, vs. remembering seeing it, are not measurably different.
Our brains are vastly efficient manufacturers of psychoactive chemicals (as I was reminded when I ate a hot pepper at lunch on Friday and got an intense endorphin high). Our emotional states trigger the production of different chemicals—and most of us are addicted to them.
And yet we are not passive victims to our mechanistic brains in a mechanistic universe; the mechanistic model falls apart at the subatomic level. Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (which I read recently) covers this well and posits an alternate model of reality where the observed does not exist in isolation from the observer. I remember reading Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics in 1984 and becoming convinced that free will and consciousness operated at the quantum level. What the #$*! tells us the same thing as Jane Roberts’ The Nature of Personal Reality, that our thoughts and beliefs completely determine our individual experience.
A dramatic illustration of the power of our minds is in Masuru Emoto’s photographs of water crystals formed with “specific, concentrated thoughts” directed at them.
| << Oxymoronica - sounds of silence | 2004 > August | Zobo Funn Band - Live at The Haunt >> |