The difference between imagination and fantasy

The difference between imagination and fantasy

Hi, dear friends and followers. Due to some difficulties this morning, I would like to introduce to you something to ponder on. Thank you very much for visiting and reading my blog.
Due to another engagement today I thought I would share again one of my older favorite entries with you. Thank you for coming to my blog

Imagination draws its energy from a confrontation with desire. It feeds off desire, transmuting and magnifying reality through desire’s power.

Fantasy does the opposite; it avoids desire by fleeing into a crude sort of wish-fulfillment that seems much safer.

Fantasy might be teddy bears, lollipops, sexual delights, or superhero adventures; it also might be voices in one’s head urging acts of outrage and mayhem. Or it might be the confused world of separation and fear we routinely live in, a threatening yet seductive world that promises us the happiness we seek when our fantasies finally become real.

Imagination confronts desire directly, in all its discomfort and intensity, deepening the world right where we are. Fantasy and reality are opposing forces, but imagination and reality are not in opposition: Imagination goes toward reality, shapes and evokes it.

What if I were to say that Imagination is also a link between reality and fantasy. A connection between dreamland and the real world. Just think about it dear friends. When you are sitting in the cinema, watching a very tense, exciting and realistic movie, do you not feel like you are, not just part of the movie, but you are actually in the action living the part in the movie. Just something to ponder 

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day. 

✿ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿

Dear Universe, I Am Willing to Explore

Dear Universe, I Am Willing to Explore 

by Lorna Tedder · in Law of Attraction

Hi, dear friends and followers. I wish to thank you and welcome you again in joining me on this beautiful blog entry topic,  I Am Willing to Explore, by Lorna Tedder. Note: Orange text are my own thoughts 

Willing to explore

A path through my grandfather’s woods at sunset

By now, you probably know that I’m a fan of stating intentions and watching them come to me. Sometimes, it’s hard to state my intention in a clear enough way. And too often, it’s hard to be honest about what I want and to get out of my own way.

It’s one thing to be able to say, “I intend for THIS to happen.” But what if you’re a little afraid of the results? Or a lot afraid? It seems like we wouldn’t fear getting what we yearn for, what we dream of. Not so.

What if our fondest dreams and deepest desires come true and…we can’t handle the results? Or we get it and then lose it? What if we get what we want and find it’s only an illusion?

Note: If I get it, do I really deserve it? am I worthy of it? Things like that just don't happen to me, or is it something that is really a necessity? Someone else is more deserving of it, this is just to mention a few thoughts that went through my mind. I have found that the best way to work with intentions is to propose it to Universe, Great Spirit or God, and leave it there and trust.

The results of this has always been that I got a return, maybe not what I expected, but I do get a return.

 
Success will take us to a next step, and we can’t turn back. It will be new joys, yes, but also new pressures and bigger risks. What if we fail? Is it better to stay where we are and assume we’ll just never have those things and be as content as we can force ourselves to be…or do we go all out, risk everything, the worst of which is losing our dreams and knowing they’re not what we thought?

I have a couple of dreams like that. The only thing that has stopped me from being successful is wondering what if I’m not.

I confessed my own fears and posed these questions to a young friend who was at a crossroads in her professional life. She has a grand dream, but the next step means she sticks to this career field or turns away from it. You’d look at her work and never think she’d considered giving up a dream like that, but she’s afraid of what happens next. Like me. And it’s enough to paralyze her forward momentum.

I’ve come up with a different way of setting intentions for my scariest dreams–the ones I most want and most afraid will fail. My most intense dreams are ones I cannot write here–you’d be shocked at some and others are too obvious and yet too personal. So in lieu of confessing the things I most want out of this incarnation here, I’ll give a few examples of lesser importance to me.

I start by taking the pressure off of the desire. Instead of saying, “I intend to be debt-free,” and then wondering how I’ll handle my finances if that dream comes true, I change up the words a bit, like this:

Dear Universe, I am willing to explore…being debt-free.
Or,

Dear Universe, I am open to exploring freedom from debt.

I like the latter one better. If the result is good, it’s good. If there are issues (there will be of some sort), then I’ll work them out as they appear. But I’m willing to let it happen to me and to explore that feeling of being debt-free, with no mortgage. When I think of it this way, I can almost taste it. It’s a delicious feeling, and I can simply…explore it. Be willing to explore. Open to exploring.

Other lesser dreams of mine might be phrased like this:

I am open to exploring how it feels to wear a slinky size 6 dress that fits perfectly.

I am open to exploring speaking before a large crowd with self-confidence.
I am open to exploring what it feels like to be accepted by my social circle for my beliefs.

Note: You have my atention hon

I’ve started experimenting with results on a small scale. One thing that has eluded me is having a guy around the house who can take care of the handyman chores that I’m not able to do myself, either for lack of knowledge or lack of upper body strength. I stated my intention as “I’m willing to explore what it feels like to have an honest man in my life that I can trust to take care of handyman projects for me and one I wouldn’t mind giving the run of the house to when I’m at work.” Note that I didn’t say how the result had to look. This didn’t have to be a boyfriend or a male roommate. The result didn’t have to be male, really, though I never thought of it at the time because some of the projects around the house require certain physical strengths.

The result turned up rather quickly. A friend and student of mine announced he was leaving his job and starting his own business, as a handyman. He’d volunteered his handyman services on several occasions over the years I’d known him, and I’d once thought there was nothing he couldn’t fix. He was someone I already trusted. I was immediately and happily his first customer, with a long punch list of handyman work waiting for him.

Now that I understand how this type of intention-setting works and that it’s a way for me to get beyond my fear of success–and fear of subsequent failure–I’ll give it a try on my bigger, more personal dreams.

What are YOU open to exploring?

Note: I most certainly am, thank you for being an inspiration Lorna hon.

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day.

✿ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿

The Mystery of Chance

The Mystery of Chance

by Peter A. Jordan

Hi, dear friends and followers. Thank you very much for visiting and reading my blog. Today's topic is about The Mystery of Chance, coincidence, and synchronicity. Enjoy.  

At some time or another it's happened to all of us. There's that certain number that pops up wherever you go. Hotel rooms, airline terminals, street addresses -- its haunting presence cannot be escaped. Or, you're in your car, absently humming a song. You turn on the radio. A sudden chill prickles your spine. That same song is now pouring from the speaker.

Coincidence, you tell yourself. Or is it?
For most mainstream scientists, experiences like this, however strange and recurrent, are nothing but lawful expressions of chance, a creation -- not of the divine or mystical -- but of simply that which is possible. Ignorance of natural law, they argue, causes us to fall prey to superstitious thinking, inventing supernatural causes where none exist. In fact, say these statistical law-abiding rationalists, the occasional manifestation of the rare and improbable in daily life is not only permissible, but inevitable.

Consider this: from a well-shuffled deck of fifty-two playing cards, the mathematical odds of dealing a hand of thirteen specified cards are about 635,000,000,000 to one. (This means that, in dealing the hand, there exist as many as 635,000,000,000 different hands that may possibly appear.) What statisticians tell us, though, is that these billions of hands are all equally likely to occur, and that one of them is absolutely certain to occur each time the hand is dealt. Thus, any hand that is dealt, including the most rare and improbable hand is, in terms of probability, merely one of a number of equally likely events, one of which was bound to happen.

Such sobering assurances don't necessarily satisfy everyone, however: many see coincidence as embedded in a higher, transcendental force, a cosmic "glue," as it were, which binds random events together in a meaningful and coherent pattern. The question has always been: could such a harmonizing principle actually exist? Or are skeptics right in regarding this as a product of wishful thinking, a consoling myth spawned by the intellectual discomfort and capriciousness of chance?

Mathematician Warren Weaver, in his book, Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability, recounts a fascinating tale of coincidence that stretches our traditional notions of chance to their breaking point. The story originally appeared in Life magazine. Weaver writes:

All fifteen members of a church choir in Beatrice, Nebraska, due at practice at 7:20, were late on the evening of March 1, 1950. The minister and his wife and daughter had one reason (his wife delayed to iron the daughter's dress) one girl waited to finish a geometry problem; one couldn't start her car; two lingered to hear the end of an especially exciting radio program; one mother and daughter were late because the mother had to call the daughter twice to wake her from a nap; and so on. The reasons seemed rather ordinary. But there were ten separate and quite unconnected reasons for the lateness of the fifteen persons. It was rather fortunate that none of the fifteen arrived on time at 7:20, for at 7:25 the church building was destroyed in an explosion. The members of the choir, Life reported, wondered if their delay was "an act of God."

Weaver calculates the staggering odds against chance for this uncanny event as about one chance in a million.

Coincidences such as these, some say, are almost too purposeful, too orderly, to be a product of random chance, which strains somewhat to accommodate them. But then how do we explain them?

Psychologist Carl Jung believed the traditional notions of causality were incapable of explaining some of the more improbable forms of coincidence. Where it is plain, felt Jung, that no causal connection can be demonstrated between two events, but where a meaningful relationship nevertheless exists between them, a wholly different type of principle is likely to be operating. Jung called this principle "synchronicity."

In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Jung describes how, during his research into the phenomenon of the collective unconscious, he began to observe coincidences that were connected in such a meaningful way that their occurrence seemed to defy the calculations of probability. He provided numerous examples culled from his own psychiatric case-studies, many now legendary.

A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me his dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to the golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetoaia urata) which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience.

Who then, might we say, was responsible for the synchronous arrival of the beetle -- Jung or the patient? While on the surface reasonable, such a question presupposes a chain of causality Jung claimed was absent from such experience. As psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor has observed, the scarab, by Jung's view, had no determinable cause, but instead complemented the "impossibility" of the analysis. The disturbance also (as synchronicities often do) prefigured a profound transformation. For, as Fodor observes, Jung's patient had -- until the appearance of the beetle -- shown excessive rationality, remaining psychologically inaccessible. Once presented with the scarab, however, her demeanor improved and their sessions together grew more profitable.

Because Jung believed the phenomenon of synchronicity was primarily connected with psychic conditions, he felt that such couplings of inner (subjective) and outer (objective) reality evolved through the influence of the archetypes, patterns inherent in the human psyche and shared by all of mankind. These patterns, or "primordial images," as Jung sometimes refers to them, comprise man's collective unconscious, representing the dynamic source of all human confrontation with death, conflict, love, sex, rebirth and mystical experience. When an archetype is activated by an emotionally charged event (such as a tragedy), says Jung, other related events tend to draw near. In this way the archetypes become a doorway that provide us access to the experience of meaningful (and often insightful) coincidence.

Implicit in Jung's concept of synchronicity is the belief in the ultimate "oneness" of the universe. As Jung expressed it, such phenomenon betrays a "peculiar interdependence of objective elements among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers." Jung claimed to have found evidence of this interdependence, not only in his psychiatric studies, but in his research of esoteric practices as well. Of the I Ching, a Chinese method of divination which Jung regarded as the clearest expression of the synchronicity principle, he wrote: "The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed...While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment."

Similarly, Jung discovered the synchronicity within the I Ching also extended to astrology. In a letter to Freud dated June 12, 1911, he wrote: "My evenings are taken up largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you...I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens."

Freud was alarmed by Jung's letter. Jung's interest in synchronicity and the paranormal rankled the strict materialist; he condemned Jung for wallowing in what he called the "black tide of the mud of occultism." Just two years earlier, during a visit to Freud in Vienna, Jung had attempted to defend his beliefs and sparked a heated debate. Freud's skepticism remained calcified as ever, causing him to dismiss Jung's paranormal leanings, "in terms of so shallow a positivism," recalls Jung, "that I had difficulty in checking the sharp retort on the tip of my tongue." A shocking synchronistic event followed. Jung writes in his memoirs:

While Freud was going on this way, I had a curious sensation. It was as if my diaphragm were made of iron and were becoming red-hot -- a glowing vault. And at that moment there was such a loud report in the bookcase, which stood right next to us, that we both started up in alarm, fearing the thing was going to topple over on us. I said to Freud: 'There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorization phenomenon.' 'Oh come,' he exclaimed. 'That is sheer bosh.' 'It is not,' I replied. 'You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another such loud report! 'Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words that the same detonation went off in the bookcase. To this day I do not know what gave me this certainty. But I knew beyond all doubt that the report would come again. Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case, this incident aroused his distrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had done something against him. I never afterward discussed the incident with him.

In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth century, which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he added, "that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture, and secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view, but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness -- far from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact, interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a unified reality.

The belief -- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of synchronous events -- that matter and consciousness interpenetrate is, of course, far from new. What historian Arthur Koestler refers to as the capacity of the human psyche to "act as a cosmic resonator" faithfully echoes the thinking of Kepler and Pico. Leibnitz's "monad," a spiritual microcosm said to mirror the patterns of the universe, was based on the premise that individual and universe "imprint" each other, acting by virtue of a "pre-established harmony." And for Schopenhauer who, like Jung, questioned the exclusive status of causality, everything was "interrelated and mutually attuned."

Common among these various historical sources, as Koestler observes in his book, The Roots of Coincidence, is the presumption of a "fundamental unity of all things," which transcends mechanical causality, and which relates coincidence to the "universal scheme of things."

In exploring the parallels between modern science and the mystical concept of a universal scheme or oneness, Koestler compares the evolution of science during the past one-hundred-and-fifty years to a vast river system, in which each tributary is "swallowed up" by the mainstream, until all unified in a single river-delta. The science of electricity, he points out, merged, during the nineteenth century, with the science of magnetism. Electromagnetic waves were then discovered to be responsible for light, color, radiant heat and Hertzian waves, while chemistry was embraced by atomic physics. The control of the body by nerves and glands was linked to electrochemical processes, and atoms were broken down into the "building blocks" of protons, electrons and neutrons. Soon, however, even these fundamental parts were reduced by scientists to mere "parcels of compressed energy, packed and patterned according to certain mathematical formulae."

What all this reveals, then, is that there may be what Koestler refers to as "the universal hanging-together of things, their embeddedness in a universal matrix." Many ecologists already subscribe to this sense of interrelation in the world, what the ancients called the "sympathy" of life, and the numbers of scientists now converting to this world-view are beginning to multiply. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigione of the University of Texas at Austin is studying the "spontaneous formation of coherent structures," how chemical and other kinds of structures evolve patterns out of chaos. Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed that the brain may be a type of "hologram," a pattern and frequency analyzer which creates "hard" reality by interpreting frequencies from a dimension beyond space and time. On the basis of such a model, the physical world "out there," is, in Pribram's words, "isomorphic with" -- that, the same as, the processes of the brain.

So, if the modern alliance evolving between quantum physicists, neuroscientists, parapsychologists and mystics is not just a short-fused phase in scientific understanding, a paradigm shift may well be imminent. We may soon not only embrace a new image of the universe as non-causal and "sympathetic," but uncover conclusive evidence that the universe functions not as some great machine, but as a great thought -- unifying matter, energy, and consciousness. Synchronous events, perhaps even the broader spectrum of paranormal phenomena, will be then liberated from the stigma of "occultism," and no longer seen as disturbing. At that point, our perceptions, and hence our world, will be changed forever.

ONE THOUGHT, let there be light

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day. 

✿ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿

The Empathic Civilization ~ Part2

The Empathic Civilization ~ Part2By Jeremy Rifkin 

Hi, dear friends and followers. Thank you very much for visiting and reading my blog. Today I have for you part2 of The Empathic Civilization, by Jeremy Rifkin

Each more sophisticated communication revolution brings together more diverse people in increasingly more expansive and varied social networks. Oral communication has only limited temporal and spatial reach while script, print and electronic communications each extend the range and depth of human social interaction.

By extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, communication revolutions provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand. For example, during the period of the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations characterized by script and theological consciousness, empathic sensitivity broadened from tribal blood ties to associational ties based on common religious affiliation. Jews came to empathize with Jews, Christians with Christians, Muslims with Muslims, etc. In the first industrial revolution characterized by print and ideological consciousness, empathic sensibility extended to national borders, with Americans empathizing with Americans, Germans with Germans, Japanese with Japanese and so on. In the second industrial revolution, characterized by electronic communication and psychological consciousness, individuals began to identify with like-minded others.

Today, we are on the cusp of another historic convergence of energy and communication--a third industrial revolution--that could extend empathic sensibility to the biosphere itself and all of life on Earth. The distributed Internet revolution is coming together with distributed renewable energies, making possible a sustainable, post-carbon economy that is both globally connected and locally managed.

In the 21st century, hundreds of millions--and eventually billions--of human beings will transform their buildings into power plants to harvest renewable energies on site, store those energies in the form of hydrogen and share electricity, peer-to-peer, across local, regional, national and continental inter-grids that act much like the Internet. The open source sharing of energy, like open source sharing of information, will give rise to collaborative energy spaces--not unlike the collaborative social spaces that currently exist on the Internet.

When every family and business comes to take responsibility for its own small swath of the biosphere by harnessing renewable energy and sharing it with millions of others on smart power grids that stretch across continents, we become intimately interconnected at the most basic level of earthly existence by jointly stewarding the energy that bathes the planet and sustains all of life.

The new distributed communication revolution not only organizes distributed renewable energies, but also changes human consciousness. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history.

Whether in fact we will begin to empathize as a species will depend on how we use the new distributed communication medium. While distributed communications technologies-and, soon, distributed renewable energies - are connecting the human race, what is so shocking is that no one has offered much of a reason as to why we ought to be connected. We talk breathlessly about access and inclusion in a global communications network but speak little of exactly why we want to communicate with one another on such a planetary scale. What's sorely missing is an overarching reason that billions of human beings should be increasingly connected. Toward what end? 

The only feeble explanations thus far offered are to share information, be entertained, advance commercial exchange and speed the globalization of the economy. All the above, while relevant, nonetheless seem insufficient to justify why nearly seven billion human beings should be connected and mutually embedded in a globalized society. The idea of even billion individual connections, absent any overall unifying purpose, seems a colossal waste of human energy. More important, making global connections without any real transcendent purpose risks a narrowing rather than an expanding of human consciousness. But what if our distributed global communication networks were put to the task of helping us re-participate in deep communion with the common biosphere that sustains all of our lives?

The biosphere is the narrow band that extends some forty miles from the ocean floor to outer space where living creatures and the Earth's geochemical processes interact to sustain each other. We are learning that the biosphere functions like an indivisible organism. It is the continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and between living creatures and the geochemical processes that ensure the survival of the planetary organism and the individual species that live within its biospheric envelope. If every human life, the species as a whole, and all other life-forms are entwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself, then we are all dependent on and responsible for the health of the whole organism. Carrying out that responsibility means living out our individual lives in our neighborhoods and communities in ways that promote the general well-being of the larger biosphere within which we dwell. The Third Industrial Revolution offers just such an opportunity.

If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness. We leave the old world of geopolitics behind and enter into a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness.

The Third Industrial Revolution and the new era of distributed capitalism allow us to sculpt a new approach to globalization, this time emphasizing continentelization from the bottom up. Because renewable energies are more or less equally distributed around the world, every region is potentially amply endowed with the power it needs to be relatively self-sufficient and sustainable in its lifestyle, while at the same time interconnected via smart grids to other regions across countries and continents.

When every community is locally empowered, both figuratively and literally, it can engage directly in regional, transnational, continental, and limited global trade without the severe restrictions that are imposed by the geopolitics that oversee elite fossil fuels and uranium energy distribution.

Continentalization is already bringing with it a new form of governance. The nation-state, which grew up alongside the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, and provided the regulatory mechanism for managing an energy regime whose reach was the geosphere, is ill suited for a Third Industrial Revolution whose domain is the biosphere. Distributed renewable energies generated locally and regionally and shared openly--peer to peer--across vast contiguous land masses connected by intelligent utility networks and smart logistics and supply chains favor a seamless network of governing institutions that span entire continents.

The European Union is the first continental governing institution of the Third Industrial Revolution era. The EU is already beginning to put in place the infrastructure for a European-wide energy regime, along with the codes, regulations, and standards to effectively operate a seamless transport, communications, and energy grid that will stretch from the Irish Sea to the doorsteps of Russia by midcentury. Asian, African, and Latin American continental political unions are also in the making and will likely be the premier governing institutions on their respective continents by 2050.

In this new era of distributed energy, governing institutions will more resemble the workings of the ecosystems they manage. Just as habitats function within ecosystems, and ecosystems within the biosphere in a web of interrelationships, governing institutions will similarly function in a collaborative network of relationships with localities, regions, and nations all embedded within the continent as a whole. This new complex political organism operates like the biosphere it attends, synergistically and reciprocally. This is biosphere politics.

The new biosphere politics transcends traditional right/left distinctions so characteristic of the geopolitics of the modern market economy and nation-state era. The new divide is generational and contrasts the traditional top-down model of structuring family life, education, commerce, and governance with a younger generation whose thinking is more relational and distributed, whose nature is more collaborative and cosmopolitan, and whose work and social spaces favor open-source commons. For the Internet generation, "quality of life" becomes as important as individual opportunity in fashioning a new dream for the 21st century.

The transition to biosphere consciousness has already begun. All over the world, a younger generation is beginning to realize that one's daily consumption of energy and other resources ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature that inhabits the Earth.

The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth. But our rush to universal empathic connectivity is running up against a rapidly accelerating entropic juggernaut in the form of climate change. Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

This blog post has been adapted from Jeremy Rifkin's new book 'The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis' (Tarcher/Penguin)

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day. 

✿ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿

'The Empathic Civilization'

'The Empathic Civilization': Rethinking Human Nature in the Biosphere Era
By Jeremy Rifkin

Hi, dear friends and followers. This entry is derived in part from a book written by Jeremy Rifkin. The Empathic Civilization. I have read in part some of his work several years ago and have found it to be interesting. I hope that you also enjoy reading this entry.

Two spectacular failures, separated by only 18 months, marked the end of the modern era. In July 2008, the price of oil on world markets peaked at $147/ barrel, inflation soared, the price of everything from food to gasoline skyrocketed, and the global economic engine shut off. Growing demand in the developed nations, as well as in China, India, and other emerging economies, for diminishing fossil fuels precipitated the crisis. 

Purchasing power plummeted and the global economy collapsed. That was the earthquake that tore asunder the industrial age built on and propelled by fossil fuels. The failure of the financial markets two months later was merely the aftershock. The fossil fuel energies that make up the industrial way of life are sunsetting and the industrial infrastructure is now on life support.
In December 2009, world leaders from 192 countries assembled in Copenhagen to address the question of how to handle the accumulated entropy bill of the fossil fuel based industrial revolution-the spent C0₂ that is heating up the planet and careening the earth into a catastrophic shift in climate. After years of preparation, the negotiations broke down and world leaders were unable to reach a formal accord.

Neither the world's political or business leaders anticipated the economic debacle of July 2008, nor were they able to cobble together a sufficient plan for economic recovery in the months since. They were equally inept at addressing the issue of climate change, despite the fact that the scientific community warns that is poses the greatest threat to our species in its history, that we are running out of time, and that we may even be facing the prospect of our own extinction.

The problem runs deeper than the issue of finding new ways to regulate the market or imposing legally binding global green house gas emission reduction targets. The real crisis lies in the set of assumptions about human nature that governs the behavior of world leaders--assumptions that were spawned during the Enlightenment more than 200 years ago at the dawn of the modern market economy and the emergence of the nation state era.

The Enlightenment thinkers--John Locke, Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet et. al.--took umbrage with the Medieval Christian world view that saw human nature as fallen and depraved and that looked to salvation in the next world through God's grace. They preferred to cast their lot with the idea that human beings' essential nature is rational, detached, autonomous, acquisitive and utilitarian and argued that individual salvation lies in unlimited material progress here on Earth.

The Enlightenment notions about human nature were reflected in the newly minted nation-state whose raison d'être was to protect private property relations and stimulate market forces as well as act as a surrogate of the collective self-interest of the citizenry in the international arena. Like individuals, nation-states were considered to be autonomous agents embroiled in a relentless battle with other sovereign nations in the pursuit of material gains.

It was these very assumptions that provided the philosophical underpinnings for a geopolitical frame of reference that accompanied the first and second industrial revolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. These beliefs about human nature came to the fore in the aftermath of the global economic meltdown and in the boisterous and acrimonious confrontations in the meeting rooms in Copenhagen, with potentially disastrous consequences for the future of humanity and the planet. 

If human nature is as the Enlightenment philosophers claimed, then we are likely doomed. It is impossible to imagine how we might create a sustainable global economy and restore the biosphere to health if each and every one of us is, at the core of our biology, an autonomous agent and a self-centered and materialistic being.

Recent discoveries in brain science and child development, however, are forcing us to rethink these long-held shibboleths about human nature. Biologists and cognitive neuroscientists are discovering mirror-neurons--the so-called empathy neurons--that allow human beings and other species to feel and experience another's situation as if it were one's own. We are, it appears, the most social of animals and seek intimate participation and companionship with our fellows.

Social scientists, in turn, are beginning to reexamine human history from an empathic lens and, in the process, discovering previously hidden strands of the human narrative which suggests that human evolution is measured not only by the expansion of power over nature, but also by the intensification and extension of empathy to more diverse others across broader temporal and spatial domains. The growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species.

What is required now is nothing less than a leap to global empathic consciousness and in less than a generation if we are to resurrect the global economy and revitalize the biosphere. The question becomes this: what is the mechanism that allows empathic sensitivity to mature and consciousness to expand through history?

The pivotal turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras. The new communications revolutions become the command and control mechanisms for structuring, organizing and managing more complex civilizations that the new energy regimes make possible. For example, in the early modern age, print communication became the means to organize and manage the technologies, organizations, and infrastructure of the coal, steam, and rail revolution. It would have been impossible to administer the first industrial revolution using script and codex.

Communication revolutions not only manage new, more complex energy regimes, but also change human consciousness in the process. Forager/hunter societies relied on oral communications and their consciousness was mythologically constructed. The great hydraulic agricultural civilizations were, for the most part, organized around script communication and steeped in theological consciousness. The first industrial revolution of the 19th century was managed by print communication and ushered in ideological consciousness. Electronic communication became the command and control mechanism for arranging the second industrial revolution in the 20th century and spawned psychological consciousness.

To be continued tomorrow

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day.
✿ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿

Are Empaths Psychic Vampires?

Ask an Empath: Are Empaths Psychic Vampires?

by Lorna Tedder · in Empathy

Hi, dear friends and followers. Welcome to my community and thank you for reading today's entry. I haven't much to add to today's entry for the author has it covered. However, I can add from personal experience that if you are in doubt about psychic vampires, the best description I can give you is that anyone who plays on your emotions, and to them it is like playing a game, giving them mental and emotional stimulation every time  they make a "score."

psychic vampires

Question: Are psychic vampires and empaths the same thing?

No. Emotions are at play for both, but in a very different way.

A psychic vampire is someone who feeds off the energy of others. It’s not in an overt way. They don’t stand over you like a monster in a bad movie and suck the life force out of you. Not exactly. If you’ve ever found yourself drained after being with someone–especially if you find yourself drained every single time you’re with them–then it’s very possible that the other person is a psychic vampire.

An empath is a person who feels the energy of others. Though I suppose it’s possible for an empath to feed off others’ energy as well, I’ve not encountered anyone who is both an empath and an energy vampire, or psychic vampire.

The psychic vampires I’ve known have tended to be emotionally needy and often initiators of drama, just to cause fluctuations in emotions that they can enjoy. These are often not positive or light emotions, and I’ve not known of any psychic vampires who “took on” these feelings themselves as empaths often do. The vampire may be an emotional manipulator or may be completely unaware of what they’re doing. A good example would be the family member who is always stirring up drama and then is right there to hear your problems while you pick up the pieces…all the while being reminded of you of things that upset you rather than allowing you to achieve a peaceful state of mind.

I’ve known both introvert and extrovert psychic vampires. Empaths are generally introverts or on the cusp.

Being an empath means feeling the emotions of people you have a bond with or are in proximity to you. As an empath, I have on a few occasions been bonded with someone who shared my sweeter emotions and I could feel both mine and theirs so that we could mirror each other. This in no way drained the other person but gave me a double dose of the same emotion. Empaths sometimes cannot distinguish between someone else’s emotions and their own, so they often get caught up in other people’s turbulent feelings. And that’s not fun!

So the big difference between psychic vampires and empaths is this:

Empaths feel the emotions of others. Psychic vampires feed off the emotions of others.

For an empath, just feeling the emotions of others can be overwhelming. Although it may be possible, I cannot understand how someone could be both. They’d have to be a glutton for punishment to both feel and feed off someone else’s emotions.

Thank you very much again, dear friends, for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts with us, if you will. Have a great day. 

✿ڰۣ❤In Loving Light from the Fairy Lady❤ڰۣ✿