Revelation - Saint Lucia - CMEX

It occurs to me that my interest in spirituality is based on a deep desire to be fully present in my life, to perpetually find joy and grace in all of my experiences. This is what some call “bliss” or “enlightenment”. It is a delicious state of consciousness and being to which the mystic aspires.

Knowledge stored in ancient spiritual texts combined with the expansion of consciousness that occurs during meditation put our feet firmly on the path to this enlightenment. Time spent in solitude can bring us closer to the experience of being 'one' with creation.

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days in Saint Lucia, West Indies at a Caribbean Media Exchange conference on “Sustainable Tourism”. Saint Lucia is a beautiful island with warm and friendly people. I was awe-struck, from the lush, ancient rain forest to the modern resorts architecturally designed to blend into the ecology. The representatives of the island whom I met had a passion for the land that showed in their commitment to sustainable farming and eco-tourism. The conference schedule left little time for reading my sacred books and I did not do my regular meditations. There were so many people interested in talking with me that I found it difficult to be in solitude even for a few moments.

It was on this exquisite and beautiful island that I had a revelation. Looking out at the clear, blue ocean with the mountains all around me and feeling the sun pouring over my skin, I realized that I need to incorporate this kind of activity into my life on a more regular basis.

I realized that every once in a while, I need to get my head out of the spiritual texts, open my eyes from meditation, come away from my solitude and truly experience the glorious creation of Almighty God.

Links:
1. St. Lucia Ministry of Tourism - http://www.stlucia.gov.lc/agencies/ministry_of_tourism_and_civil_aviation.htm
2. Caribbean Media Exchange - http://www.caribbeanmediaexchange.com/
3. Anse Chastanet, Jade Mountain - http://www.jademountain.com/
4. Coco Palm - coco-resorts.com

5. Hotel Chocolat - http://www.hotelchocolat.com/
6. Indigenous Environmental Network - http://www.ienearth.org

Pictures:

1. The Pitons, St. Lucia, West Indies

2. Anse Chastanet, Jade Mountain Resort, St. Lucia

3. "Inside" the Anse Chastanet, Jade Mountain Resort, St. Lucia

Happy 75th Birthday to Carl Sagen !

Ann Druyan, the wife and long-time partner of Carl Sagan often said that Science is as spiritual as any religion. What it lacks is good music. John Boswell may have created the first "scientific hymn". In this video called, "A Glorious Dawn", he pays tribute to Sagan. I think it's a wonderful blend of science, art and creative license. Druyan could have stopped the video with a threat of copyright infringement but did not. Instead, she praises Boswell and says that Carl Sagan would have loved it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

Possibilities of Time Travel?

Although Einstein's theory of Special Relativity shows that time is relative and travel is theoretically possible, in the physical world is believed to be impossible because in would require a velocity greater than the speed of light to achieve.

As a particle approaches the speed of light, the effects of gravity on its mass would make it too heavy for any known force to enable it to continue to accelerate. Actually, we experience time travel continuously but only in one direction –forward.

So this applies to particles with mass. Thought consciousness, presumably has no mass so is it possible, at least in theory, for our consciousness to experience time travel into the past? Mystics through the ages have reported an ability to move through time. This is even hinted at in the Sci-Fi show, “Lost”.

Here’s an interesting article about a real-world attempt to build a Flux Capacitor for time travel.
The popular film, "Back to the Future" was based on this idea. Any rocket scientists out there?

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1105back-to-the-future

…and now a disclaimer:
This is a somewhat difficult subject for me to pursue. I am not a scientist but I am a strong advocate for science. Much of the science is over my head and certainly most of the math is way over my head.

So my approach here is more philosophical and spiritual than scientific. Therein, lies the rub: How does one negotiate the intersection of science and spirituality? Is there even an intersection? I’ve heard it said that science attempts to answer the questions what and how whereas spirituality attempts to answer the questions why and who. In this blog, I am exploring the possibilities or the questions about if.

The Nature of the Meditation I do

I’m not planning to do a daily entry. At most, I will probably update this blog weekly but, at this point, I have a backlog of ideas to sort out. I thought it would be good to have a brief discussion of what happens during the initial stages of Transcendental Meditation (which I will refer to as TM henceforth).
You start by internally repeating a mantra which is given to you by your instructor. In my case, it was a word in Sanskrit. The word itself has no meaning to someone who doesn’t speak Sanskrit so there are no thought images associated with it. TM instructors say that these sounds have been specifically chosen to create the desired effect. The sound has a calming effect on the mind which, in turn relaxes the body. The body being more relaxed, in turn calms down the mind even more. So this iterative process continues until you are in a deep state of relaxation.
My experiential evidence of the meditative state of consciousness is that during meditation, I have a sense of peace and timelessness. There have been times when I thought I had been in meditation for only a few minutes but after coming out, more than an hour had passed. At times, I don’t experience thoughts yet I am fully aware. What TM instructors say is that during this phase, your mind has “transcended” into the field that is the source of all thought and it is a field of pure creativity. So, I became very curious about this field. Does it exist inside the human mind or is it a dimension that is shared among all humans or, indeed all of conscious existence?

The problem with exploring this within the TM movement is that after the initial training, it becomes more of a religious exercise where students are encouraged to read the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu spiritual texts. At the time, I was not interested in that.

This is My First Post

I started this blog so that I would have a central location to collect and store my thoughts and notes pertaining to the study of consciousness. I have been a “student” of consciousness for more than 35 years starting with subjective experiences I had after learning Transcendental Meditation as an undergraduate in college. During meditation, I experienced a state of being where I could observe my own mental or conscious processes. It is a very powerful experience but almost impossible to describe on paper. I became aware of this as a unique state of consciousness which was different from waking, sleeping or dreaming. I am a skeptic by nature so I wanted to understand what could be causing this mental experience within the physical (or material) world. Was it just my subjective experience or was it a natural course due to the consistent practice of meditation?
I discovered that descriptions of this meditative state could be found in ancient spiritual texts and in the mythologies of a number of indigenous cultures. Again, my skeptic nature turned me to a more objective way to study this but I couldn’t not find an epistemology for the study of consciousness. So I started looking more into physics, organic chemistry and other areas of science as a way to gain a more objective way to think about a subjective experience.
I also began to “sense” a unifying presence in almost everything I studied. I noticed this in how the Universe behaved whether I looked at cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry or mathematics but, so far, I have not found any evidence of a correlation between the physical world and my subjective conscious experience.
Recently, I read Dan Brown’s novel, “The Lost Symbol” which examined concepts of power in the human mind. This tells me that there is a large enough collective consciousness about this topic that I can find kindred spirits.
So, as I said, this is just a place for me to collect and store my thoughts from the past 30 years and going forward but feel free read and to post if you’d like.