For the two or three weeks leading up to the Consciousness Cruise with the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), I was getting progressively nervous about my presentation. Most of these folks are extremely well educated and they take their sciences very seriously. Often in conversation, it's not just which college degree they have, but how many PhDs they hold. So, speaking with my usual informality, throwing terms around like right brain and left brain, wouldn't wash well with this crowd. After all, the two hemispheres of the brain, though distinctly different are integrally interconnected and it's really not as simple as having an analytical side vs. an intuitive side.
I was near panic a few days before our departure, flooding myself with various articles and documents about psychic ability when my sweet husband calmed all my fears with a simple statement. He said to me, "They may be smart, really smart, but when it comes to an actual working experience of psychic ability, you are the authority here." With those words, I realized he was right. I calmed right down, got my ideas in order and relaxed about the whole thing.
The Institute of Noetic Sciences is a non-profit organization founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell. As he and his fellow astronauts returned from their trip to the moon, he saw our earth, floating in the sea of space, and realized that all of his technological education and experience had not even begun to touch upon the depth of awareness that he felt in that moment. He had a knowing, a noetic experience, that we are all connected and that our world and the universe is conscious. When he returned to earth, he devoted himself to the Study of Consciousness and the collective transformation of our human potential.
Since the Institute's inception in 1973, IONS has blossomed into an international organization with community groups throughout the world. For several years now, a number of the community groups have been enjoying Consciousness Cruises, as a forum in which to share ideas that can make a positive difference in the world. It was almost like attending a series of TED talks, while floating through the Inside Passage, those multitudinous islands off the west coast of Canada and Alaska.
As with all IONS events, there is a focus on the science behind recognizing that we are all a part of an interconnected whole. The motivating force is to create a shift in consciousness worldwide, so that we are inspired to take
action to help humanity and the planet thrive. The researchers and support teams at IONS conduct, advance, and broaden the science of what connects us so that we can all reach
new understandings about the nature of reality and our extended human
capacities. This then empowers people to apply conscious awareness in their personal lives, in healthcare, in business and in education using the real-world tools that are created from what is learned.
There were a number of presenters on the ship and all were great. We heard from luminaries in the world of consciousness research and change like Rupert Sheldrake, Jill Purce, Peter Russell and Cassandra Vieten. Rupert spoke of the dogmas in science that are limiting our worldview. Jill demonstrated how our voice and working with our family patterns can free us. Peter explored our transformation of consciousness through meditation and Cassandra gave us details of Edgar Mitchell's and IONS vision.
We also enjoyed talks about healing violence through wholeness with Douglas Bonar, embracing our wake up calls with Peter Hesse, mimicking nature's patterns for spiritual growth and evolution with Curtis Adney and implementing paradigm shifts through understanding indigenous consciousness with Milt Markewitz. These along with a host of other brilliant presentations and healing demonstrations made for a remarkable journey.
We humans are always looking for ways to expand and improve
our knowledge. And this can come to us through the advancement of our powers of perception. So often we are
taught what to learn, not how to learn. And just as the electron
microscope helped us to understand our world better, so can our other enhanced
tools of perception. It has been my experience that the extended capacities of our human
minds are vastly under explored and under appreciated. So this is why I like to teach how to develop our psychic abilities. As we learn more about our extra sensory
perceptions, we can create more knowledge. And knowledge helps us to evolve
and grow.
We all did a survey before our departure to see which talks would likely be the most popular and thus well attended. Fortunately mine scored very highly. So I was given one of the prime times in the really big room on the first day, just before lunch. It was while we were passing through a particularly beautiful part of the inland passage with snow covered peaks and glaciers reaching down to the ocean. We did the final exercises for my talk up on deck with the cool Alaskan Air and bright blue skies punctuated with the mountain tops on either side of us.
Of course everyone had extraordinary psychic connections because we all are already psychic. We are born that way. We just need a little nudge to help us realize it. And that is what I did in my talk. I gave us lots of little nudges with colorful stories from my life, designed to open our minds. I then punctuated these with simple little exercises that (loosely speaking) opened our right brains. My presentation was called, "Wake Up Your Psychic Ability," and that was exactly what happened. And everyone loved it.
With my talk all done and over with, right at the start, I was free to enjoy myself fully for the duration of the cruise. I swam in the pool which was filled with icy cold Alaskan ocean water and got chilled to the bone every day for an hour at a time. It was fabulous and so healing. Nothing can jump start your health quite like really, really cold water. Frank and I had fun on the water slides and warmed up afterward in the saunas and steam rooms. And the food was incredible. They had an excellent Indian chef on board and you could order whatever you wanted. I loved the appetizers, the soups and salads, and would sometimes have two or three of them instead of choosing a main dish.
Then there were the shore excursions. We saw Victoria by night in a horse drawn trolley. We walked through a forest to come to a large hand hewn cedar plank tribal clan house and visited the many Tlingit totem poles there. But the highlight of the trips for me was the dog sled ride.
The Alaskan Iditarod and other racing dogs need weight training exercise during the summer months. Pulling a wheeled cart with four tourists and a musher on board is an excellent way for them to get in shape. And these dogs LOVE to pull. They can hardly wait to go. When the hand brake is released, the cart lurches forward amidst a cacophony of yips and eager barks. We went racing through the deep forest with the dogs bounding ahead, pulling left and then right around the turns as we whisked along the wooded trail. Before and after our ride, we got to meet and pet the dogs who were all so sweet and welcoming. And after our wild ride was complete we were invited to meet the puppies. In order to help them become socialized, all of the puppies needed holding and petting. So we were blessed with face licking and hair biting as they expressed their affections and we all delighted in their playfulness and personalities.
We all had a truly wonderful time. And in the days that followed my talk, so many of the IONS group members came up to me and expressed their true appreciation for my presentation. They told
me that mine was their favorite and showered me with
compliments. It filled my heart with joy. I couldn't have been happier
with the outcome and I am still beaming over it all to this day.
© Josephine Laing 2016
My friend and favorite scientist, Rupert Sheldrake recently gave a talk at the Royal Geological Society in London called, "Is the Sun Conscious?" This is a wonderful topic and I hope you get a chance to listen to it. In it he speaks about the work of Alfred North Whitehead, an English mathematician and philosopher from the last century. Rupert explained that Whitehead proposed a "philosophy of organisms," seeing the whole universe as an organism and stars and planets as organisms, including Gaia, our own planet, as an organism. This is of course an idea that has gained considerable popularity in our time, following the work of James Lovelock, during the 1960's.
Rupert explained that Alfred Whitehead also saw crystals, atoms and molecules along with, of course, plants and animals as organisms. This holistic philosophy of nature treated organisms as self organizing systems with their own goals or purposes. This is one of the properties of consciousness, having a goal or a purpose. Rupert went on to say that living organisms or any organism has goals and purposes. Then he showed how Whitehead used quantum theory to point out how this might work. I've transcribed this part of Rupert's talk and would like to share it with you now, as my blog this week, because it is such a lovely and simple primer in some of the basics of quantum theory and also of consciousness. So, here we go.
"Whitehead then went on to point out how this might work using quantum theory, where matter is no longer just stuff, matter is a process. An electron is a wave, everything in quantum theory is made of waves and waves take time to wave. You can't have waves in an instant. Think of a wave in the sea, if you take an infinitesimally thin slice of a wave, it is no longer a wave, it's impossible in terms of a wave. This is the ultimate reason for the Uncertainty Principle in Quantum physics, because you can't localize waves in space or time. They are spread out in both.
Because they are spread out in time, it means that every material thing is a process, and that a material process has a past and a future, because it is spread out in time, and it has a direction in time. And whitehead used this as a way of approaching the mind body problem. Normally people think of the mind as the inside and the body as the outside, in the external world. People talk of the inner life, the mind is within, using spacial metaphors.
But Whitehead thought that the best way of thinking of mind and body was in time. The mind is the future pole of the organism, the body is the past pole. The future pole is concerned with possible actions. And this is true even with electrons, the spread of the wave equation tells us all the possible things an electron could do. And when it interacts with something is what people call "the collapse of the wave function." Of all these possibilities, only one is actually realized. That's a measurable observable fact, but it is immediately in the past. It's now a physical fact, and immediately a whole new set of possibilities opens up, in the new wave equation, which are in the future, or the virtual future. And when the electron decides, or the wave function collapses to one of these things, again, you get something in the past, a material body, like a measurable fact.
Now, he (Whitehead) thought our minds worked the same way, our minds are principally concerned with possibilities. Consciousness is an arena of possibility. And the function of our consciousness is to choose among possibilities. We all had many possibilities for this afternoon. And we chose to come here and to be here out of all of the possible things we could have done. We made that decision. We brought it into actuality by coming here. It's now a measurable fact that we are all in this room. We can be photographed, weighed, measured etc. And our minds are now opening to new possibilities.
Now, our habits are generally unconscious and don't require the consideration of possibilities. Consciousness is about consideration of possibilities in this model. It gives us a way of thinking about consciousness and what it does."
Isn't that a lovely description? To me, with this, Rupert harmonizes the quantum mechanical world with the material world. And he does it through a brief peek into the world of consciousness.
© Josephine Laing, 2016
Hello everyone. I've just created this little video with my dear friend Einar Berg. It's called Fields of Energetic Knowing. Everything is not only composed of energy, but everything has an energetic field that extends well beyond the physical shell. Learning how to engage with this field is one of the most important things we do to increase our sensitivity to our world on all levels. Join me for this brief video on how we can learn about the energy fields that we communicate with.
© Josephine Laing, 2015
After experiencing eighteen deaths in twenty four months back in the early part of the new millennium, Frank and I felt as if we had gone through the advanced course on death, loss and grieving. Our friend, Rupert Sheldrake has postulated that there is a resonance between individuals of a species that lets them know what has come before and what might lie ahead. As Frank considered this idea in terms of these many deaths that we'd experienced, he came up with a theory of his own.
Frank noticed that often with the loss of a loved one, he would feel off-balance, even clumsier. He also felt a void, not just psychologically, but also physically. This made him realize that the energy field of the person who had died was gone. Their body was no longer there to resonate with. Similar to a bat or a dolphin who uses echolocation, the energetic signal that Frank would be sending their way was no longer bouncing back to him. He felt that he literally needed to reformat his own field in order to steady himself once more.
So, how do we reformat our field? Well, we can start with all of the many ways that we process our grief: replaying the scene in our mind, reliving it with our friends, loosing ourselves in our work, allowing the passing of time, getting lots of physical exercise, realistically looking at the relationship we had with the one who has gone, seeing the attributes of those who have died in those who are still alive, doing art, letting ourselves cry as much and as long as we need to.
There are also other ways that we can heal ourselves energetically. Sometimes, if we are lucky and open to the idea, our loved ones can reach across the veil between the living and the dying to touch our lives in meaningful ways. This can often allow our healing to come to us almost instantaneously.
My friend Lillian lost her son. He was the happy one who always made her laugh and she was just so sad that he was gone. She couldn't stop grieving and crying. Then, one night while she was in bed, she awoke to the presence of a light in the room. As she looked, she realized that it was her son and he was looking so very sad. She asked him, "Why are you sad, you're in heaven?" And with that he faded away.
In that instant, Lillian realized that the reason he was so sad was because she was so sad and she knew that he wanted her to be happy. Our loved ones don't want us to mourn our lives away. They want us to enjoy and love our lives. In that moment, Lillian knew she had to heal her heart and get on with her life and find her way back to balance and love again. And with that determination, she did.
When our dear friend Franci died, we all went out on a boat onto the bay to scatter her ashes in the waves. As her son poured the ash we tossed flowers from the garden into the water. Some of the ash floated on the surface, some went straight down tinkling in the sunlight that pierced to the depths and some took flight in the air. As a gust of ash blew up I was about to take a breath and there was Franci, ready to enter my lungs. So I inhaled. Right then, Franci's totem animal, the dolphin, appeared. Not one, but three of them, arching up out of the water into the ash and flowers, circling round several times filling all of our hearts with wonder and a fond farewell. We knew in that moment that Franci was in good company and we all celebrated her life and her love.
Our hearts do get broken, but sometimes spirit steps in to help and lets us become more able to navigate those turbulent waters and find our way quickly back onto the road to joy.
© Josephine Laing, 2014
