As I see it, reality is very likely to be what is essentially represented by Pascal’s pyramid: an increasingly complex pattern where individual elements continually divide and recombine, covering all the possible combinations.

The unique realities that each of us individual human consciousnesses experience is one circle of possibility, at an extremely detailed level of observation, while our own universe is itself a single circle of possibility on a much more general level of observation. And each species of Earthling is one single circle on a level of observation somewhere between the level of detail the universe as a whole is seen at and the level of detail an individual human, maple tree, or paramecium is seen at.

The more details we choose to separate reality into for observation, the more possibilities for variety we will see. This is why every single time we think we’ve sorted out what the smallest particle is, we find out that there are, in fact, more, even smaller parts. Every part can be observed to have elements that are more particle-like (structure, space, quantity, matter) and more wavelike (function, time, quality, energy), thus each part always has smaller parts of its own. So, the more detailed we observe reality, and ourselves, the more unique and diverse we realize everything must be. I may share somewhere around 99.9% of my genes with you, but after that, I’m just totally different! I’m even significantly different right now, on an atomic level, as compared to what I was when I wrote the previous sentence…

It seems that reality is all about the infinite exploration of possibility. If it’s possible, reality will create it. It might only last a tiny fraction of time in a tiny fraction of space, or it might last billions upon billions of eons and expand out over vast areas of space, relative to ourself, but if it can exist, it will. And that’s because, as we know from looking at the top of Pascal’s pyramid, the single element that encircles all of reality is defined by both the finite and linear radius, and by the infinite and non-linear π (pi).

Reality truly loves diversity, infinitely. And the further out we expand the radius of our awareness of reality, the more diversity we will encounter…

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You might also wish to see a previous post on Pascal’s triangle: Pascal’s Perspectives

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I figure I’ll take this Blackout event to share my own practical and philosophical take on sharing, offering you all another perspective with which to talk to others who might be curious about what truly matters most when making decisions about who has the right to what when it comes to information, ideas, art and other intangible patterns of energy…

The question to ask, when making a decision about whether or not there should be laws and social support that either protect the right to freely share or prevent sharing of media, is:

Does this particular piece of media offer ideas that increase people’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and/or spiritual health? If so then the world will be a better place if it’s shared as widely as possible, and offered to everyone, unconditionally. If the media does not offer ideas that increase people’s health in any way, then it’s not important to share it with anyone.

The world needs everyone to be able to be their best, so that we can work together to solve our various problems more effectively, rather than constantly having to waste resources bickering against each other, and worrying about what the materially deficient of the world will do to the power and profit hoarders of the world, to try to regain some balance.

To ensure that the creators of good ideas and valuable media are supported in doing their pro-social work, we will set up easy to use voluntary contribution systems, where the creators can be offered money and other, more practical things that they need to be inspired to keep creating good stuff for the world.

Every website should have a donation button. Every creator of any sort should have a list of the things they are most in need of to do their best work, on a personal page somewhere, so that people can help them out directly. We can stop wasting money on public schools that pay administrators, teachers, and power-hungry unions regardless of whether or not the students are happy and learning what they most want to learn to achieve their greatest dreams, and start giving students and parents their portion of the school budget to use to thank the creators of the media they find most valuable to their learning.

And adults can be encouraged to consciously decide to spend their resources supporting only the media that they believe is most valuable, rather than being lazy and paying to let the mainstream profiteering corporation feed them whatever mind numbing crap they happen to have collected. Anyone who demands payment up front for their media is probably trying to scam you out of your money, and isn’t really expecting you to value it much. Those who offer their media for free, to anyone and everyone, has confidence that it’s going to be valuable to at least some, and believes that it’s better for the world to have their media spread. These are the people to look to for the best, most valuable ideas…

In short, the best things in life are free. Including ideas and the media that contain them. Support freedom of information, and support the creators of the best information, so that they can keep up the great work! :-)

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This is it! The year it all changes. Maybe? Yes. Of course!

Self fulfilling prophesies of both endings of old ways and beginnings of new ways. Possibly predicted using curious knowledge of mathematical patterns, or possibly just coincidental, and/or possibly the placebo effect. One way or another it appears to be 2012 will be a grand tipping point in the life of the planet and all it’s Earthlings.

We will naturally find more of what we seek (because that’s the way the brain works), and what I seek is more and more people sharing their deepest truths of what they most want and what they are most enthusiastic about offering, more creative types helping people share these most valuable stories, more people choosing to focus on finding more sustainable, local, and enjoyable ways to get the things they need to be their best, and more people being more free.

And by free, I mean free in the sense of giving of themselves freely – expressing all their body’s overabundance of matter and energy in a plethora of creative and meaningful and rewarding ways that represents the highest qualities of the self, physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. By free, I mean unencumbered by rigid rules, laws, social standards that quantify life into limited and linear boxes. By free, I mean, open ended exchanges of resources that are more in the vein of respiration, with molecules of oxygen, nitrogen, and others from all over the universe briefly flowing into the body, the body taking only what it needs to flourish, and then exhaling out all the extra carbon dioxide and such into the rest of the universe, to be shared by anyone who happens to come along next who finds it useful…

In essence, I am looking to see a world of humans waking up to how to be an awesome part of the vast and wonderful system of nature that is our little blue-green planet on the Western spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Here’s to Freedom!

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There is new evidence in the study of human consciousness that suggests that the highest level of consciousness – that of the awareness of one’s own thoughts in relation to the external world – is the product of a network of regional hubs in the brain all talking to one another.

It might be useful to think of this consciousness process as being similar to the process of triangulation when searching for the source of a signal. One takes several different receivers, from very different areas, with each one showing the general direction of the signal (but not the distance it is from the receiver), and combines all the data to pinpoint a very precise location of the signal. In the human brain, we have several different kinds of “receivers” that collect certain kinds of information from the world (both inside the body and out). In higher conscious awareness, it’s very likely that each of these regions sends it’s most useful data up into the “cloud” where it gets combined together for a single, tip of the iceberg, sensory impression of “What’s up?”

Of course as with any attempt to pinpoint anything more complex than an actual pinpoint, there will always be more information that lies beneath the surface. The rest of the iceberg might not be consciously visible, but it’s there, and it’s really, really big. And that’s why what we’re conscious of is nothing compared to what we know on a deeper, unconscious, level. Conscious certainly does allow us many wonderful opportunities to play around with ideas, but it’s always important to be conscious of the fact that consciousness is limited, and that trusting “instinct” the body’s less conscious awareness and communication system, is often at least as valuable, especially in the case of navigating through a very complex environment where there might be many enormous obstacles that only the unconscious mind is aware of…

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The number one thing you can do to improve the world, far and above anything else in life, is to grow your own, and forage for, diversity of greens to eat every single day.

Seriously. Nothing else will have a huge an impact on the world as whether or not our brains are well nourished. And doing so in the most sustainable way, by harvesting them in your own community.

What is a green? The simple answer is that a green is the leafy green part of a plant.

Basil leaves, carrot tops, wood sorrel (the heart shaped leaves on the plant that looks like a shamrock), grass, purslane, curly dock, pea sprouts, and kale are just a few of the thousands of different greens that are exceptionally nourishing for the human body. Take a look at a list of the top most nutritious foods, as defined by the USDA’s nutritional data, at NutritionData.com (scroll down past the categories until you see Basil proudly holding the number one spot!).

The reason why harvesting your own organic local greens and eating them every single day is the most effective way to make a better world is because all of our behavior is governed by our brains. And when out brains are deficient in the nutrients that greens provide, they become low functioning, muddy, and slow, and then we can’t possibly solve any of our global or even personal problems well. Trying to work with others to create a more good, beautiful, true, and inspiring world without a well nourished brain would be like trying to climb a mountain while being totally covered in slippery mud. We’d just keep sliding backwards.

So, for our brains to work at peak problem solving ability, and to achieve our highest goals for ourselves and our world, we need those super green nutrients.

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When you are working with the capacity for third person perspective, which nearly every human who’s matured past childhood has, at least to some extent, you are able to consider your own feelings about what you want, the feelings of your closest companion about what they want, and the general consensus about what the community around you wants.

This is great because you can really do a lot of complex analysis on possible options for what you do with yourself. You learn to tailor your actions so that they can best meet your needs, your companion’s needs, and the social norm of your environment. This makes you become a healthy contributor to the world, capable of joyful self-direction that also serves others.

But… as those of us who are a little older – nearing or past middle age for humans – know, the world is pretty diverse. Really, really diverse, in fact. As such, there really is no “social norm”. What the world is, on average, has very little to do with what goes on at any given time and place. That’s because the “average” is only a small slice of the vast curve that is all of life, with many less common things lying outside of the very center.

Once we’re able to see things from a fourth person perspective, we can see how important it is to further refine our awareness of the different kinds of cultures that exist in our world. With this more spiritual, post-logical, evolutionary way of considering things, we can see that just averaging the opinions of a large group of individuals, the way we tend to run things like elections in a democracy, is very likely going to lead to us missing out on some very important, and quite possibly crucial, information. With a fourth person perspective we can see that there will be smaller groups within the larger group, and that each smaller group has different needs and wants, based on their particular circumstances. If we don’t use an approach that allows each smaller group to be served individually, and just create policies that only serve what we’ve decided the average needs are, then most of what we end up doing will be a waste, and we’ll end up serving almost no one’s needs at all.

Which is why it’s time for our governments to grow up. It’s time for politics to get rid of a voting system that looks only at the average, and instead create a voting system that allows each smaller group, within the whole of the public, to clearly state their own priorities. Then we can more easily allocate the collective resources we have to where they are needed the most.

And to figure out how to best serve the needs of each group, we can again use the fourth person perspective as we research all the diverse ways that have been discovered for serving our needs, rather than trying to find some “average” solution that has a reasonable probability of not working in any particular situation.

In other words, rather than looking for a single, average approach to things, we can sort the different approaches we’ve created and discovered into categories of where and when they work best, and we can keep those options available in a database that is accessible to all, both in the government and outside, so that everyone always has the best information available for solving their particular group’s problems.

Imagine a government that honestly works to give you what you need most, regardless of whether or not it’s the same thing that others need…

Imagine that next time you go to vote in an election, you had the option of selecting any or all of the following:

I want the government to focus our collective resources on providing me with the best quality…

Inputs
□ Food
□ Water
□ Air
□ Warmth
□ Light

Outlets for expressing my excess
□ Solids
□ Gases
□ Liquids
□ Energy

Wouldn’t that represent your own interests far, far more effectively than any government election you’ve ever seen before in the past? And what would you vote for in this election? And would you want to see these options be further subdivided?

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Ideas can indeed be independent and capable of being valued totally on their own, without an identified speaker.

And stories – those thoughts and feelings that are connected to specific times and dates and individuals and experiences that lead to complaints, praise, concern, and love – they need to come with the context of not just a name, but the whole sensory expansion that is an individual being, their style, their age, their voice, their energy, their physical expression of themselves, and, yes, their name. Stories that don’t have the full context of who is telling them will fall flat, and be lost in a sea of fully fleshed out tales that truly convey the kind of information that we humans crave, as we collectively tell the story of life.

Ideas change and grow and multiply and divide as they spread out across the networks of connected neurons and other storage and communication devices of reality.

Stories keep their core linear narrative, and the important details of the who, what, where, when, and hopefully at least a little of why as they march forward in a parade-like procession, gathering an audience as they go.

Ideas are useful for solving practical problems.

Stories are useful for understanding life.

Ideas and stories are both valuable, and both need venues that welcome and share them… Where do you go to listen to and tell your stories? Where do you go to listen to and tell your ideas?

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Openly and publicly be consistent in demonstrating what one personally wants.

Breaking the words down… “Stand” gives us the consistent part, as opposed to some kind of moving around, such as wavering, running away, pushing, sidling, etc.

The “up” gives us the public part, as opposed to laying low/down.

The “for” part means the positive, wanting stuff, as opposed to being against stuff.

And the “oneself” part is doing it openly (full disclosure of one’s true self), as opposed to standing up for “someone, somewhere”.

Clearly, there is no pushing other people around, being negative, hiding, or saying one thing to one person and another to another person involved. Sometimes these other things are valuable, but they are not “standing up for oneself” at least not in any kind of accurate or literal sense.

This is something that most folks aren’t ever taught! Imagine if kids learned this in kindergarten, so that they had a logical and literal understanding of how they can, indeed, stand up for themselves when confronted by bullies?

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In my research, I’ve studied many different approaches to the most effective communication, from the more business end of things with the classic Getting to Yes, to more mainstream mediation techniques, to some psychological (DBT), philosophical (Hegelian dialectic), technological (NLP), and spiritual (Byon Katie’s inquiry process and a bit of Buddhism, too) versions of “looking at reality from different perspectives” to better understand the duality/complexity of the truth. And I’ve looked into some enthusiastic pop culture amalgams of approaches including Marshal Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, John Gottman’s and Julie Schwartz’s Ten Lessons to Transform Your Marriage, and at least one exceptionally charismatic “Pick-Up Artist” guy who’s name I totally can’t remember (but I could probably find out if anyone really cared).

And through all of these diverse approaches, the single most consistent thing about The Most Effective and Compassionate Communication that I’ve learned is: Speak the highest, most valuable truth that are your most joyful intentions for what you want to be able to do.

As I’ve mentioned before, your internal dreams for your own most ideal self are a rare gift that people absolutely need to understand and support you the best they possibly can. Not only are your expressions of your ideals for who you want to be going to most likely be well respected – because they are indeed pure expressions of your core humanity, which all humans inherently share and understand, at least on a subconscious level – but also your expressions of your ideal future self fill up the garden that is other people’s vision of your life which might otherwise get filled with harmful and ineffective toxic stuff that is made up of complaints, threats, demands, and unrealistic expectations about others. These toxic things only push people away and make you look like an unreasonable, sick, dangerous person, and kill all the life that might be trying to grow in the metaphorical garden that you are creating in the world.

Too much of the more mainstream and common approaches to communication and relationships gets mired in these unhealthy, toxic, enabling ideas of “boundaries”, “rules”, and “punishments”, which is all so unfortunate, as these negatives do make people more stressed and defensive and get in the way of people being able to give others the gift of their highest self – their most spectacular garden. Even though the original motives for doing so might be good and peace loving, trying to change others though negative, aggressive, violent, forceful approaches is what has been proven time and time again to always backfire in the long run. Putting up defensive walls around the self’s garden, walls made up of expectations and demands and attachments to the idea of “no trespassing”, or entering the garden only with lordly “permission”, only sets everyone up for failure, due to the reality of complexity and chaos and flow in life, and of the absolute need for the pollination and pruning and fertilizing that comes from the sometimes challenging and unpleasant events such as hungry beetles and bunnies and bears, high winds, torrential downpours, scorching sun, and even occasional fires, that allow the garden to flourish so magnificently over time.

Obviously, the negative internal truths that are the fear-based stuff of what one does NOT want does sometimes have to be expressed in order to clear out the previously mucked up space, to make room for the healthy stuff. Sometimes we do need to forcefully remove a small part of the self’s garden that has been entirely destructive and sick – a plant that is totally infested with insects, for example – or just generally getting in the way like so many rocks. But this is inherently different from trying to change other people, though – you don’t need to kill the insects or try to force them to eat something else that they are not designed to eat, instead, simply move them away from the garden itself, alive and intact, by removing the whole plant they are attached to – the rocks and bugs aren’t inherently “bad”, they are just better suited to being somewhere else. Effective detoxification is an internal clarification of the opposite of the self’s needs, based on evidence of what previously seems to have gotten in the way of the self being able to accomplish what it most wants to be. So there does indeed need to be a venue for us saying things like “I’m frustrated because I wanted to do X, but someone doing Y got in my way, so I think I might want to stay away from anyone doing Y in the future when I want to do X” in a welcoming, and appreciative, and understanding way. We all need a reasonable place, well away from our garden spaces, to compost any shit that is too intense and challenging for our own internal healthy growth. But detoxification is only the beginning of healing, as healing also requires the true nourishment that is your growing awareness of the highest truth of your potential, ideal self as a unique form of beautiful, joyful, creative, and compassionate energy moving through the universe. More than anything else, to grow the most beautiful garden, we need to have a reasonably clear vision of what kind of garden we most want to grow, and share that vision with everyone who expresses an interest in helping us.

Aaannnnnnd… what I have learned about how one gets to a point where one naturally, unconsciously, and automatically expresses one’s highest ideals of who one wants to be in the future, is for one to focus on giving themselves the highest quality nutritious food, cleanest water, freshest air, most loving warmth (including touch), most invigorating sunlight, and most welcoming freedom to express all of one’s excess solids, liquids, gases, and energy (including all physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual expressions). One can certainly consciously make an effort to express one’s vision of one’s most gorgeous garden of the self, and one also needs to take excellent care of the gardener, so that the garden will indeed be nurtured into the most joyful and thriving gift to the whole world with the most effortlessness, instinctive energy.

Seriously, the base of all our higher abilities for being awesome humans rests securely in the physical input and output needs for our body – the gardener – so that the vision of the garden can be clear, and the process of gardening can happen with the most grace and fluidity and strength.

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Unicorns exist in reality. Unicorns are a combination of a horse and a narwhal (or some other single horned creature). Unicorns might not have ever lived as an individual being, but they most definitely have existed as the sum of parts that do exist in life. Also, a horse is probably more than 99.9% unicorn, and thus, in the “set of living beings” unicorns exist with more certainty than the vast majority of other things in human experience. (How certain are you that someone really loves you, as opposed to just selfishly benefiting from being around you? 50% 80% 95%? How certain are you that the moon isn’t just painted on a big dome in the sky in glow in the dark paint? How about the likelihood that there really was a man named Shakespeare who wrote Hamlet? Or that the best friend you had as a kid but haven’t seen in decades isn’t just in your imagination? Or how about the speed of light?).

In human experience, truth is always a percentage – a probability that is a result of a combination of two or more factors interacting in a given situation.

X exists if and/or when at least Y and Z are present.

The only exception for truth always being a percentage (less than 100%) is for what we might call “Everything” or “The All” or the “Whole Enchilada” or “God” or “Wherever God Exists” or “The Metaverse” or whatever term we decide to use to describe “all of the possibilities, ever, in all of existence, combined”. If such an end point to all of reality exists, where everything that is possible finally exists, then it could be said to be pure 100% pure maple syrup! (Or, more likely, “the whole truth”.) But everything else must, logically, always be less than pure truth, and will always be defined by some partial set of factors in time and space, as perceived from some specific point in time and space.

Which is why getting closer to the truth is all about triangulation – looking at things from different perspectives, to get a more wholistic – 4D – understanding of them as they exist as combinations of all sorts of different points along the X, Y, Z, and time axes.

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