Online dating from a woman’s perspective in a guys head is this. .... women have it made. They have the choice of the litter. All they have to do is get online every day, sitting on their princess throne and file through the dozens or more profiles of men who have messaged them throughout the day. They then flippantly toss out all of those well thought out, carefully crafted messages from most of those poor schmucks, and then they log onto their Facebook accounts to complain to their girlfriends that there are no “good men” left in the world.
I get a lot of profile “views”, but no messages. Maybe they don’t like my pictures, or maybe I’m not being as nice as I feel I am in my messages. Part of me thinks that they’re just so overwhelmed with messages from so many guys that they just pick the few that strike them as the “best” and just ignore the rest. Women’s choice is what it’s all about I guess.
Guys get accused a lot of being superficial and basing everything on looks, but I can’t help thinking that most of these women just file quickly through a guy’s photos and then fly right on to the next one without actually getting to know what the guy is like. It’s so frustrating, because you know, I think a lot of really nice guys out there could make for amazing boyfriends who would treat these lonely, single women like they deserve to be treated. Instead, you know, I think a lot of them are still hung up on hunting for the bad boys, the smooth-talkers. I don’t know what more a nice guy can do, but I do know it would be nice if some of these women would at least give us a chance to show what we have to offer.
Because you start to focus more on that beautiful smile and you forget about important things – like someone’s beliefs, requirements and way of spending free time. I got myself countless times into very sh**ty situations where I forget what’s important to me and I went after looks. I only ended up hurting myself and wasting time for something that was bad from the beginning – I just couldn’t see it. Horrible, I prefer “cold and shallow” text. Maybe it’s not that romantic but at least I will not waste my time because from the very beginning both sides will know fundamental things about eachother, like wanting or not wanting children / getting married, religion. On a classic first date you can’t go to restaurant and ask that person “Hey, you seem like a great person but before we start I’d like to ask… do you want to get married soon? Cause you know, I don’t plan on doing that …” cause that’s even for my egoistic mind hillariously wrong thing to do. But on a dating site? You look at someone’s profile and you get these informations instantly.
My point is not about being shallow and calculating. But still, there ARE things that you cannot overcome in relationship and there’s no way to choose something “in-between”. I know and fully understand that relationship is based on compromise. Still, you can’t force yourself to do some things. With dating websites you see these things instantly (marriage, children, plans about future, religion). With classic dating you may romantically fall in love (which yeah, is damn good feeling) but in the end you may hurt yourself more than you think.
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Thursday, April 17, 2014
LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate,
I must be dreaming or living in a fantasy.I tell you now...if you must enter please do so quietly for this dream that I am having is one so wonderful that I do not wish for it to end. So please tread carefully and do not bump my bed in case this dream.Should crumble and fade like a distant memory in my sleep I pray that I may sleep forever In this total state of bliss! Every feeling that I have ever felt for you.Has been full of undying love;and the ongoing dream that you might hold me and get lost in my eyes. Every feeling that my heart had to feel has been felt for you.Each and every one has ached inside of my soul... awaiting the day for you to set me at ease by taking my hand and taking that risk that I would take at any moment because it's a risk that is worth taking. Every feeling that yearns for you has been golden and true...yearning for that everlasting moment that you will kiss my lips and say that you love me.Each and every feeling is praying that you will break down and confess everything to me, the one who has loved you. For oh so long.and I tell you this, These feelings are ready to be expressed To you, the one who has changed everything In my life, and how I feel. Every feeling that is inside of me is waiting for your words and your love.I long for your touch and soft caress, Your gentle kindness, the sweet sound of your voice. Your smile lifts the shadows from my soul, and your presence in my life melts my heart, like the warmth of the sun melts the snow.That night, innocently you kissed my forehead. with one quiet kiss you touched me. Touched inside of me, a place I have long forgotten.Now I hold you there, in that place...my heart.Show me the way to your heart,
that i may within you become a part, for where else among world,can true love be found.Let me lay my head upon your breast,let me in your arms, lie and restonly then can i in peace lie, upon my grave to die. True love must be very strong,for really i care not if i am right or wrong,except that i want cupid's arrows,to wipe away all my sorrows.
I must be dreaming or living in a fantasy.I tell you now...if you must enter please do so quietly for this dream that I am having is one so wonderful that I do not wish for it to end. So please tread carefully and do not bump my bed in case this dream.Should crumble and fade like a distant memory in my sleep I pray that I may sleep forever In this total state of bliss! Every feeling that I have ever felt for you.Has been full of undying love;and the ongoing dream that you might hold me and get lost in my eyes. Every feeling that my heart had to feel has been felt for you.Each and every one has ached inside of my soul... awaiting the day for you to set me at ease by taking my hand and taking that risk that I would take at any moment because it's a risk that is worth taking. Every feeling that yearns for you has been golden and true...yearning for that everlasting moment that you will kiss my lips and say that you love me.Each and every feeling is praying that you will break down and confess everything to me, the one who has loved you. For oh so long.and I tell you this, These feelings are ready to be expressed To you, the one who has changed everything In my life, and how I feel. Every feeling that is inside of me is waiting for your words and your love.I long for your touch and soft caress, Your gentle kindness, the sweet sound of your voice. Your smile lifts the shadows from my soul, and your presence in my life melts my heart, like the warmth of the sun melts the snow.That night, innocently you kissed my forehead. with one quiet kiss you touched me. Touched inside of me, a place I have long forgotten.Now I hold you there, in that place...my heart.Show me the way to your heart,
that i may within you become a part, for where else among world,can true love be found.Let me lay my head upon your breast,let me in your arms, lie and restonly then can i in peace lie, upon my grave to die. True love must be very strong,for really i care not if i am right or wrong,except that i want cupid's arrows,to wipe away all my sorrows.
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
JOURNAL:
I got a new pair of glasses this weekend. Now I can see better.
I am beginning to realize that this blog isn't really helping me find the one. I am not going to write on this daily anymore. I might be alone forever. I haven't had a relationship since last summer. Every woman that I met or talk to ...all they ever talk about is "I want a guy who will take me out to dinner, plays, and vacation". I am not against doing that...but in the past most woman never brought up what they wanted. It's all about what I can do for them. I would usually met someone and we decided together what we want to do. I have no problem going out, but when you spend the whole week working and then on the weekend...you have to do work around the house...do laundry, do food shopping, cooking and ects.. You also want to rest and catch up on paper work...TV shows...and get ready for the following week. These woman don't have any money and want someone else to take the tap. Well it's not me.
I am so disappointed and disgusted by the dating scene. Woman who have no education, no money, and not even that hot..expect everything. Woman are just stupid...i am sorry to say that... but they are. I am not saying this because I am angry at them. I worked my whole life to buy a house, have some money in the bank, be healthy, be close to my family and they haven't done anything. Like I said..i might be alone forever and I have to accept that. I might even die alone....so be it.
I used to get so upset when things don't do my way. Now I don't even care anymore. My ego would get in the way. I know that I have to do with the flow of life and just trust God.
I am beginning to realize that this blog isn't really helping me find the one. I am not going to write on this daily anymore. I might be alone forever. I haven't had a relationship since last summer. Every woman that I met or talk to ...all they ever talk about is "I want a guy who will take me out to dinner, plays, and vacation". I am not against doing that...but in the past most woman never brought up what they wanted. It's all about what I can do for them. I would usually met someone and we decided together what we want to do. I have no problem going out, but when you spend the whole week working and then on the weekend...you have to do work around the house...do laundry, do food shopping, cooking and ects.. You also want to rest and catch up on paper work...TV shows...and get ready for the following week. These woman don't have any money and want someone else to take the tap. Well it's not me.
I am so disappointed and disgusted by the dating scene. Woman who have no education, no money, and not even that hot..expect everything. Woman are just stupid...i am sorry to say that... but they are. I am not saying this because I am angry at them. I worked my whole life to buy a house, have some money in the bank, be healthy, be close to my family and they haven't done anything. Like I said..i might be alone forever and I have to accept that. I might even die alone....so be it.
I used to get so upset when things don't do my way. Now I don't even care anymore. My ego would get in the way. I know that I have to do with the flow of life and just trust God.
Sunday, April 13, 2014
ARTICLE: Plutocracy without end: Why the 1 percent always defeats the middle class Thomas Frank
There are more of us than them. But income inequality keeps getting worse -- and there is sadly no end in sight
I’ve been writing about what we politely call “inequality” since the mid-1990s, but one day about ten years ago, when I was traveling the country lecturing about the toxic curlicues of right-wing culture, it dawned on me that maybe I had been getting the entire story wrong. All the economic developments that I spent my days bemoaning—the obscene enrichment of the CEO class, the assault on the regulatory state, the ruination of average people—were very possibly not what I thought they were. When I talked about these things, I assumed they were an outrage, an affront to the affluent nation I still believed we were; once the scales fell from our eyes and Americans figured out what was happening, I argued, we would yell “stop,” bring this age of folly to a close, and get back to middle-class prosperity as usual.
What hit me that day was the possibility that my happy, postwar middle-class world was the exception, and that the plutocracy we were gradually becoming was the norm. Maybe what was happening to us was a colossal reversion to a pre-Rooseveltian mean, and all the trappings of ordinary life that had seemed so solid and so permanent when I was young—the vast suburbs and the anchorman’s reassuring baritone and the nice appliances that filled the houses of the working class—were aberrations made possible by an unusual balance of political forces maintained only by the enormous political efforts of its beneficiaries.
Maybe the gravity of history pulled in the exact opposite direction of what I had always believed. If so, the question was not, “When will we get back to the right order of things,” but rather, “Would we ever stop falling?”
Today, of course, the situation has grown vastly worse. The subject of inequality is discussed everywhere; there are think tanks and academic conferences dedicated to it; it has become socially permissible for polite people to wonder about the obscene gorging of those at the top. Sooner or later the question that everyone asks, upon discovering just how much of what Americans produce goes to the imbeciles in the penthouses and executive suites, is this: How much further can this thing go?
The One Percent have already broken every record for wealth-hogging set by their ancestors, going back to the dawn of record-keeping in 1913. But what if it all just keeps going? How much fatter can the fat cats get before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores balance?
________________________________
advertisement
________________________________
That we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for example, about how inequality contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that cannot survive.
It reminds me of the once-influential theory of inequality advanced by the economist Simon Kuznets, who thought that capitalist societies simply became more egalitarian as they matured—a theory that is carefully debunked by economist Thomas Piketty in his new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It also reminds me of the theories of the economist Ravi Batra, who in 1987 predicted a “Great Depression of 1990” because (among other things) inequality would have by then had reached what he believed to be unsustainable levels.
It is an attractive fantasy, this faith that some kind of built-in restraint will stop all this from going too far. Unfortunately, what it reminds me of the most are the similar mechanisms that Democrats like to dream about on those occasions when the Republican Party has won another election. As the triumphant wingers stand athwart the unconscious bodies of their opponents, beating their chests and bellowing for some new and awesomely destructive tax cut, a liberal’s heart turns longingly to such chimera as pendulum theory, or thirty-year-cycle theory, or the theory of the inevitable triumph of the center. Some great force will fix those guys, we mumble. One of these days, they’ll get their comeuppance.
But the cosmic cavalry never shows up. No deus ex machina will arrive to rescue the middle-class society, either. The economic system is always in some sort of crisis or another; somehow it always manages to survive.
One of the ways it manages to survive, in fact, is by working the public into paroxysms of fear at those who proclaim the inevitable destruction of the system. I refer here not only to the Republicans’ routine deploring of “class war,” by which they mean any criticism of plutocracy, but also to the once-influential right-wing radio host Glenn Beck, who in 2009 and 2010 was just about the only one in America who thought to take seriously the obscure French anarchist tract, “The Coming Insurrection.” Night after night in those dark days, Beck would use the book to terrify his vast audience of seniors and goldbugs—anarchy was right around the corner!—and to this day you can still find the tract on the reading lists of 9/12 clubs across the country.
Let us not forget that it was thanks to the energetic activity of those 9/12 clubs and the closely aligned Tea Party that the obvious and conventional — and maybe even inevitable — response to the 2008 catastrophe was not the response the public chose. According to an important recent paper by the sociologists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, the orthodox poli-sci theory of economic downturn holds that voters “turn away from unregulated markets and demand more government in times of economic downturn and rising unemployment.” But in the downturn of the last few years, people reacted differently: “Rather than the recession stimulating new public demands for governent, Americans gravitated toward lower support for government responsibility for social and economic problems.” And they swept in the Republican Congress of 2010, a result that, according to Brooks and Manza, has much to do with the hyperbolic conservatism of partisan organizations like Fox News.
A second irony, worth noting in passing, is that the right-wing offensive against public pensions, which began as soon as the Republican wave landed, has been carried on under the banner of historical determinism, with everyone agreeing that the rich are going to get their way with the unions and that no alternative exists. (“Detroit pension cuts were inevitable, city consultant testifies,” screams a typical headline on the subject.)
*
None of this is to deny, of course, that concentrated wealth will have certain predictable social effects, in addition to the brutal primary effect of screwing you and yours permanently. Inequality will most definitely bring further corruption of our political system, which will in turn lead to further deregulation and bailouts, which will eventually allow epidemics of fraud and failure. It will definitely bring an aggravated business cycle, with crazy booms and awful busts. We know these things will happen because this is what has happened in our own time. But that doesn’t mean the situation will somehow cease to function as a matter of course, or that leading capitalists will be converted to Keynesianism en masse and start insisting on better oversight of Wall Street.
The ugly fact that we must face is that this thing can go much farther still. Plutocracy shocks us every day with its viciousness, but that doesn’t mean God will strike it down. The middle-class model worked much better for about ninety-nine percent of the population, but that doesn’t make it some kind of dialectic inevitability. You can build a plutocratic model that will stumble along just fine, like it did in the nineteenth century. It requires different things: instead of refrigerators for all, it needs bought legislatures and armies of strikebreakers—plus bailouts for the big banks when they collapse under the weight of their stupid loans, an innovation of our own time. All this may be hurtful, inefficient, and undemocratic, but it won’t dismantle itself all on its own.
That is our job. No one else is going to do it for us.
I’ve been writing about what we politely call “inequality” since the mid-1990s, but one day about ten years ago, when I was traveling the country lecturing about the toxic curlicues of right-wing culture, it dawned on me that maybe I had been getting the entire story wrong. All the economic developments that I spent my days bemoaning—the obscene enrichment of the CEO class, the assault on the regulatory state, the ruination of average people—were very possibly not what I thought they were. When I talked about these things, I assumed they were an outrage, an affront to the affluent nation I still believed we were; once the scales fell from our eyes and Americans figured out what was happening, I argued, we would yell “stop,” bring this age of folly to a close, and get back to middle-class prosperity as usual.
What hit me that day was the possibility that my happy, postwar middle-class world was the exception, and that the plutocracy we were gradually becoming was the norm. Maybe what was happening to us was a colossal reversion to a pre-Rooseveltian mean, and all the trappings of ordinary life that had seemed so solid and so permanent when I was young—the vast suburbs and the anchorman’s reassuring baritone and the nice appliances that filled the houses of the working class—were aberrations made possible by an unusual balance of political forces maintained only by the enormous political efforts of its beneficiaries.
Maybe the gravity of history pulled in the exact opposite direction of what I had always believed. If so, the question was not, “When will we get back to the right order of things,” but rather, “Would we ever stop falling?”
Today, of course, the situation has grown vastly worse. The subject of inequality is discussed everywhere; there are think tanks and academic conferences dedicated to it; it has become socially permissible for polite people to wonder about the obscene gorging of those at the top. Sooner or later the question that everyone asks, upon discovering just how much of what Americans produce goes to the imbeciles in the penthouses and executive suites, is this: How much further can this thing go?
The One Percent have already broken every record for wealth-hogging set by their ancestors, going back to the dawn of record-keeping in 1913. But what if it all just keeps going? How much fatter can the fat cats get before they hit some kind of natural limit? Before the invisible thumb of history presses down on the other side of the scale and restores balance?
________________________________
advertisement
________________________________
That we are very close to such a limit—that the contradictions inherent in the system will automatically be its undoing—is an idea much in the air of late. Not many still subscribe to Marx’s dialectical vision of history, in which inevitable worker immiseration would be followed, also inevitably, by a revolutionary explosion, but there are other inevitabilities that seem equally persuasive today. We hear much, for example, about how inequality contributed to the housing bubble and the financial crisis, how it has brought us an imbalanced economy that cannot survive.
It reminds me of the once-influential theory of inequality advanced by the economist Simon Kuznets, who thought that capitalist societies simply became more egalitarian as they matured—a theory that is carefully debunked by economist Thomas Piketty in his new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” It also reminds me of the theories of the economist Ravi Batra, who in 1987 predicted a “Great Depression of 1990” because (among other things) inequality would have by then had reached what he believed to be unsustainable levels.
It is an attractive fantasy, this faith that some kind of built-in restraint will stop all this from going too far. Unfortunately, what it reminds me of the most are the similar mechanisms that Democrats like to dream about on those occasions when the Republican Party has won another election. As the triumphant wingers stand athwart the unconscious bodies of their opponents, beating their chests and bellowing for some new and awesomely destructive tax cut, a liberal’s heart turns longingly to such chimera as pendulum theory, or thirty-year-cycle theory, or the theory of the inevitable triumph of the center. Some great force will fix those guys, we mumble. One of these days, they’ll get their comeuppance.
But the cosmic cavalry never shows up. No deus ex machina will arrive to rescue the middle-class society, either. The economic system is always in some sort of crisis or another; somehow it always manages to survive.
One of the ways it manages to survive, in fact, is by working the public into paroxysms of fear at those who proclaim the inevitable destruction of the system. I refer here not only to the Republicans’ routine deploring of “class war,” by which they mean any criticism of plutocracy, but also to the once-influential right-wing radio host Glenn Beck, who in 2009 and 2010 was just about the only one in America who thought to take seriously the obscure French anarchist tract, “The Coming Insurrection.” Night after night in those dark days, Beck would use the book to terrify his vast audience of seniors and goldbugs—anarchy was right around the corner!—and to this day you can still find the tract on the reading lists of 9/12 clubs across the country.
Let us not forget that it was thanks to the energetic activity of those 9/12 clubs and the closely aligned Tea Party that the obvious and conventional — and maybe even inevitable — response to the 2008 catastrophe was not the response the public chose. According to an important recent paper by the sociologists Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza, the orthodox poli-sci theory of economic downturn holds that voters “turn away from unregulated markets and demand more government in times of economic downturn and rising unemployment.” But in the downturn of the last few years, people reacted differently: “Rather than the recession stimulating new public demands for governent, Americans gravitated toward lower support for government responsibility for social and economic problems.” And they swept in the Republican Congress of 2010, a result that, according to Brooks and Manza, has much to do with the hyperbolic conservatism of partisan organizations like Fox News.
A second irony, worth noting in passing, is that the right-wing offensive against public pensions, which began as soon as the Republican wave landed, has been carried on under the banner of historical determinism, with everyone agreeing that the rich are going to get their way with the unions and that no alternative exists. (“Detroit pension cuts were inevitable, city consultant testifies,” screams a typical headline on the subject.)
*
None of this is to deny, of course, that concentrated wealth will have certain predictable social effects, in addition to the brutal primary effect of screwing you and yours permanently. Inequality will most definitely bring further corruption of our political system, which will in turn lead to further deregulation and bailouts, which will eventually allow epidemics of fraud and failure. It will definitely bring an aggravated business cycle, with crazy booms and awful busts. We know these things will happen because this is what has happened in our own time. But that doesn’t mean the situation will somehow cease to function as a matter of course, or that leading capitalists will be converted to Keynesianism en masse and start insisting on better oversight of Wall Street.
The ugly fact that we must face is that this thing can go much farther still. Plutocracy shocks us every day with its viciousness, but that doesn’t mean God will strike it down. The middle-class model worked much better for about ninety-nine percent of the population, but that doesn’t make it some kind of dialectic inevitability. You can build a plutocratic model that will stumble along just fine, like it did in the nineteenth century. It requires different things: instead of refrigerators for all, it needs bought legislatures and armies of strikebreakers—plus bailouts for the big banks when they collapse under the weight of their stupid loans, an innovation of our own time. All this may be hurtful, inefficient, and undemocratic, but it won’t dismantle itself all on its own.
That is our job. No one else is going to do it for us.
ARTICLE: New Study: The Rich are more Unethical by Bud MeyersFollow
It's been said that money is the root of all evil. But does money really make people more likely to lie, cheat and steal? New research released by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says "yes".
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods, reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were also more likely to:
exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3),
take valued goods from others (study 4),
lie in a negotiation (study 5),
cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6),
and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.
Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms --- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge --- has marked the upward surge of mankind." ~ Gordon Gekko, 1987
Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on other new research from the University of California, Berkeley collaborating this, and the impact of wealth on people’s behavior in a new 10-minute video from PBS (posted at YouTube)
This might help explain why some people like Wal-Mart's Christy Walton can rake in $1.2 million a day in unearned income with stock dividends, while at the same time, refusing to pay her employees a living wage in earned hourly income --- costing the taxpayers $6,000 per employee in government entitlements (aka "wage subsidies"). It seems that some of these people just can't help themselves...they're mentally ill!
* Download supporting information at www.pnas.org (PDF) --- "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials. Since its establishment in 1914, it continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy." (* This was also posted at the www.economicpopulist.org)
Forbes: Why (Some) Psychopaths Make Great CEOs "The incidence of psychopathy among CEOs is about 4 percent, four times what it is in the population at large. They lack the things that make you human: empathy, remorse, loving kindness."
BusinessInsider: 20 Signs You are a Psychopath - After CEOs, lawyers are the second most psychopathic profession in the world.
TIME: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths - "Psychopaths, who are characterized by being completely amoral and concerned only with their own power and selfish pleasures, may be over-represented in the business environment."
Forbes: The Top 10 Jobs That Attract Psychopaths - 1. CEO, 2. Lawyer, 3. Media (Television/Radio), 4. Salesperson, 5. Surgeon, 6. Journalist, 7. Police officer, 8. Clergy person 9. Chef and 10. Civil servant
Bud Meyers: STUDY: 10% on Wall Street are Psychopaths - "Studies conducted by forensic psychologist Robert Hare indicate that about 1 percent of the general population can be categorized as psychopathic, but the prevalence rate in the financial services industry is 10 percent."
Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods, reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were also more likely to:
exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3),
take valued goods from others (study 4),
lie in a negotiation (study 5),
cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6),
and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals.
Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.
"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms --- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge --- has marked the upward surge of mankind." ~ Gordon Gekko, 1987
Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on other new research from the University of California, Berkeley collaborating this, and the impact of wealth on people’s behavior in a new 10-minute video from PBS (posted at YouTube)
This might help explain why some people like Wal-Mart's Christy Walton can rake in $1.2 million a day in unearned income with stock dividends, while at the same time, refusing to pay her employees a living wage in earned hourly income --- costing the taxpayers $6,000 per employee in government entitlements (aka "wage subsidies"). It seems that some of these people just can't help themselves...they're mentally ill!
* Download supporting information at www.pnas.org (PDF) --- "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials. Since its establishment in 1914, it continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy." (* This was also posted at the www.economicpopulist.org)
Forbes: Why (Some) Psychopaths Make Great CEOs "The incidence of psychopathy among CEOs is about 4 percent, four times what it is in the population at large. They lack the things that make you human: empathy, remorse, loving kindness."
BusinessInsider: 20 Signs You are a Psychopath - After CEOs, lawyers are the second most psychopathic profession in the world.
TIME: Study: 1 in 25 Business Leaders May Be Psychopaths - "Psychopaths, who are characterized by being completely amoral and concerned only with their own power and selfish pleasures, may be over-represented in the business environment."
Forbes: The Top 10 Jobs That Attract Psychopaths - 1. CEO, 2. Lawyer, 3. Media (Television/Radio), 4. Salesperson, 5. Surgeon, 6. Journalist, 7. Police officer, 8. Clergy person 9. Chef and 10. Civil servant
Bud Meyers: STUDY: 10% on Wall Street are Psychopaths - "Studies conducted by forensic psychologist Robert Hare indicate that about 1 percent of the general population can be categorized as psychopathic, but the prevalence rate in the financial services industry is 10 percent."
SPIRITUAL: WHY THE LAW OF ATTRACTION ISN'T WORKING FOR YOU
Maybe you’re a person who totally believes in what the book says – that like attracts like, and that with positive thinking you can create health, wealth and happiness.
Or maybe you’re one of the people who thinks that the whole thing is a big pile of hooey.
I’m not sure which side you might think I’m on. Personally, I think that the idea of “something for nothing”, or getting things just because you visualize them, is kind of ridiculous.
But at the same time – I DO believe in visualizing the things that you want. And I DO believe that through visualization, you can make the things you want real. You CAN turn your thoughts into things.
That’s sounds like I just said two completely opposite things, doesn’t it?
But I didn’t!
What I’m saying is that all the visualization in the world isn’t going to make something come true until you…
TAKE ACTION
To make it happen!
Here’s why I believe that.
Imagine that you want to lose 25 pounds. So you visualize a thinner you. You visualize yourself wearing cute little sundresses and bikinis, and imagine yourself hiking up mountains or going skiing – things the you(-25lbs) will be able to wear and enjoy that the current you(+25lbs) does not.
But all that visualization isn’t going do any good if you keep eating crappy food and sitting around on your butt in front of the computer.
So what’s the deal with that? Part of the problem is that the whole time you’re visualizing a thinner you, there’s another part of your brain that’s whispering “Yeah, remember the last time you tried to lose weight? Remember how you couldn’t stop thinking about food? Remember how much it hurt to exercise and how you ended up gaining 5lbs? You’re a failure and you’re always going to be fat.”
So simple visualization isn’t going to be enough. You need to start with identifying the beliefs that are stopping you; you need to change your mindset and create thoughts that will help you succeed.
And this is where visualization can work wonders – instead of visualizing “I’m 25 lbs lighter” – start visualizing yourself doing 30 minutes of exercise and feeling good about it. Start visualizing yourself eating healthy meals and enjoying them. Keep tweaking those visualizations until they are things that make you feel really good – and that’s when those visualizations will actually start coming true!
But that’s not the only way that “The Secret” works for you.
You may have heard of the “Red Car syndrome” – where, when you buy a red car, suddenly you start seeing red cars everywhere. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the “Blue Feather manifestation”… where you’re supposed to go about your day with the intention of having a blue feather appear in your life sometime within the next 48 hours.
These things are real – and they are one of the many functions of a part of your brain known as the reticular activating system (RAS). This particular function is called “confirmation bias”. You see, every day in your life, you’re exposed to so many BILLIONS of different stimuli that it’s absolutely impossible to pay attention to all of it. There’s so much information around us all the time, it would drive us crazy if we couldn’t filter most of it out. And that’s what the RAS does – it decides what things you need to pay attention to and what things you can let slide.
And by visualizing, focusing and concentrating on a certain object – like your brand new red car or that blue feather – when one of them passes by in your life, you notice it. It’s not because you “created them with your mind” – what you’ve actually done is created the circumstance in which you were more ready to recognize them when they came around.
Get that? You didn’t CREATE the blue feather, you created a mindset that was more attuned to seeing the blue feather when it passed by.
And this is how visualizations, manifesting and setting intentions can bring us wealth, happiness or love. There’s no magic to it – you aren’t making things appear out of thin air. But through your visualizations, you create a mindset where the path to having those things becomes more clear.
So, what The Secret and the law of attraction really do is get you to focus your attention on the things you truly want – goals that make you feel 100% good! – so that you can spot situations that will help you achieve those goals.
Visualizations help you create a mindset that moves you towards your goal, and manifest your desires.
It’s still YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to take action on those opportunities – and being 100% aligned with your goal helps you follow through.
Or maybe you’re one of the people who thinks that the whole thing is a big pile of hooey.
I’m not sure which side you might think I’m on. Personally, I think that the idea of “something for nothing”, or getting things just because you visualize them, is kind of ridiculous.
But at the same time – I DO believe in visualizing the things that you want. And I DO believe that through visualization, you can make the things you want real. You CAN turn your thoughts into things.
That’s sounds like I just said two completely opposite things, doesn’t it?
But I didn’t!
What I’m saying is that all the visualization in the world isn’t going to make something come true until you…
TAKE ACTION
To make it happen!
Here’s why I believe that.
Imagine that you want to lose 25 pounds. So you visualize a thinner you. You visualize yourself wearing cute little sundresses and bikinis, and imagine yourself hiking up mountains or going skiing – things the you(-25lbs) will be able to wear and enjoy that the current you(+25lbs) does not.
But all that visualization isn’t going do any good if you keep eating crappy food and sitting around on your butt in front of the computer.
So what’s the deal with that? Part of the problem is that the whole time you’re visualizing a thinner you, there’s another part of your brain that’s whispering “Yeah, remember the last time you tried to lose weight? Remember how you couldn’t stop thinking about food? Remember how much it hurt to exercise and how you ended up gaining 5lbs? You’re a failure and you’re always going to be fat.”
So simple visualization isn’t going to be enough. You need to start with identifying the beliefs that are stopping you; you need to change your mindset and create thoughts that will help you succeed.
And this is where visualization can work wonders – instead of visualizing “I’m 25 lbs lighter” – start visualizing yourself doing 30 minutes of exercise and feeling good about it. Start visualizing yourself eating healthy meals and enjoying them. Keep tweaking those visualizations until they are things that make you feel really good – and that’s when those visualizations will actually start coming true!
But that’s not the only way that “The Secret” works for you.
You may have heard of the “Red Car syndrome” – where, when you buy a red car, suddenly you start seeing red cars everywhere. Or perhaps you’ve heard of the “Blue Feather manifestation”… where you’re supposed to go about your day with the intention of having a blue feather appear in your life sometime within the next 48 hours.
These things are real – and they are one of the many functions of a part of your brain known as the reticular activating system (RAS). This particular function is called “confirmation bias”. You see, every day in your life, you’re exposed to so many BILLIONS of different stimuli that it’s absolutely impossible to pay attention to all of it. There’s so much information around us all the time, it would drive us crazy if we couldn’t filter most of it out. And that’s what the RAS does – it decides what things you need to pay attention to and what things you can let slide.
And by visualizing, focusing and concentrating on a certain object – like your brand new red car or that blue feather – when one of them passes by in your life, you notice it. It’s not because you “created them with your mind” – what you’ve actually done is created the circumstance in which you were more ready to recognize them when they came around.
Get that? You didn’t CREATE the blue feather, you created a mindset that was more attuned to seeing the blue feather when it passed by.
And this is how visualizations, manifesting and setting intentions can bring us wealth, happiness or love. There’s no magic to it – you aren’t making things appear out of thin air. But through your visualizations, you create a mindset where the path to having those things becomes more clear.
So, what The Secret and the law of attraction really do is get you to focus your attention on the things you truly want – goals that make you feel 100% good! – so that you can spot situations that will help you achieve those goals.
Visualizations help you create a mindset that moves you towards your goal, and manifest your desires.
It’s still YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to take action on those opportunities – and being 100% aligned with your goal helps you follow through.
DATING;QUESTION..I REALLY WANT TO ASK THESE WOMAN
1. What’s your policy regarding leaving people suddenly and without warning?
2. Are you obnoxiously dependent, or are we still going to be able to have our own lives?
3. Are you going to make me wait 6 dates before sleeping with me?
4. Is it okay if we wait like, 6 dates before sleeping together?
5. Do you actually watch Rachel Maddow/Read the NY Times/love this band/go to MoMA in your spare time, or are you just saying that?
6. How much money do you actually make?
7. Are you seeing other people? HOW many other people?
8. You talk to your ex how often?
9. Will you be willing to take a backseat to my career? Will you want me to take a backseat to yours?
10. Will you be just as apt to keep the bathroom door closed six months, six years into the relationship, as you are right now?
11. Do you have any plans to gain a ton of weight/lose a ton of weight/take up drugs/change your career/change your religion/change your country of residence, or in any other way drastically alter your life in the next two years?
12. Will you always expect me to pay? (Will you always pay?)
13. Does any part of you right now think that I’m not someone you could be serious about? How attracted/interested in me are you really?
2. Are you obnoxiously dependent, or are we still going to be able to have our own lives?
3. Are you going to make me wait 6 dates before sleeping with me?
4. Is it okay if we wait like, 6 dates before sleeping together?
5. Do you actually watch Rachel Maddow/Read the NY Times/love this band/go to MoMA in your spare time, or are you just saying that?
6. How much money do you actually make?
7. Are you seeing other people? HOW many other people?
8. You talk to your ex how often?
9. Will you be willing to take a backseat to my career? Will you want me to take a backseat to yours?
10. Will you be just as apt to keep the bathroom door closed six months, six years into the relationship, as you are right now?
11. Do you have any plans to gain a ton of weight/lose a ton of weight/take up drugs/change your career/change your religion/change your country of residence, or in any other way drastically alter your life in the next two years?
12. Will you always expect me to pay? (Will you always pay?)
13. Does any part of you right now think that I’m not someone you could be serious about? How attracted/interested in me are you really?
Saturday, April 12, 2014
ARTICLE/SPIRITUAL:Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.
Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company.
Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.
But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics.
This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since.
Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.
Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter.
He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding.
Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.
The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body.
They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.
If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle.
In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.
In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.
Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead.
And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.
This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It’s almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.
This hope-instilling, but extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want to live forever, but also some well-known scientists.
These are the physicists and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who suggest the possibility of multiple universes.
Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.
The first one was a science fiction writer H.G. Wells who proclaimed in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall”.
And after 62 years, this idea was developed by Dr. Hugh Everett in his graduate thesis at the Princeton University. It basically posits that at any given moment the universe divides into countless similar instances.
And the next moment, these “newborn” universes split in a similar fashion. In some of these worlds you may be present: reading this article in one universe, or watching TV in another.
The triggering factor for these multiplyingworlds is our actions, explained Everett. If we make some choices, instantly one universe splits into two with different versions of outcomes.
In the 1980s, Andrei Linde, scientist from the Lebedev’s Institute of physics, developed the theory of multiple universes. He is now a professor at Stanford University.
Linde explained: Space consists of many inflating spheres, which give rise to similar spheres, and those, in turn, produce spheres in even greater numbers, and so on to infinity.
In the universe, they are spaced apart. They are not aware of each other’s existence. But they represent parts of the same physical universe.
The fact that our universe is not alone is supported by data received from the Planck space telescope.
Using the data, scientists have created the most accurate map of the microwave background, the so-called cosmic relic background radiation, which has remained since the inception of our universe.
They also found that the universe has a lot of dark recesses represented by some holes and extensive gaps.
Theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the North Carolina University with her colleagues argue: the anomalies of the microwave background exist due to the fact that our universe is influenced by other universes existing nearby. And holes and gaps are a direct result of attacks on us by neighboring universes.
So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist?
Is there any scientific theory of consciousness that could accommodate such a claim?
According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe.
Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.
Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing.
Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it.
They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).
Consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness is theorized by them to be a fundamental property of the universe, present even at the first moment of the universe during the Big Bang.
“In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity.”
Our souls are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time.
So is there really a part of your consciousness that is non-material and will live on after the death of your physical body?
Dr Hameroff told the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole documentary:
“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state.
The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large”.
Robert Lanza would add here that not only does it exist in the universe, it exists perhaps in another universe.
If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says “I had a near death experience”‘
He adds: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”
This account of quantum consciousness explains things like near-death experiences, astral projection, out of body experiences, and even reincarnation without needing to appeal to religious ideology.
The energy of your consciousness potentially gets recycled back into a different body at some point, and in the mean time it exists outside of the physical body on some other level of reality, and possibly in another universe.
The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.
Lanza is an expert in regenerative medicine and scientific director of Advanced Cell Technology Company.
Before he has been known for his extensive research which dealt with stem cells, he was also famous for several successful experiments on cloning endangered animal species.
But not so long ago, the scientist became involved with physics, quantum mechanics and astrophysics.
This explosive mixture has given birth to the new theory of biocentrism, which the professor has been preaching ever since.
Biocentrism teaches that life and consciousness are fundamental to the universe. It is consciousness that creates the material universe, not the other way around.
Lanza points to the structure of the universe itself, and that the laws, forces, and constants of the universe appear to be fine-tuned for life, implying intelligence existed prior to matter.
He also claims that space and time are not objects or things, but rather tools of our animal understanding.
Lanza says that we carry space and time around with us “like turtles with shells.” meaning that when the shell comes off (space and time), we still exist.
The theory implies that death of consciousness simply does not exist. It only exists as a thought because people identify themselves with their body.
They believe that the body is going to perish, sooner or later, thinking their consciousness will disappear too.
If the body generates consciousness, then consciousness dies when the body dies. But if the body receives consciousness in the same way that a cable box receives satellite signals, then of course consciousness does not end at the death of the physical vehicle.
In fact, consciousness exists outside of constraints of time and space. It is able to be anywhere: in the human body and outside of it.
In other words, it is non-local in the same sense that quantum objects are non-local.
Lanza also believes that multiple universes can exist simultaneously. In one universe, the body can be dead.
And in another it continues to exist, absorbing consciousness which migrated into this universe.
This means that a dead person while traveling through the same tunnel ends up not in hell or in heaven, but in a similar world he or she once inhabited, but this time alive. And so on, infinitely. It’s almost like a cosmic Russian doll afterlife effect.
This hope-instilling, but extremely controversial theory by Lanza has many unwitting supporters, not just mere mortals who want to live forever, but also some well-known scientists.
These are the physicists and astrophysicists who tend to agree with existence of parallel worlds and who suggest the possibility of multiple universes.
Multiverse (multi-universe) is a so-called scientific concept, which they defend. They believe that no physical laws exist which would prohibit the existence of parallel worlds.
The first one was a science fiction writer H.G. Wells who proclaimed in 1895 in his story “The Door in the Wall”.
And after 62 years, this idea was developed by Dr. Hugh Everett in his graduate thesis at the Princeton University. It basically posits that at any given moment the universe divides into countless similar instances.
And the next moment, these “newborn” universes split in a similar fashion. In some of these worlds you may be present: reading this article in one universe, or watching TV in another.
The triggering factor for these multiplyingworlds is our actions, explained Everett. If we make some choices, instantly one universe splits into two with different versions of outcomes.
In the 1980s, Andrei Linde, scientist from the Lebedev’s Institute of physics, developed the theory of multiple universes. He is now a professor at Stanford University.
Linde explained: Space consists of many inflating spheres, which give rise to similar spheres, and those, in turn, produce spheres in even greater numbers, and so on to infinity.
In the universe, they are spaced apart. They are not aware of each other’s existence. But they represent parts of the same physical universe.
The fact that our universe is not alone is supported by data received from the Planck space telescope.
Using the data, scientists have created the most accurate map of the microwave background, the so-called cosmic relic background radiation, which has remained since the inception of our universe.
They also found that the universe has a lot of dark recesses represented by some holes and extensive gaps.
Theoretical physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton from the North Carolina University with her colleagues argue: the anomalies of the microwave background exist due to the fact that our universe is influenced by other universes existing nearby. And holes and gaps are a direct result of attacks on us by neighboring universes.
So, there is abundance of places or other universes where our soul could migrate after death, according to the theory of neo-biocentrism. But does the soul exist?
Is there any scientific theory of consciousness that could accommodate such a claim?
According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe.
Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.
Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing.
Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it.
They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).
Consciousness, or at least proto-consciousness is theorized by them to be a fundamental property of the universe, present even at the first moment of the universe during the Big Bang.
“In one such scheme proto-conscious experience is a basic property of physical reality accessible to a quantum process associated with brain activity.”
Our souls are in fact constructed from the very fabric of the universe – and may have existed since the beginning of time. Our brains are just receivers and amplifiers for the proto-consciousness that is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time.
So is there really a part of your consciousness that is non-material and will live on after the death of your physical body?
Dr Hameroff told the Science Channel’s Through the Wormhole documentary:
“Let’s say the heart stops beating, the blood stops flowing, the microtubules lose their quantum state.
The quantum information within the microtubules is not destroyed, it can’t be destroyed, it just distributes and dissipates to the universe at large”.
Robert Lanza would add here that not only does it exist in the universe, it exists perhaps in another universe.
If the patient is resuscitated, revived, this quantum information can go back into the microtubules and the patient says “I had a near death experience”‘
He adds: “If they’re not revived, and the patient dies, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body, perhaps indefinitely, as a soul.”
This account of quantum consciousness explains things like near-death experiences, astral projection, out of body experiences, and even reincarnation without needing to appeal to religious ideology.
The energy of your consciousness potentially gets recycled back into a different body at some point, and in the mean time it exists outside of the physical body on some other level of reality, and possibly in another universe.
ARTICLE/ SPIRITUAL: THIS IS HEAVEN BY SAM HARRIS
This Must Be Heaven
Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole. According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. Our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet”—for, as the doctor writes, “What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.”
Well, I intend to spend the rest of the morning sparing him the effort. Whether you read it online or hold the physical object in your hands, this issue of Newsweek is best viewed as an archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations. Its existence surely says more about our time than the editors at the magazine meant to say—for the cover alone reveals the abasement and desperation of our journalism, the intellectual bankruptcy and resultant tenacity of faith-based religion, and our ubiquitous confusion about the nature of scientific authority. The article is the modern equivalent of a 14th-century woodcut depicting the work of alchemists, inquisitors, Crusaders, and fortune-tellers. I hope our descendants understand that at least some of us were blushing.
As many of you know, I am interested in “spiritual” experiences of the sort Alexander reports. Unlike many atheists, I don’t doubt the subjective phenomena themselves—that is, I don’t believe that everyone who claims to have seen an angel, or left his body in a trance, or become one with the universe, is lying or mentally ill. Indeed, I have had similar experiences myself in meditation, in lucid dreams (even while meditating in a lucid dream), and through the use of various psychedelics (in times gone by). I know that astonishing changes in the contents of consciousness are possible and can be psychologically transformative.
And, unlike many neuroscientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are, of course, very good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind obviously is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were, in fact, irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned. I know that we do not understand consciousness, and nothing that I think I know about the cosmos, or about the patent falsity of most religious beliefs, requires that I deny this. So, although I am an atheist who can be expected to be unforgiving of religious dogma, I am not reflexively hostile to claims of the sort Alexander has made. In principle, my mind is open. (It really is.)
But Alexander’s account is so bad—his reasoning so lazy and tendentious—that it would be beneath notice if not for the fact that it currently disgraces the cover of a major newsmagazine. Alexander is also releasing a book at the end of the month, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, which seems destined to become an instant bestseller. As much as I would like to simply ignore the unfolding travesty, it would be derelict of me to do so.
But first things first: You really must read Alexander’s article.
I trust that doing so has given you cause to worry that the good doctor is just another casualty of American-style Christianity—for though he claims to have been a nonbeliever before his adventures in coma, he presents the following self-portrait:
Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.
What it means to be a “faithful Christian” without “actual belief” is not spelled out, but few nonbelievers will be surprised when our hero’s scientific skepticism proves no match for his religious conditioning. Most of us have been around this block often enough to know that many “former atheists”—like Francis Collins—spent so long on the brink of faith, and yearned for its emotional consolations with such vampiric intensity, that the slightest breeze would send them spinning into the abyss. For Collins, you may recall, all it took to establish the divinity of Jesus and the coming resurrection of the dead was the sight of a frozen waterfall. Alexander seems to have required a ride on a psychedelic butterfly. In either case, it’s not the perception of beauty we should begrudge but the utter absence of intellectual seriousness with which the author interprets it.
Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.
The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case. Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly. Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?
I confess that I found Alexander’s account so alarmingly unscientific that I began to worry that something had gone wrong with my own brain. So I sought the opinion of Mark Cohen, a pioneer in the field of neuroimaging who holds appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Science, Neurology, Psychology, Radiological Science, and Bioengineering at UCLA. (He was also my thesis advisor.) Here is part of what he had to say:
This poetic interpretation of his experience is not supported by evidence of any kind. As you correctly point out, coma does not equate to “inactivation of the cerebral cortex” or “higher-order brain functions totally offline” or “neurons of [my] cortex stunned into complete inactivity”. These describe brain death, a one hundred percent lethal condition. There are many excellent scholarly articles that discuss the definitions of coma. (For example: 1 & 2)
We are not privy to his EEG records, but high alpha activity is common in coma. Also common is “flat” EEG. The EEG can appear flat even in the presence of high activity, when that activity is not synchronous. For example, the EEG flattens in regions involved in direct task processing. This phenomenon is known as event-related desynchronization (hundreds of references).
As is obvious to you, this is truth by authority. Neurosurgeons, however, are rarely well-trained in brain function. Dr. Alexander cuts brains; he does not appear to study them. “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness ...” True, science cannot explain brain-free consciousness. Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Either his brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.
There are many reports of people remembering dream-like states while in medical coma. They lack consistency, of course, but there is nothing particularly unique in Dr. Alexander’s unfortunate episode.
Okay, so it appears that my own cortex hasn’t completely shut down. In fact, there are further problems with Alexander’s account. Not only does he appear ignorant of the relevant science, but he doesn’t realize how many people have experienced visions similar to his while their brains were operational. In his online interview we learn about the kinds of conversations he’s now having with skeptics:
I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience,” or “That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.
Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings.
“Not even in the right ballpark”? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. Here is Alexander’s description of the afterlife:
I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them… [there were] waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arcs of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came to call them “angels,” those arcs of light in the sky. I think that word is probably fairly accurate….
Then we went out of this universe. I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light….
They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. It was indescribable.
But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work.
Everything that Alexander describes here and in his Newsweek article, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny. Here is how the late Terence McKenna described the prototypical DMT trance:
Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find. (Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, pp. 258-259.)
Alexander believes that his E. coli-addled brain could not have produced his visions because they were too “intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance for even a healthy brain to conjure. He also appears to think that despite their timeless quality, his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. He clearly knows nothing about what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics. Nor does he know that visions of the sort that McKenna describes, although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. Unlike LSD and other long-acting psychedelics, DMT alters consciousness for merely a few minutes. Alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was coming out of his coma (whether his cortex was rebooting or not).
Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension. As one of his correspondents has already informed him, similar experiences can be had with ketamine, which is a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to protect a traumatized brain. Did Alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the hospital? Would he even think it relevant if he had? His assertion that psychedelics like DMT and ketamine “do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since he returned from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about.
Again, there is nothing to be said against Alexander’s experience. It sounds perfectly sublime. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel. The problem is that the conclusions Alexander has drawn from his experience—he continually reminds us, as a scientist—are based on some very obvious errors in reasoning and gaps in his understanding.
Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.
Once upon a time, a neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander contracted a bad case of bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma. While immobile in his hospital bed, he experienced visions of such intense beauty that they changed everything—not just for him, but for all of us, and for science as a whole. According to Newsweek, Alexander’s experience proves that consciousness is independent of the brain, that death is an illusion, and that an eternity of perfect splendor awaits us beyond the grave—complete with the usual angels, clouds, and departed relatives, but also butterflies and beautiful girls in peasant dress. Our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet”—for, as the doctor writes, “What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.”
Well, I intend to spend the rest of the morning sparing him the effort. Whether you read it online or hold the physical object in your hands, this issue of Newsweek is best viewed as an archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations. Its existence surely says more about our time than the editors at the magazine meant to say—for the cover alone reveals the abasement and desperation of our journalism, the intellectual bankruptcy and resultant tenacity of faith-based religion, and our ubiquitous confusion about the nature of scientific authority. The article is the modern equivalent of a 14th-century woodcut depicting the work of alchemists, inquisitors, Crusaders, and fortune-tellers. I hope our descendants understand that at least some of us were blushing.
As many of you know, I am interested in “spiritual” experiences of the sort Alexander reports. Unlike many atheists, I don’t doubt the subjective phenomena themselves—that is, I don’t believe that everyone who claims to have seen an angel, or left his body in a trance, or become one with the universe, is lying or mentally ill. Indeed, I have had similar experiences myself in meditation, in lucid dreams (even while meditating in a lucid dream), and through the use of various psychedelics (in times gone by). I know that astonishing changes in the contents of consciousness are possible and can be psychologically transformative.
And, unlike many neuroscientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are, of course, very good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind obviously is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were, in fact, irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned. I know that we do not understand consciousness, and nothing that I think I know about the cosmos, or about the patent falsity of most religious beliefs, requires that I deny this. So, although I am an atheist who can be expected to be unforgiving of religious dogma, I am not reflexively hostile to claims of the sort Alexander has made. In principle, my mind is open. (It really is.)
But Alexander’s account is so bad—his reasoning so lazy and tendentious—that it would be beneath notice if not for the fact that it currently disgraces the cover of a major newsmagazine. Alexander is also releasing a book at the end of the month, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, which seems destined to become an instant bestseller. As much as I would like to simply ignore the unfolding travesty, it would be derelict of me to do so.
But first things first: You really must read Alexander’s article.
I trust that doing so has given you cause to worry that the good doctor is just another casualty of American-style Christianity—for though he claims to have been a nonbeliever before his adventures in coma, he presents the following self-portrait:
Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.
What it means to be a “faithful Christian” without “actual belief” is not spelled out, but few nonbelievers will be surprised when our hero’s scientific skepticism proves no match for his religious conditioning. Most of us have been around this block often enough to know that many “former atheists”—like Francis Collins—spent so long on the brink of faith, and yearned for its emotional consolations with such vampiric intensity, that the slightest breeze would send them spinning into the abyss. For Collins, you may recall, all it took to establish the divinity of Jesus and the coming resurrection of the dead was the sight of a frozen waterfall. Alexander seems to have required a ride on a psychedelic butterfly. In either case, it’s not the perception of beauty we should begrudge but the utter absence of intellectual seriousness with which the author interprets it.
Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. Perhaps he has saved a more persuasive account for his book—though now that I’ve listened to an hour-long interview with him online, I very much doubt it. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.
The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case. Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly. Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?
I confess that I found Alexander’s account so alarmingly unscientific that I began to worry that something had gone wrong with my own brain. So I sought the opinion of Mark Cohen, a pioneer in the field of neuroimaging who holds appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Science, Neurology, Psychology, Radiological Science, and Bioengineering at UCLA. (He was also my thesis advisor.) Here is part of what he had to say:
This poetic interpretation of his experience is not supported by evidence of any kind. As you correctly point out, coma does not equate to “inactivation of the cerebral cortex” or “higher-order brain functions totally offline” or “neurons of [my] cortex stunned into complete inactivity”. These describe brain death, a one hundred percent lethal condition. There are many excellent scholarly articles that discuss the definitions of coma. (For example: 1 & 2)
We are not privy to his EEG records, but high alpha activity is common in coma. Also common is “flat” EEG. The EEG can appear flat even in the presence of high activity, when that activity is not synchronous. For example, the EEG flattens in regions involved in direct task processing. This phenomenon is known as event-related desynchronization (hundreds of references).
As is obvious to you, this is truth by authority. Neurosurgeons, however, are rarely well-trained in brain function. Dr. Alexander cuts brains; he does not appear to study them. “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness ...” True, science cannot explain brain-free consciousness. Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Either his brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.
There are many reports of people remembering dream-like states while in medical coma. They lack consistency, of course, but there is nothing particularly unique in Dr. Alexander’s unfortunate episode.
Okay, so it appears that my own cortex hasn’t completely shut down. In fact, there are further problems with Alexander’s account. Not only does he appear ignorant of the relevant science, but he doesn’t realize how many people have experienced visions similar to his while their brains were operational. In his online interview we learn about the kinds of conversations he’s now having with skeptics:
I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience,” or “That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.
Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings.
“Not even in the right ballpark”? His experience sounds so much like a DMT trip that we are not only in the right ballpark, we are talking about the stitching on the same ball. Here is Alexander’s description of the afterlife:
I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them… [there were] waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arcs of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came to call them “angels,” those arcs of light in the sky. I think that word is probably fairly accurate….
Then we went out of this universe. I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light….
They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. It was indescribable.
But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work.
Everything that Alexander describes here and in his Newsweek article, including the parts I have left out, has been reported by DMT users. The similarity is uncanny. Here is how the late Terence McKenna described the prototypical DMT trance:
Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find. (Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods, pp. 258-259.)
Alexander believes that his E. coli-addled brain could not have produced his visions because they were too “intense,” too “hyper-real,” too “beautiful,” too “interactive,” and too drenched in significance for even a healthy brain to conjure. He also appears to think that despite their timeless quality, his visions could not have arisen in the minutes or hours during which his cortex (which surely never went off) switched back on. He clearly knows nothing about what people with working brains experience under the influence of psychedelics. Nor does he know that visions of the sort that McKenna describes, although they may seem to last for ages, require only a brief span of biological time. Unlike LSD and other long-acting psychedelics, DMT alters consciousness for merely a few minutes. Alexander would have had more than enough time to experience a visionary ecstasy as he was coming out of his coma (whether his cortex was rebooting or not).
Does Alexander know that DMT already exists in the brain as a neurotransmitter? Did his brain experience a surge of DMT release during his coma? This is pure speculation, of course, but it is a far more credible hypothesis than that his cortex “shut down,” freeing his soul to travel to another dimension. As one of his correspondents has already informed him, similar experiences can be had with ketamine, which is a surgical anesthetic that is occasionally used to protect a traumatized brain. Did Alexander by any chance receive ketamine while in the hospital? Would he even think it relevant if he had? His assertion that psychedelics like DMT and ketamine “do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding” he experienced is perhaps the most amazing thing he has said since he returned from heaven. Such compounds are universally understood to do the job. And most scientists believe that the reliable effects of psychedelics indicate that the brain is at the very least involved in the production of visionary states of the sort Alexander is talking about.
Again, there is nothing to be said against Alexander’s experience. It sounds perfectly sublime. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel. The problem is that the conclusions Alexander has drawn from his experience—he continually reminds us, as a scientist—are based on some very obvious errors in reasoning and gaps in his understanding.
Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about. And his article is not the sort of thing that the editors of a once-important magazine should publish if they hope to reclaim some measure of respect for their battered brand.
Friday, April 11, 2014
PERSONAL: COULD I BE
Could I be the one you pour your heart out to, the one to love you and be true. Could I be the one that takes all your pain away, the one in your life to stay. Could I be the one that you've been waiting for, the one to give you my heart and much more. Could I be the one to take long walks in the park, the one you make love to in the dark. Could I be that special someone in your life, the one that you would later call your husband. Could I be the one that you hold so very close, the one that would love you the most. Could I be the one to make you smile, the one that bears your child.Could I be the one to give you everything though I don't have much, the one to feel your gentle touch. Could I be the one to hear you say "I Love You", the one that you be true to. Could you be the one for me, 'cause all these things I'd love to be.
LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate
Your skin, just like a shining glass.It enables me see my face as I pass. Your ears hear me when I call.Your strong, lovely hands will never let our love fall.Your mouth releases only good news.With a sweet voice I dare not lose A single step you take shakes the earth.A word you speak takes away my breath.Your eyes, my love, are bright and clear.Among roses, you are the loveliest rose, my love.Your beauty shines like diamond sand. One like you will not be found in any land.When you are by my side .Nothing else matters,When you are with me. When you say you Love me. It feels so good to hear you say those words.When you're happy.It makes me feel good to see you so happy.When you're sad and blue.I want to make you happy again.When you smile .I couldn't be any happier.I wish you would understand.How I feel about you.I wish you would tell me how you feel .Tell me! Tell me, please.I Love you.I know you Love me, too .But you just have a funny way to show your love.Please try .You mean so much to me.I Would Rather Be with You Anytime. Love You To see your face in the bright sunlight.I would give away my soul.And to hear your voice flow to my heart.Would make more than whole.To taste your kiss as you bend close.Is more than I could dream.And to feel your warmth when you come home. Would mean everything.I look at you and I drown in the intensity of your sweet love. Everyday spent with you puts a deeper longing into my heart to be with you for the rest of all time. You wink, you smile you hold me close.Life feels right.I am where I want to be.Your kiss brings me into your world and your eyes entice me to be all I can be. Your touch sends me into utter ecstacy. Your words make my day brighter. I need you...When you look at me. deep down inside do you see all these things... this love burning this unfulfilled desire? I'm putting my all into you I want this to last I want to be with you when I wake up each morning and when I lay my head down at night all through every day and every starry night.I need you with me because I love you so very much
Your skin, just like a shining glass.It enables me see my face as I pass. Your ears hear me when I call.Your strong, lovely hands will never let our love fall.Your mouth releases only good news.With a sweet voice I dare not lose A single step you take shakes the earth.A word you speak takes away my breath.Your eyes, my love, are bright and clear.Among roses, you are the loveliest rose, my love.Your beauty shines like diamond sand. One like you will not be found in any land.When you are by my side .Nothing else matters,When you are with me. When you say you Love me. It feels so good to hear you say those words.When you're happy.It makes me feel good to see you so happy.When you're sad and blue.I want to make you happy again.When you smile .I couldn't be any happier.I wish you would understand.How I feel about you.I wish you would tell me how you feel .Tell me! Tell me, please.I Love you.I know you Love me, too .But you just have a funny way to show your love.Please try .You mean so much to me.I Would Rather Be with You Anytime. Love You To see your face in the bright sunlight.I would give away my soul.And to hear your voice flow to my heart.Would make more than whole.To taste your kiss as you bend close.Is more than I could dream.And to feel your warmth when you come home. Would mean everything.I look at you and I drown in the intensity of your sweet love. Everyday spent with you puts a deeper longing into my heart to be with you for the rest of all time. You wink, you smile you hold me close.Life feels right.I am where I want to be.Your kiss brings me into your world and your eyes entice me to be all I can be. Your touch sends me into utter ecstacy. Your words make my day brighter. I need you...When you look at me. deep down inside do you see all these things... this love burning this unfulfilled desire? I'm putting my all into you I want this to last I want to be with you when I wake up each morning and when I lay my head down at night all through every day and every starry night.I need you with me because I love you so very much
Thursday, April 10, 2014
LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate,
When I first met you you were just a person- oh that was a terribly wrong assumption. When I first saw you it was a physical attraction- now I love your everything-as if a chain reaction I like you for your physical, but love your spiritual and I think of you daily-as if you are my ritual.I thought we stood no chance-what a bad assumption for now I see you are my hope in this world of corruption for someone like you-i have forever prayed and how I am so fortunate that thru all this you have stayed ....stayed in my life, to lighten my road ...stayed in my heart-in this world so cold.From the moment we met,I knew it was you,Who would steal away my heart,And forever to me be true.Every day that goes by,I realize even more,How much I care about you,I've never been so sure.Our future lies in front of us, but together we will be,Strong enough to conquer,Any conflict that we see. For all you have given me,I could not ask for more,Only wish that in return, I could give you what you ask for.I know that if I need something,I only say your name,And in every way you can,The world is mine, without a shame! I wouldn't give you up,For love, or life, or pride,Because I know that in the end,You'll be standing by my side.I think in God's will,He's put you and me together,To set a good example,Of how true love lasts FOREVER! For everything I am,For everything I'll be, I'm nothing without you, I WANT THIS WORLD TO SEE!
When I first met you you were just a person- oh that was a terribly wrong assumption. When I first saw you it was a physical attraction- now I love your everything-as if a chain reaction I like you for your physical, but love your spiritual and I think of you daily-as if you are my ritual.I thought we stood no chance-what a bad assumption for now I see you are my hope in this world of corruption for someone like you-i have forever prayed and how I am so fortunate that thru all this you have stayed ....stayed in my life, to lighten my road ...stayed in my heart-in this world so cold.From the moment we met,I knew it was you,Who would steal away my heart,And forever to me be true.Every day that goes by,I realize even more,How much I care about you,I've never been so sure.Our future lies in front of us, but together we will be,Strong enough to conquer,Any conflict that we see. For all you have given me,I could not ask for more,Only wish that in return, I could give you what you ask for.I know that if I need something,I only say your name,And in every way you can,The world is mine, without a shame! I wouldn't give you up,For love, or life, or pride,Because I know that in the end,You'll be standing by my side.I think in God's will,He's put you and me together,To set a good example,Of how true love lasts FOREVER! For everything I am,For everything I'll be, I'm nothing without you, I WANT THIS WORLD TO SEE!
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate
You are my strength--the fiber of my being--the meaning of life.You are the music of my soul--the humming of my heart --the laughter in my eyes.How can "one" be so beautiful.that the eye envies thee.How can "one" be so wonderful..you are what an angel can only be.How can "one" be so perfect as if everything can be so right...only an angel glows so magnificantly that it can blind the stars that shine at night.How can "one" be so breathtaking leave you speechless and have all the right things to say.How can "one" turn clouds into sunshine and make all my misery go away.How can "one" be mine so full of beauty...so honest and love thy lonely me.Only an angel can ever be so wonderful; I pray to love only thee! When we touch a miracle is born. When we kiss a gift is given.When we make love,magic explodes caressing our souls uniting as one.When we hug one another..an invisible shield fastens all around us...keeping serenity within.As I look in your eyes, I see my world;My heart, cradled in your hands, beats only for you;I want to call you up on the phone,Tell you all about my day,Tell you that everything has gone wrong and hear from you that everything is going to be okay.I want to walk down the street and hold your hand tight because in your arms,Everything is alright.I want to give you half of my lunch and maybe my vegetables too.And when we walk together in the rain.I want to share my umbrella with no one else but you.I want to lay in bed with you ten years from now, and read that sweet romantic novel I've had for years,Kiss you oh so softly..while you wipe away my sympathetic tears. I love you
I never knew great things await me...When I suddenly walked into your life I had no clue of what your love would bring. Until things gradually began to unfold.You turned my weakness into strength and my sorrow into gladness You changed my wickedness to kindness and my foolishness to cleverness You made my words the pillar of your heart.You made my burden the load of your life. You made my worries the heaviness of your heart.You healed my sorrows with tears from your eyes.As empty as I could feel inside.You fill me up with abundance of love.On my way to the path of hell.You suddenly came to give me light.A thousand times you came to my rescue and created brand new memories in me. Feelings, my mouth could not reveal.Finally taking full control of me..Through your nose, I smell the sweetness of love.Through your feet, I walk the path of life.Through your ears, I hear the voice of God. Through your mouth, I speak the words of love.I knew from the moment I said hello,That I would never let you go. When we opened up our hearts,I knew that the love would never depart. And I'd do anything,Yes, I mean everything.My love, I'd do anything? Just to be with you.Whenever we are drawn apart.By some force that can't be stopped,Just remember my love is always with you.You have my spirit and my heart.And I'd do anything,Yes, I mean everything.My love, I'd do anything?Just to be with you.Now when life seems hard to bear,And when it feels like no one cares,I'm here for you. I'm here for life.I will love you?Until the day I die!And I'd do anything,Yes, I mean everything.My love, I'd do anything?Just to be with you.
You are my strength--the fiber of my being--the meaning of life.You are the music of my soul--the humming of my heart --the laughter in my eyes.How can "one" be so beautiful.that the eye envies thee.How can "one" be so wonderful..you are what an angel can only be.How can "one" be so perfect as if everything can be so right...only an angel glows so magnificantly that it can blind the stars that shine at night.How can "one" be so breathtaking leave you speechless and have all the right things to say.How can "one" turn clouds into sunshine and make all my misery go away.How can "one" be mine so full of beauty...so honest and love thy lonely me.Only an angel can ever be so wonderful; I pray to love only thee! When we touch a miracle is born. When we kiss a gift is given.When we make love,magic explodes caressing our souls uniting as one.When we hug one another..an invisible shield fastens all around us...keeping serenity within.As I look in your eyes, I see my world;My heart, cradled in your hands, beats only for you;I want to call you up on the phone,Tell you all about my day,Tell you that everything has gone wrong and hear from you that everything is going to be okay.I want to walk down the street and hold your hand tight because in your arms,Everything is alright.I want to give you half of my lunch and maybe my vegetables too.And when we walk together in the rain.I want to share my umbrella with no one else but you.I want to lay in bed with you ten years from now, and read that sweet romantic novel I've had for years,Kiss you oh so softly..while you wipe away my sympathetic tears. I love you
I never knew great things await me...When I suddenly walked into your life I had no clue of what your love would bring. Until things gradually began to unfold.You turned my weakness into strength and my sorrow into gladness You changed my wickedness to kindness and my foolishness to cleverness You made my words the pillar of your heart.You made my burden the load of your life. You made my worries the heaviness of your heart.You healed my sorrows with tears from your eyes.As empty as I could feel inside.You fill me up with abundance of love.On my way to the path of hell.You suddenly came to give me light.A thousand times you came to my rescue and created brand new memories in me. Feelings, my mouth could not reveal.Finally taking full control of me..Through your nose, I smell the sweetness of love.Through your feet, I walk the path of life.Through your ears, I hear the voice of God. Through your mouth, I speak the words of love.I knew from the moment I said hello,That I would never let you go. When we opened up our hearts,I knew that the love would never depart. And I'd do anything,Yes, I mean everything.My love, I'd do anything? Just to be with you.Whenever we are drawn apart.By some force that can't be stopped,Just remember my love is always with you.You have my spirit and my heart.And I'd do anything,Yes, I mean everything.My love, I'd do anything?Just to be with you.Now when life seems hard to bear,And when it feels like no one cares,I'm here for you. I'm here for life.I will love you?Until the day I die!And I'd do anything,Yes, I mean everything.My love, I'd do anything?Just to be with you.
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