reality creation Archives - TheTranscendenceDiaries

Realism Is False — by Donald D. Hoffman

January 7, 2023

This is an article I came upon recently that I found absolutely fascinating. One, because it’s about a subject I write a lot about in the Transcendence Diaries, knowing full well that it may be the most unpopular and non-topical subject in the society we currently live in — [I am working on a piece presently related to just this, called The Death Of the Intellectual In the Modern Age], and two, because the author, Hoffman, attempts to explore consciousness from a scientific approach, resisting the popular trend of relegating the study of consciousness to the fields of philosophy or metaphysics. There’s hardcore science here. It may not be an easy read in some places; but it’s thoroughly refreshing to follow along the thoughts and thinking process of someone so ravenously intellectually curious and well thought out. A rare occurrence in our time. The piece was originally published in Edge on January 27, 2020. I am re-posting it here in the Diaries for informational purposes and as reference material. I believe it’s a must read for anyone interested in Ontology or Consciousness Studies. – Ed Hale

A Conversation with Donald D. Hoffman [1.27.20]

. . . I want to propose that realism is false, and what we’re seeing is more like a user interface or a virtual reality headset. Think about a virtual reality game of tennis. You’re playing VR tennis with a friend, you both have your headset and body suits on, you see your friend’s avatar on a tennis court and you start playing. Your friend hits the tennis ball to you, and you hit the same tennis ball back to your friend, but is your friend seeing exactly the same tennis ball that you’re seeing? Well, of course not. There’s no public tennis ball. You have some photons being sprayed to your eye by your headset, and those photons are causing your visual system to create your own perception of what you would call a green tennis ball. Your friend has a headset on, which is spraying photons to his eye, and his visual system is creating his own green tennis ball perception.

All the things that we would do to say that objects really exist even when they’re not perceived hold here in virtual reality. . . . That doesn’t mean that the tennis ball exists and has any physical properties when it’s not perceived; it just means that there is some objective reality.

DONALD D. HOFFMAN is a full professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, most recently, of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Donald D. Hoffman’s Edge Bio Page

REALISM IS FALSE

Some of the questions I’m asking myself are about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. I’m trying to understand the classic mind-body problem—how consciousness is related to the physical brain or to physical systems more generally, perhaps computing systems. That’s been a conundrum for centuries. Gottfried Leibniz understood it, Thomas Huxley understood it, Francis Crick understood it and said we should really study it. So, I’ve been studying it.

What’s bothering me and many people in our field is that we have so far failed to get a scientific physicalist theory of consciousness that starts with neural activity, or starts with computer programs or some kind of abstract functional architecture and, without any further magic, gives us specific conscious experiences, like the taste of chocolate or the smell of garlic, arising in very specific mathematically precise ways from those physical or functional systems.

Right now, I’m trying to start with a theory of consciousness in which consciousness itself is fundamental. So again, it’s a mathematically precise theory. When we try to come up with a mathematically precise new theory, one of the things we have to do is think about the basic assumptions that we’re going to build into the theory. Every scientific theory starts with certain assumptions, certain axioms if you will, and then tries to build up an explanation of the other things. No theory in science can explain everything. We always have a few things that we assume, and then we try to explain everything else in terms of those few things.

In physical theory, for example, we’ve assumed space, time, matter, or quantum fields are fundamental, and then we can explain chemistry and biology. We’ve tried to use that kind of framework so that with those assumptions, we can try to boot up a theory of consciousness that explains exactly what physical systems or computational systems must be the taste of chocolate and could not be the taste of vanilla. There’s not a single theory that’s been proposed that can explain even one specific conscious experience.

So, what are the basic assumptions that we would need to build into a theory of consciousness? We don’t want to put too many assumptions on the table. We want the minimal number of assumptions that will give the maximum explanation. I’ve been playing with the idea of what I call a conscious agent, which has a set of conscious experiences and can act on those experiences. I have a mathematical formalism for it. Briefly, it’s measurable spaces of conscious experiences and Markovian kernels for decisions and actions based on those experiences.

One thing that comes out of this formalism is that it’s computationally universal. Anything about learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, self, any of those things that we would think should ultimately be part of a theory of consciousness are not part of my assumptions; those are things that I will try to build out of networks of these conscious agents. The idea is that we’ll have these interacting social networks of conscious agents and, by the dynamics of the networks of conscious agents, we’ll build up theories of learning, memory, problem solving, intelligence, and the notion of a self.

I have a wonderful team of collaborators including Chetan Prakash, Manish Singh, Chris Fields, Robert Prentner, Federico Faggin, and Mauro D’Ariano working with me on the mathematics and the network dynamics and so forth. Ultimately, to solve the mind-body problem—how consciousness is related to the physical world—we’re going to have to start with this theory of consciousness and show how the physical world arises. We’re assuming consciousness is fundamental, not space, time, and matter. We’re going to have to get space, time, matter, and all of modern physics coming out from this network of conscious agents. The question is how to do that. Is that something that is at all compatible with some of the best views in modern physics?

Our team has been looking at some of the recent developments in physics, in particular the work of Nima Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators, in which they’re saying that spacetime has been the foundational idea in physics. In some sense, physics has been about what happens inside space and time for centuries. Spacetime has had a good run; it’s been a foundational assumption in physics. But there are lots of indications, especially from quantum theory and general relativity, that spacetime cannot be fundamental. As some of the physicists are putting it: spacetime is doomed. That’s not my quote, it’s theirs. There’s got to be something deeper that’s fundamental, outside of space and time, that gives rise to space and time. We’re not saying quantum mechanics is wrong or general relativity is wrong. They’re beautiful and powerful theories, but at some point, there are questions they can’t answer and problems that cannot be explained.

For example, spacetime itself. If you try to observe it at finer and finer scales with a bigger and bigger microscope, one problem is eventually the energies that are required to look at finer and finer resolution of spacetime, when you get down to the Planck scale, the energies create a black hole and you destroy the very thing that you’re trying to look at. And if you add more energy, the black hole just gets bigger. Physicists will say that if spacetime is not something we can measure with absolute precision, then it’s not a fundamental concept. We need something more fundamental.

Another idea they have is that in quantum theory you have an observer and a system, and the observer itself needs to be infinite to have infinite resolution in the measurements that it makes of a system. If you have a room in which you’re trying to do a measurement, to get more precise measurements, the observer has to be bigger with more mass. At some point, the observer itself collapses the room into a black hole. As they say, there are no local observables in quantum theory.

The question that I’m dealing with now is, how can I connect this idea of conscious agents and some of the new theories that physicists are coming up with that try to go beyond space and time?

There’s something called scattering amplitudes, the scattering behavior of particles in the Large Hadron Collider. So you smash protons together at near the speed of light. In many cases, you’ll have quarks and gluons hit each other and spray out, so you might have two gluons coming in and four gluons spraying out. You see these things in the detectors, and you can talk about the probabilities or what they call the amplitudes for these various scattering events. They’ve discovered that if you do the computations of the scattering amplitudes in space and time using Feynman diagrams, you get hundreds of pages of math. It’s ugly and you can’t do it in real time because you’re doing a billion of these collisions per second, roughly. They found that they could collapse these expressions to simple expressions, from hundreds of pages down to two or three terms, if they don’t do the computation in space and time.

One of the things they deal with is something called the amplituhedron. It’s a geometric object outside of space and time, and the volumes of various parts of the amplituhedron correspond to the probabilities of these scattering events. This amplituhedron has symmetries that cannot be expressed in space and time. The physicists are discovering that there’s this new realm behind space and time. They don’t know what it’s about. Right now, they’re following the math, which is telling us that there is this structure outside of space and time and it makes the computation simpler, gives us insight into symmetries that you can’t see in space and time.

Maybe this dynamic of conscious agents that we’re thinking about could be the realm behind space and time. My big project over the next couple of years, with the physicists on my team, is to try to understand how the dynamics of conscious agents might give rise to this amplituhedron.

One of the ideas I’m looking at has to do with the dynamics of conscious agents, the so-called Markovian dynamics. That just means that what you’re going to do at this moment depends pretty much on your current state. So, whatever your current state is, it governs all the probabilities of what you’re going to do at the next decision point. You have only a finite memory of what you’ve done in the past, and it’s only a finite memory of what you’ve done in the past that influences your future behavior.

When you look at these kinds of Markovian dynamics, you can look at their long-term behavior. We have a step-by-step behavior of what conscious agents are doing at each step of their interaction. Think of their interactions like a vast social network, like the Twitterverse. There’s a bunch of conscious agents, like a bunch of Twitter users, and they’re all interacting with each other. But what they’re doing is passing experiences back and forth between each other.

We can look at the dynamics of what’s happening at each step of this social network in this interaction, or we can look asymptotically. As the number of interactions goes to infinity, what kinds of patterns do you see there? That’s where I’m thinking we might get the connection to physics and the amplituhedron, not at the step-by-step dynamics of conscious agents. That’s too fine a grain. If we look at the infinite long-term asymptotic behavior of these social networks of conscious agents, that asymptotic behavior erases a lot of the detailed information about the social network and how it works. On the other hand, it’s capturing the long-term patterns. That’s going to be one of those central proposals. What physics has been doing is capturing just the long-term asymptotic behavior of these networks of conscious agents. That’s why it hasn’t looked conscious at all.

For example, if you’re looking at the freeways in Southern California from an airplane, you just see a bunch of little dots moving around. There’s not much evidence of any consciousness or intelligence. You’re looking at it from a high level and you’re erasing a lot of information. You don’t see all the conscious individuals inside the cars. You just see this pattern of flow, of little dots on streets. That’s what physics has been seeing. It’s not seeing the step-by-step dynamics of the conscious agents. It’s only seeing a top-level asymptotic description of the long-term behavior of these social networks of conscious agents. That’s why we haven’t seen things that look like they’re conscious, because we’re only seeing the long-term behavior.

Of course, there’s a lot of specific mathematical steps that we’ll have to take to prove that the asymptotic dynamics of these social networks precisely fits into the structure of the amplituhedron, which they have shown can give rise to the interesting features of quantum theory and relativity theory combined.

That’s one thing I’m trying to work on—flesh out this model of conscious agent networks, look at the asymptotic behavior of these dynamics, and then plug that into the amplituhedron. That whole process will help me with another big problem we’ve got, which is if consciousness is fundamental, there’s this social network of conscious agents out there and they’re interacting—why? The right answer is, I don’t know. I’m trying to first come up with some principled ideas that are at least plausible for what the dynamics of consciousness is fundamentally about.

One idea my team and I are playing with is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Gödel showed that if you have any sufficiently complex mathematical system, and that system has a set of axioms, there will be truths that are consistent with those axioms, but they cannot be proved from that set of axioms. There are unprovable truths. And if you add those new truths (that you couldn’t prove before) as axioms to a bigger system, then Gödel’s theorem says there will be yet new truths that can’t be proven within your bigger system of axioms.

Effectively, this means that the exploration of mathematical structure is, in principle, endless. There will be no end to the exploration of what we can do in mathematics. Why is that interesting in the context of a theory of consciousness and conscious agents? Well, it turns out that consciousness and mathematics are intimately linked.

There’s a field called psychophysics that has studied conscious experiences since 1860. One thing that we’ve discovered in our psychophysical studies in the lab and with the mathematical models is that conscious experiences are highly structured. We can write down mathematical models that predict not only judgments of similarity between various like colors, but also predict precisely what three-dimensional structures you will see and when you will see them. It’s mathematics through and through. I’m not saying that consciousness just is mathematics; it’s more like consciousness and mathematics are like a living organism and the bones. The bones are the mathematics and consciousness is the living organism. That’s one reason why we can hope to build a mathematical model of consciousness and conscious agents. The mathematics is a genuine insight into the structural aspects of consciousness, but of course there’s more to consciousness than just the mathematics.

This is where Gödel’s theorem comes in. It says the structures that consciousness can take and that these conscious agents can explore are endless. One idea is that the goal of consciousness and of these conscious agents is endless exploration of all the possible varieties of conscious experiences and their structures. It may or may not be true, but at least it seems deep enough that it’s a plausible candidate to answer the question of what the dynamics of consciousness is all about.

Suppose we hit a dead end there and that idea turns out to be wrong, that Gödel’s theorem, as interesting as it is, turns out not to be an adequate foundation for our dynamics of conscious agents. If we can take our theory of conscious agents, show how it plugs into, say, the amplituhedron, and then eventually into quantum field theory and general relativity, then what we may be able to do is reverse engineer things. Once we know how to map from conscious agent dynamics into modern physics, can we reverse that map? Can we take what we know about modern physics and its dynamics, pull it back into the realm of conscious agents, and say what kinds of dynamics would get pulled back? That may then focus our attention on certain kinds of conscious agent dynamics that may then help us to grope toward the answer to the question of what consciousness is all about.

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I got my BA in quantitative psychology from UCLA. While I was there, I took some classes on artificial intelligence and neuroscience of vision that caught my interest. One class pulled those together, a graduate class that I took in which we looked at the work of David Marr. He was bringing artificial intelligence ideas together with neuroscience ideas to study human vision. His idea was to be mathematically precise, to come up with mathematical theories that you could implement in a computer for things like seeing in 3D, object perception, and object recognition. As an undergraduate, I thought this was wonderful. This was someone who was using mathematics, computers, and artificial intelligence to solve problems in human vision, and eventually to build robotic vision systems.

I was very interested in the relationship of computing to humans. I was interested in questions like, are humans just computers or are we more than computers? And, what’s the relationship between human cognition and computation? David Marr was at MIT in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and what’s now the Brain and Cognitive Science Department, so I went there, and he and Whitman Richards became my co-advisors.

I worked with Marr for only about fourteen months because he died young, at age thirty-five of leukemia, unfortunately. It was a great loss personally and to the field. But I did have that chance to work with him and the wonderful team that he’d assembled around him. I got to jump in and see what artificial intelligence can do, how far it can go in understanding human vision.

I completed my PhD there, working on human vision. Then I went to UC Irvine as a professor of cognitive sciences in 1983, and I’ve been there ever since. Now my own research is focused on specific problems in human vision, because it’s good to take on specific problems if you’re trying to understand how human nature is related to computation. It’s good to jump in and try to build computational devices that model human nature and see how far you can go. It turns out you can go quite far. In fact, there’s almost no area of cognitive science—learning, memory, problem solving, sensory perception, language development—that isn’t beautifully treated by these functionalist computer kinds of models. There’s only one area that has been a problem, and that is conscious experience.

~ ~ ~ ~

There’s an attitude toward things that accepts the possibility that everything I believe is false. But if I’m right about anything, I’m right that I have experiences—that I’m having a headache right now, or that I’m experiencing a chair in front of me, or a table. As philosophers say, I’m having an experience “as of” a table, or an experience as of a chair, or as of a spoon. So, if I look ahead of myself and I see a table, I’m having an experience as of a table. If I close my eyes, then my experience changes and I no longer have an experience as of a table. Then when I open my eyes, I have once again an experience as of a table.

My physicalist colleagues will say that the table is what’s real; it’s there all the time. Even when my eyes are closed, there is a table that exists even if no perceiver were to look at it. The table not only exists, but it has roughly the shape, texture, color, and other properties that I see. That’s a pretty strong claim.

The physicalist is making the stronger and more tendentious claim, that physical objects have definite values of physical properties, like position, momentum, spin, even if no creature observes it. That’s a strong claim, and it might even sound like a non-scientific claim. That’s more than I’m claiming if I just take conscious experiences as fundamental. All I’m claiming is that when I open my eyes, I have an experience as of a table, and when I close my eyes, who knows what’s happening in objective reality. Of course, you could turn it around and say I’m claiming that if consciousness is fundamental and the physical world isn’t fundamental, there is no table when I don’t observe, no object with a definite position, momentum, and spin. That also seems to be a non-scientific claim. How can you claim something about a physical object and its properties when nothing is observing it? How can you possibly have an experiment to test that?

This kind of debate about whether physical objects exist and have definite properties when they’re not observed is one that Einstein was pushing back in the 1920s and 1930s. It seemed to Einstein that quantum mechanics was saying the moon doesn’t exist when no one observes it, at least in the interpretation of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the Copenhagen interpretation, had.

Wolfgang Pauli was quite impatient with Einstein. He said the kinds of questions that Einstein was asking were like asking how many angels dance on the head of a pin. Who cares? This was a metaphysical thing that couldn’t be answered with experiment anyway, so why bother with it? That was Pauli’s attitude. Pauli was a towering genius, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. It turns out though that he was wrong—this is a question that we can ask and answer experimentally.

A physicist named John Bell, in 1963, found a series of experiments that could test whether something like an atom has a definite value of position, or momentum, or spin even when it’s not observed. It sounds impossible. How could you have a series of experiments that definitely tell you an answer to the question of whether something exists with definite values of properties even when you don’t look at it? Bell discovered that you could test something called local realism, to which there’s two parts.

Realism is the claim that physical objects have definite values of position, momentum, and spin when they’re not observed—that’s realism. Locality is the additional assumption that those definite values of the physical properties have influences that propagate no faster than the speed of light through space. Bell proposed this set of experiments, something called Bell’s inequalities—a beautiful theorem that he came up with. It took a couple of decades, but we got the technology roughly in the 1980s and then started doing the experiments. The experiment has been done many times.

People were blown away by the answer, which is that local realism is false. That has been established by experiment repeatedly. Local realism is absolutely false, but there’s two aspects to it. It could be that either realism is false—particles or objects don’t have definite values of their properties when they’re not observed—or it could be that locality is false—influences can propagate faster than the speed of light. Or it could be that both locality and realism are false.

Then there was another theorem in 1963 and 1964 that Bell and two physicists named Simon Kochen and Ernst Specker proved. It’s about realism and what they called “non-contextuality.” It’s not about local realism, it’s about non-contextual realism. The question here is, is non-contextual realism true? Non-contextual realism is the claim that physical objects, like an atom, have a definite position, or spin, or momentum when they’re not observed. Second, these definite values, their prior nature does not depend on how you choose to measure. The kind of measurement you make does not in any way alter these preexisting values. That’s non-contextual realism.

It turns out that our best theory, quantum theory, predicts quite clearly that non-contextual realism is false. Local realism is false, non-contextual realism is false, and that leaves it quite open that realism itself is false. If realism is false, that raises a couple of questions. Is that true only for microscopic objects—electrons, protons, neutrons, and photons—and not more macroscopic objects?

It’s turning out that this border between the microscopic and the macroscopic, first, is very suspicious. No one has ever been able to make a principled size or scale distinction. What size is microscopic and what scale is macroscopic? Recent experiments have been showing that we can put bigger and bigger systems of atoms—some getting pretty big now, thousands of atoms—and put them in quantum superpositions so that the quantum effects that the Kochen-Specker-Bell inequalities are true of these systems that involve thousands of atoms. These are huge molecules with thousands of atoms—getting close to the size of a virus. We suspect that as we continue to develop technology, we’ll find that this boundary between the microscopic and the macroscopic is not nearly so firm as you might think.

The bottom line is local realism is false and non-contextual realism is false. So, what does that mean about the notion of public physical objects? What do we mean in science by third-person science and public physical objects? Intuitively, what we talk about is the way science works and the way it’s in some sense objective. I can watch a ball rolling down an inclined plane, I can measure its acceleration, and I can compute the effects of gravity on it. Then you can look at that very same ball and make your own independent measurements of that public physical ball. If your measurements and my measurements agree, then we can start to have objective science.

There’s this notion of public physical objects and third-person science in the sense that independent observers can do scientific experiments on the same object and come to some kind of agreement. Sometimes the agreement isn’t absolute, like if we’re measuring the length of a meter stick. It turns out if you’re moving fast relative to me, you will get a different length for the meter stick than I will. There’s something called the Lorentz contraction that happens. We can take those kinds of things into account and have a dictionary between the distance you measure and the distance I measure. If they’re the same up to the Lorentz contraction, then we would still say that we agree. And even in special relativity, the spacetime interval is something that we would all agree with on the exact number. That’s the general notion that we have of public physical objects and third-person science.

The idea that local realism and non-contextual realism are false leads me to argue that in fact realism is false. I want to propose that realism is false, and what we’re seeing is more like a user interface or a virtual reality headset. Think about a virtual reality game of tennis. You’re playing VR tennis with a friend, you both have your headset and body suits on, you see your friend’s avatar on a tennis court and you start playing. Your friend hits the tennis ball to you, and you hit the same tennis ball back to your friend, but is your friend seeing exactly the same tennis ball that you’re seeing? Well, of course not. There’s no public tennis ball. You have some photons being sprayed to your eye by your headset, and those photons are causing your visual system to create your own perception of what you would call a green tennis ball. Your friend has a headset on, which is spraying photons to his eye, and his visual system is creating his own green tennis ball perception.

It turns out that both of those perceptions are coordinated by something else, namely a supercomputer that’s sending the photons to both headsets, causing both headsets to work in coordination. Notice in this example that it looks like there’s a public object, namely a green tennis ball, but there isn’t. There is your tennis ball that you perceive and that disappears when you close your eyes, and your friend’s tennis ball that he perceives and disappears when he closes his eyes. There’s no public tennis ball in this example.

All the things that we would do to say that objects really exist even when they’re not perceived hold here in virtual reality. We might say, I know that this table exists because I closed my eyes and my friend Joe can see the table even when I don’t look. Or I can close my eyes and touch the table and can feel it even when I’m not seeing it. Or I can take this spoon and close my eyes, drop it, and know exactly where to look when I open my eyes. You can do all those things in virtual reality. I can take my green tennis ball in virtual reality, close my eyes, drop the tennis ball and know where I’m going to see it. That doesn’t mean that the tennis ball exists and has any physical properties when it’s not perceived; it just means that there is some objective reality.

I’m not denying that there is an objective reality. There is some objective reality that exists independent of whether or not I perceive it, but that objective reality is not space and time or anything inside space and time. Those are just human forms of perception. That’s what quantum theory is telling us. It’s telling us local realism is false, non-contextual realism is false, and realism is false, at least what we call realism of objects in space and time. They don’t exist, except when they’re perceived. They don’t have their properties, except when they’re perceived because spacetime is not fundamental. That’s what the physicists are now telling us, like Nima Arkani-Hamed. Spacetime is doomed. There is an objective reality, but it’s not space and time. It’s a deeper reality outside of space and time. Spacetime is emergent and is not fundamental.

Here’s a cognitive neuroscientist talking about consciousness being fundamental reality, not space and time, and that’s surely treading on the turf of physics. So, what do physicists think about this? Do they just dismiss this out of hand? There’s an interesting history of physicists and their ideas about consciousness. Some of the early quantum physicists were very interested in consciousness. Erwin Schrödinger was interested in it, so were Eugene Wigner and John von Neumann. Wigner thought that consciousness was fundamental, and von Neumann said that as well. There are various interpretations as to whether he was serious about it or not, but he did talk about consciousness being fundamental.

There were a number of physicists who have said that, but among modern physicists, I would say that most simply do not take the idea that consciousness could be fundamental seriously. They would be dismissed pretty much out of hand. The idea that spacetime is doomed, that there’s something beyond space and time, doesn’t entail that that something is consciousness.

Some physicists are proposing that consciousness might be a state of matter. Max Tegmark, for example, has the notion of perceptronium, where certain states of matter could give rise to conscious experience. That idea is very different from the kind of idea that I’m proposing. I’m not proposing that consciousness is a special state of matter. I’m saying that consciousness is fundamental outside of space and time. Space and time itself, and what we call physical objects and their matter inside space and time, are interface descriptions of what’s going on in the dynamics of conscious agents.

Other physicists are proposing other models of what’s behind space and time; again, not consciousness, maybe quantum information—quantum bits and quantum gates. I certainly understand why a physicist would not feel inclined to jump all the way in and say consciousness is fundamental. The proof will be in what we can do. If we can get a mathematically precise theory of conscious agents and the network dynamics of those conscious agents, and we can show that it plugs in, say, to the amplituhedron that Nima Arkani-Hamed has been looking at, and it gives us new predictions, then and only then would I expect that physicists take this stuff seriously. I certainly understand them not taking it seriously until I make some new concrete prediction that affects physics.

I heard a talk recently by Nima Arkani-Hamed in which he said something he advised was just speculative on his part. He said that maybe one of the problems that they’re having in trying to get a deeper understanding of physics that resolves some of the paradoxes between quantum theory and gravity is the division between the subject and the object, between the observer and the observed. Somehow that division, which is required by quantum mechanics, is a real source of problems because the observer has to effectively be infinite if you’re going to have any precise measurements in quantum theory. That has to do with the idea that there are all these quantum fluctuations, and if you’re trying to measure something to infinite precision and you have a finite measuring device, then the quantum fluctuations will perturb the measuring device and give you the wrong answers by the time you get to the fiftieth decimal point, or the hundredth decimal point, or ten to the hundredth decimal point. He was saying maybe we’re going to have to figure out a way to either get rid of that division or multiple ways of doing that division. There’s something about the division between the observer and the observed that will have to be changed.

What’s interesting to me is that in this theory of conscious agents, that’s precisely what I do. The observer and the observed distinction goes away. All are the same mathematical structure, and all are conscious agents. In this dynamical theory, when agents interact, they form new agents. You can have simple agents with few conscious experiences, maybe only two. We might call that a one-bit agent; it only has two experiences, but they can interact to create two-bit agents and four-bit agents, all the way up to however big you want. What agents are really observing are other agents. So, the division between subject and object is not this fundamental distinction. The observer-observed are all the same kind of thing. The boundary between them is completely fluid.

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I’m collaborating with several mathematical physicists right now, working to get some predictions that will grab the interest of this community. One of the biggest influences on me, the person who got me into cognitive neuroscience was David Marr. His writing was powerful, his ideas were brilliant, and he grabbed my attention when I was in my early twenties. It was a great privilege to work with David Marr and then with Whitman Richards, who was my co-advisor while Marr was alive. After Marr died, Whitman Richards was my sole advisor. He was just a wonderful adviser. He gave me the freedom to pursue what I wanted to. He gave me feedback, treated me as an equal, and treated my ideas with respect. We were friends for decades afterwards until his death just a couple of years ago. Whitman had a long-term impact.

Another impact on me was a mathematician named Bruce Bennett, who was a professor of algebra and geometry here at UC Irvine. He took me under his wing when I first came here to UCI, and he and I collaborated for fifteen or twenty years. I’m not a mathematician, so he was very patient and taught me a lot of mathematics. Chetan Prakash, who is a mathematical physicist, also has had a big influence on me and has continued to collaborate with me.

More recently, Federico Faggin has been a big influence. Faggin is probably a name that most people haven’t heard but should know. He was the young genius at Intel who invented the microprocessor. He helped perfect the silicon gate technology. He went on to invent the Z80 and the 8080. He was the CEO of Zilog, also the CEO of Synaptics, where they developed the touch pad. Federico is a genius. He’s also very interested in consciousness.

He heard me give a talk six or seven years ago on my mathematical model of consciousness, struck up a conversation with me, and we’ve been friends ever since. We collaborate closely. His ideas are similar to mine. We’re on the same page, but different enough that it’s interesting. We have strong debates on the details, which is very good. Federico has helped to assemble a team that he’s funding. It would be difficult to get the National Science Foundation or the NIH to fund my research because it’s so far out there, but Federico Faggin is funding it from his own foundation, the Faggin Foundation, for which I’m exceedingly grateful. It’s not the funding that’s the primary thing, although it’s very helpful, but Federico’s ideas are extremely influential and helpful to me.

In terms of some other peers in philosophy of mind, I’m quite impressed with the work of Dave Chalmers. I like his thorough analysis, his mathematical sophistication, his philosophical sophistication, and his non-doctrinaire approach. I like how he surveys the various possibilities and looks at the pros and cons of the various possibilities. I never see him getting dragged into ad hominem debates. He always keeps it where it should be, which is not in personal attacks, but just focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of various ideas. I’ve been heavily influenced by Dave Chalmers and his writing.

There are definitely people who would disagree with me, as I believe Dan Dennett does. He is into conscious illusionism. I talk about conscious realism. I think conscious experiences are real and maybe the foundational reality. Dan Dennett says that space, time, and matter are fundamental. What we call consciousness, in particular, phenomenal conscious experiences—the “what is it like” aspect of consciousness—is merely an illusion that comes about when certain processes in our brain are monitoring the activity of other processes in our brain. The way they monitor and the language in which they couch what they’re monitoring is what leads to the illusion of consciousness. Keith Frankish, Dan Dennett, and others are spearheading this illusionism approach.

It’s not my approach and I disagree with it, but I’m glad they’re mapping out that part of the conceptual space. It’s important to have different points of views. Thinking about their ideas forces me to rethink certain aspects of my own approach. Yeah, we disagree, but it’s a profitable and useful kind of disagreement.

One other person that I should mention that was a big influence was Francis Crick. He was the one who gave permission for scientists to jump in and study consciousness. When I was a graduate student at MIT, I was interested in consciousness, but it wasn’t considered a proper subject of science. It was a little bit too woo woo. I studied it, but I didn’t call it that. I published a book with my collaborators, Bruce Bennett and Chetan Prakash called Observer Mechanics (1989). It’s effectively a mathematical model of dynamics of consciousness, but we just called it observer mechanics and left the consciousness out. Within a few years it was perfectly fine to talk about consciousness and that was largely due to the influence of Francis Crick.

Francis also was the intellectual leader of a group in Southern California that I was lucky to participate in called the Helmholtz club. The Helmholtz club brought together thinkers and professors from various universities in Southern California. We all met at the university club at UC Irvine for nearly twenty years on a roughly monthly basis, with some breaks. A group of a dozen or fifteen of us were the core group, and we would bring in guests and outside speakers. We were after understanding this hard problem of consciousness. Francis was looking at it from a hard-nosed neurobiological point of view—the neurocircuits and the activities that cause conscious experiences. He was hoping to demystify consciousness just like he’d demystified life when he and Watson discovered the structure of DNA. He was looking for the double helix of neuroscience that would demystify consciousness. It was a great pleasure to watch him at work, to see him grappling with the neuroscience data, questioning researchers about their latest findings, and then trying to come up with a model of how neuroactivity could create conscious experience.

I’m not going to be here forever. I need to help the next generation understand the ideas and carry on when I’m no longer able to do it. There is a balance that we all have to strike up between how much time we spend communicating the ideas and how much time we spend having fun exploring the ideas. That’s what it’s like climbing a mountain. You climb it because it’s there. We’re exploring these ideas because it’s incredibly fun to explore them, but then it’s time to stop having that fun. I do enjoy the communication process, but it’s different than the exploration of the ideas.

I try in my public communication, in podcasts and so forth, to communicate to a broad, intelligent but non-specialist audience. I would hope that intelligent, lower division undergraduates could understand what I’m saying. That’s my goal, because that’s often my audience. On the other hand, I’m hoping to catch the brilliant minds who know high-level physics or mathematics and could push this thing to heights that I can’t push it. I try to make it interesting to a broad audience, but also have enough beef that it is not dismissed by people who are talented and could find a real project in this.

I’m planning to officially retire from the UC Irvine this July. I’ll still be on the faculty, but I’ll be emeritus. I still plan to bring in grant money and do the research. As anybody who is a professor knows, you spend a lot of time teaching, and doing committee work, writing grants and reviewing grants, so all of the extraneous duties disappear. That’s one reason why I’m retiring. I’ll have more extended time to sink deeply into the ideas, especially when I’m trying to make this connection, which is my goal between the long-term behavior of conscious agent networks and perhaps the amplituhedron, or these interesting structures that physicists are finding that seem to be prior to spacetime and may give rise to spacetime.

My goal is to work with my team to get a mathematically rigorous theory over the next four or five years, and to get this far enough along that even if we don’t have the whole thing worked out, the ideas are promising enough that it’s worth writing a book that focuses on the idea that consciousness is fundamental. Even if I can’t bring that all the way home, I would like to bring it part of the way and then entice a new generation that’s mathematically sophisticated and sophisticated in physics to then bring it all the way home, and do it quickly enough that I can read it. I want to know the answer. That’s my real motivation. I want to know the answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Does the idea that consciousness is fundamental and could give rise to physics pan out? I am exceedingly interested in that. If I don’t get it, I need to get a book out there to have brighter people work on it so I can read their papers. That’s my goal

Bouncing Back When Flat — Ed Hale Opens Up in New Book and Interview

February 25, 2014

Earlier this year Ed Hale gave an in-depth interview with the website FlyFreeAvatar.com, where he opens up more about his music, business, spiritual and personal life than ever before. The interview also makes mention of the potential release of a new book entitled Bouncing Back When Flat. The interview is being reprinted here for Transcendence Diaries readers in its entirety with permission from the owners. Original interview published on February 1st, 2014 here: Bouncing Back When Flat — An Interview with Recording Artist Ed Hale

FlyFreeAvatar.com recently had the opportunity to get recording artist Ed Hale to sit down for an in-depth interview. This is a project we have spoken about doing for several years, and the New Year seemed like the perfect time to finally complete it. Hale has been in the public eye for most of his life, having released his first album at the age of 17. He is best known as a singer-songwriter and recording artist — as the lead singer of the musical group Ed Hale and the Transcendence, scoring numerous Top 40 hits over the last fifteen years — including classics like “Superhero Girl”, “Scene in San Francisco” and “New Orleans Dreams”. He is also well-known as a successful entrepreneur and businessman, a prolific writer, and an outspoken social and political activist and human rights advocate. He has a reputation for being open and outspoken about his personal life, especially in his popular long-running blog The Transcendence Diaries, which is celebrating its twelfth year online this year. He is refreshingly candid about sharing his spiritual views as well – a rare quality in the entertainment world. Being actively involved in community building and Civilian Diplomacy work with organizations like Habitat for Humanity and Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Hale has traveled the world extensively for diplomatic, peace and work trips and speaks six languages. Most applicable to this site, Hale has taken all of the Avatar Courses numerous times over the last 15 years and continues to do so on a regular basis.

FlyFreeAvatar (FFA): When I first thought about talking to you for this interview, there were two questions that came to mind immediately. The first was about how your music has been affected by taking the Avatar courses. And the second was about all the success you’ve had over the years and how much of a role you think Avatar has played in it.

Ed Hale (EH): Yep. I can see that. Those are the two questions I get asked the most when it comes to Avatar. But that’s TWO questions you know. [laughs]

FFA: Okay so let’s start with your career success. With the band’s last album’s success and the hit singles you had from your solo album, “Scene in San Francisco” and “New Orleans Dreams” climbing the Billboard Top40 Charts, why don’t we start there? With your career success. How much of a role do you think Avatar has played in that?

EH: Well I had achieved success in music at an early age. Long before I took the Avatar Course for the first time. So I don’t want to mislead anyone on that count. But it was short lived. I mean, I was signed, released an album, had a few hits and was touring before I finished high school. And then it was all over before I graduated college! [laughs] But this latest success? I think we could safely say that I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for everything I learned in Avatar; let alone be in Billboard magazine.

FFA: Your early career, that was when you were known as Eddie Darling…

EH: Yes. That’s the embarrassing truth. But you know, when we’re young… we don’t know. We think we know… but we don’t. At the time I guess I thought that was a cool sounding name. But that was such a crazy experience to go through at such a young age. None of it was on my terms. It was all up to other people. Just a very large greedy money-making machine. If they like what you’re doing, you’re in. If they don’t like what you’re doing, you’re out. No compassion, no sense of artistic integrity or guidance. It was really disheartening for me as a young artist. I thought that was going to be the start of this amazing career, but it didn’t last very long. A few years in the big leagues and it was over and I was back in the local club scene.

FFA: But you obviously didn’t give up on music, which has been a hallmark of your career, this persistence. What led you to keep going?

EH: Well I did give up for a while there. I went back to college and got really into that. But it didn’t last long. I just couldn’t stay away from making music. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable NOT making music. It’s just the one thing in life I enjoy doing more than anything else. Except being married of course! [laughs] The difference was, when I went back into music then, that it was going to be on MY terms. I didn’t feel like I had any control in it my first run-through. So that was one of the many reasons why I took the Avatar Course. I wanted to harness more deliberateness in my life. Not sure if that’s a word… But I really liked the idea of “living deliberately”. [Living Deliberately is the name of the first book by Harry Palmer. Palmer is the author and creator of the Avatar Course and has published many books on the subject.]

FFA: You were young when you took Avatar for the first time.

EH: Yes, I was 21 or 22 years old. Back then that was considered “young”. Now there are kids eight and nine years old taking the courses. It’s incredible. I used to feel like “the kid” around those courses. Now I feel old compared to these kids. [laughs]

FFA: Yes. It’s amazing. But still, 22 is still pretty young to take Avatar. Especially back then when the course was fairly new and unknown. What prompted you to take it?

EH: Well it’s like what I was saying, about the last album, and really all of them over the last ten years… I took Avatar initially because I wanted to feel more in control of my life. I wanted to feel like I was creating my experiences. I could FEEL that what it was about totally vibrated with what I believed personally. I mean, the whole “we create our experiences based on our beliefs” premise… I believed that already. Or at least wanted to. But how do we control our beliefs? That’s what puzzled me and interested me the most. And I learned how to do that on that first Avatar Course; and in the future ones that I took like Masters and Wizards. It gave me the ability to create my beliefs deliberately. So instead of feeling caught up in a large out of control system like the music business, I created feeling in control and confident. And every album since has done better than the last. It’s really been a very positive force in my career. For sure. There’s no arguing about that.

FFA: So do you use the tools regularly?

EH: Yes. Absolutely. I try to live through them… By using them all the time… Like in every moment. After a while, it transcends “using the tools” and just becomes… a way of life, a habit, how you live.

FFA: Have you used the tools specifically about your career? In other words is there a direct correlation between the success you’ve had and using the Avatar tools?

EH: Yes. Absolutely. In terms of using them specifically around my career, I learned from some of the more experienced Avatars out there – and I’m not sure if this is “a thing” or not… But I learned that they might go to a course and dedicate that whole course to just one aspect of their lives, like say their career, or money. Other things come up of course, because it’s all connected, all the different aspects of our lives… but I went to a Pro Course [The Avatar Professional Masters Course] and decided to dedicate the whole course to my career. And it was a truly amazing experience. Doing it that way.

FFA: In what way?

EH: Just the discipline you have to have in order to do that, to stay focused on one thing; controlling your will to be able to do it. And then the variety of tools available to you to explore that one aspect of your life. They offer you so many different perspectives you’ve never thought of before. And the course keeps you on track to really get to the bottom of things. In whatever you’re focusing on. In that case, tackling your beliefs about one specific subject, like your career, from the variety of different angles that are provided to you by using all those different tools. We released the Rise and Shine album a few months later and that album took off bigger and faster than we ever expected. It opened the door for us. Before that, we were a new and relatively unknown band. After that album, we became a national act. The songs were charting in cities all over the country. That was when I first started learning about where all these cities were that we hear about all the time around the country. From the radio station play charts. [laughs] I can’t help believe that part of what helped all that to happen was because I had dedicated that course a few months earlier to focusing just on my career. It was so effortless.

FFA: Have you done that with other areas of your life? Is it something you always do?

EH: No it is not something I always do. But I have done it with other things. But not usually. I did it regarding relationships one year and that was also very successful. I found my soul-mate because of doing that I believe. I cleaned up all the beliefs I had about love and romance and relationships… But usually I just take the courses and allow whatever comes up to come up. And you know, what I notice is that if your attention is on your career, then that’s what’s going to come up for you anyway. So it’s not really necessary. It all tends to work out perfectly if you don’t fight it and you just let it flow. Ultimately it’s your consciousness, no one else’s. You just have to decide if you want to be a victim of it or the master and leader of it.

FFA: That’s well put. So how do the courses affect your music? As an artist?

EH: Well I get that question a lot. And the answer is I honestly don’t know. I know that the answer is supposed to be really incredible and mystical or magical in some way… There’s this expectation there it seems… But honestly, in terms of music, I’ve been writing and playing music since I was a kid, since before I could walk. So if I were to be totally honest, I don’t know what affect it’s had. Freedom maybe?

FFA: That’s fair. Freedom in what way?

EH: Well… I can tell you this. When I first took the Avatar Course and then the Masters Courses, I felt OUT OF THIS WORLD. I had never felt so good in my life. Just like… I don’t know, flying is how I would put it. High as a kite, but without drugs. High on life. [Hale is very animated as he speaks. His eyes are wide and he uses a lot of hand gestures.] I felt SO confident and SO fresh and new and GOOD inside. I KNOW that came through in the music I was writing back then. It gave me a feeling of invincibility and that definitely translated to me having a new-found confidence as a musician and as a writer… to write whatever I wanted to and forget about any of the so-called “rules of the business”. You know? So in that sense, the courses did affect my music tremendously.

FFA: Some of your songs are very spiritual. You tend to write more specifically about spiritual matters than other mainstream rock or pop singers…

EH: So now I’m mainstream? That’s a first!

FFA: You know what I mean, singers in the public eye… most of them don’t write about spirituality as much as you do. Even the ideas of Avatar and Abraham Hicks are referenced. I also couldn’t help notice that you credit Harry Palmer on some of the songs.

EH: Well yeah, [laughs] you get so excited after you first learn all that knowledge. It’s a big WOW moment. Like discovering chocolate or sex for the first time or something. [laughs] But bigger. Just the knowledge is mind-blowing, right? So it’s a given that you’re going to want to share that with people. Just not go overboard with it… hopefully. But if you use the tools on a regular basis, if you practice BEING an Avatar… then you feel like you’re walking on clouds most of the time. Those ideals and principles are embedded in you. Simple things. But profound. So they tend to come out in the lyrics. If I write a lyric that sounds really close to something I’ve read then yeah I’ll give credit to wherever I think credit is due. When I was younger I was writing a lot of songs about spirituality and transcendence and stuff like that and it really did feel like I was channeling the ideas of Avatar through music at times. So I would credit whoever was the inspiration. That doesn’t make our publisher very happy [laughs] because it creates a lot more paper work. But it’s the right thing to do. Harry Palmer’s ideas have been a huge influence on me and how I think… ever since I was a kid.

FFA: Does he know that he’s written songs with you?

EH: I don’t know. [laughs] That’s a weird way to put it. But I’ve never kept it a secret. We’ve never talked about it. I always wonder if he gets these checks in the mail and then wonders where they’re coming from. [laughs]

FFA: You’ve also had tremendous success in business, as an entrepreneur.

EH: I’ve tried. [laughs]

FFA: Well you have. That’s an aspect of your career that isn’t talked about as much. You were a successful entrepreneur before you were 30, irrespective of your career in music. And that seems to be a running thread throughout your life, starting businesses and being in business, since you were very young. [Hale started his first company at the age of 20 when he opened up a rehearsal and recording studio. Since then he’s owned health food stores, juice bars, a vitamin manufacturing company, a business consulting company, a record label and a real estate investment company.]

EH: Yeah, for sure. That’s another one of those things that I just absolutely LOVE. Business. Being in business. LOVE it.

FFA: You say that about a lot of things!

EH: Maybe I do… [laughs] I don’t know. I guess I just love a lot of stuff. Hey that’s the Ambassador!

FFA: So what is it about business that you love?

EH: Well I was raised in that kind of an environment, number one. I grew up with my parents owning businesses. So I think that was instrumental in it. And I have just always enjoyed being in business for myself more than working for other people. Though I don’t necessarily believe that it’s easier. I actually think working for other people – especially for a large company – is the easier path to take, for sure. But for someone like me… I just could never imagine doing that full time and long term. Plus, there’s also a real rush you get out of the risky and adventurous aspect of being in business for yourself. Unlimited reward but unlimited risk as well. I get off on that.

FFA: But how do you keep up with it? And how does Avatar affect it?

EH: You know that’s two questions, right? [laughs] I’ve always been fascinated by being in business for yourself. Since I was a kid I always admired those kind of people. Tony Robbins has been as big an influence on me as say, someone like John Lennon. Almost equal. And I also found that I was good at it, or at least lucky in it. So I keep up with it as best as I can. Probably not as well as I could honestly. The Avatar thing, that’s a different story. It helps obviously. I know that. That’s the thing… Avatar helps you with everything. It’s not just one aspect of your life. It’s your whole life that is affected.

FFA: You’ve talked about Harry Palmer and Tony Robbins a lot throughout your career in interviews. They seem to come up quite a bit.

EH: [laughs] Yeah I guess I do. But hey if you’re going to have mentors, they might as well be great ones. And for my money those are two of the brightest minds in the world today when it comes to personal achievement. Even though they’re very different. Stephen Bauman too. He’s more of a spiritual intellectual who keeps your integrity on its toes. But really all of them do that. [Stephen Bauman is an author, speaker and Methodist Pastor in New York City]

FFA: I know your love for Tony Robbins and Stephen Bauman. But in relation to this website and its readers, how does Avatar help with your success in business?

EH: Well to me I think the answer to that question is obvious, but for someone who’s never taken any of the Avatar Courses before…. okay, we can go there… Say you’re experiencing the same challenge over and over again in your business. Everything seems to be going well except this one thing… Or perhaps LOTS of things… You can keep banging your head against the wall over it… Hire new people, recruit consultants, read more books, take more classes, etc. etc. OR you can take a look at the beliefs underneath this problem and once you discover them, you can then DIScreate them. That’s a term that Harry Palmer came up with in the Avatar Course. It’s brilliant. And voila! They’re gone. That challenge will no longer be there. THAT’S how it can help. It’s miraculous. If people have ever seen that movie The Secret… it’s like that. But it’s real.

FFA: You make it sound so easy.

EH: Well in a way, it is. Not all the time. But it isn’t rocket science. It’s a very natural thing. It’s an organic process, just like breathing oxygen. We just have to re-remember it… Discreating limiting beliefs helps us remove obstacles in our life that up to that point seem insurmountable to us. I can honestly say I would not have experienced the level of business success I have had in my life, especially as young as I was, without having that knowledge and those tools. To me it’s a no-brainer. The same with religious faith. Both help.

FFA: Speaking of obstacles, you’ve had your share and always seem to bounce back, which has been an inspiration to many people. What’s the secret? Or does that give away the plot to your new book? [Hale has a new business/inspirational book coming out this year entitled Bouncing Back When Flat]

EH: Besides what I just said? [laughs] I mean that kind of sums it up, right?

FAA: I was hoping we could go a little deeper.

EH: Okay well which ones? There’ve been a lot of them. [laughs] It hasn’t been as easy as people seem to think it has. It never is. Not for any of us.

FFA: A few years ago you experienced a major business setback that left you broke and even homeless for a while, which is what your new book is about. I’ve read some of the interviews about that experience and it’s shocking. But you turned it around. What I’m trying to come to is how you did it? [In 2006 Hale discovered that his business partner, Naomi Whittel (nee Balcombe) (now at Reserveage Organics), had sold one of the companies he had founded, Ageless Foundation Laboratories, without his knowledge to a publicly traded company. Hale found out through the SEC filing. Naturade Inc., the company who purchased Hale’s company, didn’t even know Hale was an owner of the company when they made the purchase, finding out months later. The story has been written about extensively, but Hale has been relatively quiet about it.]

EH: Yeah, that… [This is the first time in the interview Hale becomes quiet, anything but animated.] That’s still a tough thing for me to talk about. But I understand that it’s important and why you think it’s relevant. I’m still coming to terms with it all.

FFA: Well that’s why you wrote this book, right?

EH: Yes. Absolutely. It’s an important story. I know that.

FFA: Not many people can imagine living through that kind of a setback, let alone bouncing back from it. But you did. Rather quickly some would say. And you have had tremendous success since then.

EH: Yes, I know. And I’m very grateful for that. Hence the book. If I can do that, then anyone can do anything. That’s how I look at it.

FFA: I read an interview you gave last year where you did talk about it and it was inspiring. I only ask because the story does have a happy ending. You didn’t let it take you down, but instead you found a way to work your way back to the top. That’s an incredible achievement.

EH: Yes, it did take me down. I mean, how could it not have? One day I was going about my business and living my life, not a worry in the world, and then in one fell swoop everything I had in the world was gone. Bank accounts, credit cards, my company, retirement savings. Everything. Gone. It was the single most challenging thing I’ve ever lived through. For sure. But you’re right, I didn’t let it keep me down forever. I started from scratch and rebuilt. And slowly I was able to rise back up.

FFA: Without giving too much of the book away, how were you able to do that?

EH: Well for one thing, my faith is very strong. We’ve talked about that. I’ve never hidden that. I try not to be preachy, but I also think it’s bullshit, pardon my French, when entertainers keep their faith in the closet because they’re worried about how it’s going to affect their career.

FFA: You’ve certainly never done that.

EH: No, I haven’t. I talk about it when it’s appropriate. It’s important to me and I believe it’s important to a lot of my friends and fans.

FFA: You write a lot about religion and faith in your blog and sometimes sound almost anti-religious, almost like an atheist, which I know you’re not. And yet at the same time you write a lot about being a Christian and how challenging it is. Can you explain that a little?

EH: Well I’m definitely not one of those “100% sold” kind of people. I think anyone who’s really honest about their religious faith is going to be confused about it… and struggle occasionally. Because there are just so many contradictions in religion and spirituality… The difference with me I guess is that I haven’t necessarily chosen a side yet… I’m still open to all of them…. dissecting it all. And I explore all that a lot publicly in the Diaries. [Hale is referring to his long-running blog The Transcendence Diaries].

FFA: I know a lot of people find that inspiring. But you also anger certain groups of people with this “openness”.

EH: I know. And I don’t mean to. What I’m really doing is what I believe we should all be doing if we’re serious about spirituality and faith… questioning, studying, exploring. I’m not trying to make anybody mad or even question what they believe. To me it’s fun. It’s academic. But it also meaning beyond that.

FFA: I think most people recognize that. So your faith is one of the things that brought you through that business challenge?

EH: Without a doubt. A lot of reflection and prayer. And a lot of counseling with mentors. Seeking advice from older people that I looked up to. Also I had a really strong community around me. Family and friends who were there for me. That’s a tremendous asset. Something that you can’t buy. If it weren’t for that, I don’t know if I’d be here today. Because when that kind of thing happens to you, you really start questioning your life. All your effort and hard work and even your beliefs, things that you’ve taken for granted your whole life all of a sudden… you start questioning.

FFA: Like what?

EH: Well like… just everything. For example, you assume that if you work hard and you’re a good person that you’re going to succeed. That’s what I’d ALWAYS believed. My whole life. And I experienced that. Over and over again throughout my life that’s what I experienced. And then when this happened, it was so shocking, that it was hard to put those pieces back together, of that belief. It didn’t ring true to me anymore. Being a good person did NOT equal being successful. I started wondering if maybe that was just bs and perhaps we were supposed to be bad people and that was how to succeed. That was my first gut reaction of course. It took me some time to overcome that idea…. because bad people seem to succeed just as much as good people.

FFA: It’s easy to see how you could come to that.

EH: Right? But here’s the thing. I was wrong. We’re not “good” people because we want to succeed. We’re good people because we believe that’s the best way to live life. You know? My friends and family would call me every day, I mean every day, just to see how I was doing and check in on me. That was a big help. And we would talk about it and little by little they got through to me. I remember this one time I was driving around Manhattan with a friend, Big Mac, I LOVE this guy. He’s super funny, a southern guy. And he had just finished seminary at Princeton… So he is a spiritual guy too…

FFA: You write about him in your Diaries. I know the name.

EH: Yep. I write about EVERYBODY in the Diaries. Much to their displeasure! [laughs]

FFA: I definitely want to talk about that later, because I have a lot of questions about your blog and the reaction you’ve gotten through the years, but I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought. So go on with the story.

EH: Okay… So I was telling Big Mac how I was trying to make sense of God’s plan for my life with making this horrible thing happen to me. With Naomi and the business. That perhaps God was trying to show me a different path to take, rather than all this success and being a business tycoon that maybe God wanted me to be more focused on making the world a better place. And Big Mac, he just looked over at me and said “Bro I could never believe in a God like that.” I’ll never forget it. That was just one of those moments in life you never forget. I was like “What do you mean?” And he said “Ed, God doesn’t make bad things happen to people. God is grace. And love. Who did this to you? This Naomi chick did this to you.” The way he enunciated her name in his southern drawl… I can still remember it… He said “People did this to you man. God didn’t. God is the one helping you. Not hurting you.” I turned around in my seat and I began to cry. Right there in his truck. Because that was exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. I had been so puzzled by it. I couldn’t figure out WHY it happened… I was still trying to make sense of it. But he made me realize in that moment that it didn’t have anything to do with God or God’s plan… it was people. If anything, God is there to help us, not hurt us. At least in his view.

FFA: And is that your viewpoint now?

EH: Yes. Absolutely. That really resonated with me. When he said it. And looking back, still, it totally changed my whole point of view. That’s what I mean by my beliefs were being challenged. I was actually so fooled for a while there that I thought maybe that “God” wanted me to suffer in that way… It’s crazy. But luckily, if anything it made me stronger. And more importantly it offered me a reference point for how to view life when bad things happen to us. That it’s not about blaming God, every time something good or bad happens to us. People were the cause of it. And more importantly so was I.

FFA: How so? How were you the cause of it?

EH: Well that’s the part where I think I got the most out of the experience. Where if there is anything positive to take away from it, I got it. The first thing I did, because I had taken Avatar, was I started looking at my own past actions to see what was there, what had I done, in my life… I started reflecting on my own responsibility in the whole thing, instead of blaming anyone – and trust me it was easy to blame people… it was a horrible thing they did, they broke the law in a hundred different ways, and worse… broke my heart by taking advantage of our friendship… I HATE stuff like that… people like that. But I knew I needed to look for where and how I was responsible… So on the one hand, I saw how we have to be real when it comes to people doing harmful things to us; it happens. We can’t live in a bubble and pretend that there aren’t bad people out there. Because there are. But I also saw that I had some responsibility in it too.

FFA: That’s admirable, but in what ways were you responsible?

EH: Well I can’t act like I did anything overtly wrong to cause it… Sometimes people can make the mistake of over-owning things I think. It’s not like I was acting unethically or broke the law or something… I was a good guy. Same as I am now. But I had been warned that that kind of thing might happen before it did… at least a hundred times before to be honest. It wasn’t like it came out of the blue. I had been in business with Naomi for years. And that was the main thing we argued about, was her always wanting to break the law and me always saying that we most certainly should NOT. And our employees would always be stuck in the middle, between our two viewpoints. She constantly accused me of being “self-righteous” and I just wanted us to play it straight. So I had definitely been warned already. But what had I done about it? Nothing. Sure we had stacks of legal agreements between us that prohibited us from doing those kinds of things… But based on what I’d already experienced with her in the past, I should have known better. I should have taken more action BEFORE all that happened. And I didn’t. Why? Because I was being lazy, yes… or because I was resisting conflict. For sure. I didn’t like conflict of any kind. I love people and I love harmony and I’m all about love and peace, you know? So I just pretended like everything was fine when I knew it really wasn’t. I could feel it…

FFA: You were in denial… of your intuition?

EH: Yes, absolutely. Living in denial. Pretending. I helped to create the whole thing through knowing about the potential for something like that to happen and NOT doing anything about it. NOT acting when you know you should can be just as bad as TAKING an action that’s harmful.

FFA: So you took responsibility for the experience? Did that make it easier to deal with?

EH: Yes, absolutely. It gave me a sense of relief. It enabled me to feel the remorse for my non-actions that might have contributed to it, and other things, and then to move on. What it does is help you feel responsible for it rather than like a victim of it.

FFA: That’s a great example of using what you learn in Avatar in the real world.

EH: Yes. Totally. I think so. That one experience compelled me to fill three whole notebooks with actions from my past that I felt weren’t necessarily aligned with being a good person and to make amends for them. In order to get a fresh start. It led to a lot of self-reflection and taking responsibility for my past. I became a better person through doing all that.

FFA: When you’ve written about the experience that’s what you mean by it also being a positive experience…

EH: Yes. Let’s face it. No one wants to go through something like that. To have everything you own taken from you by other people. That’s a bad thing. The betrayal aspect of it alone is enough to make you feel so discouraged and ungrounded… so unsure of yourself and the world. When someone lies to you so overtly and is doing it from a place of friendship, it can really screw with your mind. But you have to find a way to turn it around and see the positive side of it. And for me the best way to do that was to start looking at me instead of at the others. And to start planning how I could improve who I was as a person… Once again I saw firsthand how our actions in the world can affect others, either in a positive or in a negative way. That’s the least we can do. Take stock of our actions and make sure we are having a positive impact. So that’s what I did.

FFA: That is inspiring. And within a few years you had overcome it and were back on top again with three hit albums, songs on the Billboard charts, and your now infamous trip to Iran… Do you think there’s any correlation between what you went through and the success you’ve had?

EH: No. I don’t. Maybe, I don’t know. I know it inspired me. But only through necessity. Before that happened I was really enjoying life. Taking advantage of how hard I had worked and how successful I had become. After that, I was forced to go back to square one and start over again and rebuild my entire life and career from scratch. It really inspired me to become successful again. I was determined to. So in that respect yes there was a correlation. But I’ll tell you this: no one should ever believe for a minute that they need to endure some kind of tragedy or suffering in order to succeed. That would be a very impeding and unnecessary belief to cultivate.

FFA: That’s a good point to make.

EH: Well if you go and read a lot of the articles that were written when our first album after that experience came out and became successful there is a lot of attention paid to the whole rags to riches aspect of it, “from homeless to Billboard!” became a headline. As if there was a romantic aspect to it. And I can promise you that there is nothing romantic about going through something like that. If you can avoid it, do so.

FFA: Well the story is an appealing and inspiring one, from an entertainment or person of interest point of view. You can see that…

EH: Yeah, I can. Totally. Which is one of the reasons why I wrote a book about it. I mean, I get it. How often does something like that happen to a person? Not very often. It’s more like a movie than real life.

III

FFA: There is another aspect about that experience that I wanted to have you talk about if you don’t mind, because I think it’s important. Ultimately you decided to settle the whole thing with your partner out of court. Yet the case still remains unresolved years later. Why did you decide to do that? And do you regret it now? [Naomi Whittel signed a settlement agreement to pay Hale for the sale of the company in order to render it a legal transaction months after the sale and prevent the case from going to court, but the agreement has never been fulfilled.]

EH: Well that’s more than just one question….

FFA: Okay. Why did you agree to settle out of court? Why didn’t you just go about it in a more traditional business manner?

EH: You mean by taking legal action?

FFA: Yes. Laws were clearly broken. Contracts were breached. It seems like an open and shut case.

EH: Right, I know. And it was. I get this question a lot, especially from other business people. There was a ton of criminal activity revealed. Fraud, forgery, tax fraud, embezzlement, a lot of lying and stealing… You know. Crazy stuff. It was something right out of a movie. Totally unreal and way outside anything I’d ever dealt with before. It’s insane when you think about it. This was a situation where yes, I probably could have played tougher… But for one thing, there’s a good chance that Naomi would have gone to jail if I would have gone public with it by taking it to court. And I was still operating under the misconception that Naomi and I were friends. We had been engaged to be married after all for years. So I still cared about her as a person. Secondly, she literally called me every day for years from the moment I found out what she had done…. Begging me to settle. Even though it may seem in retrospect like such an open and shut case now, at the time, I was still receiving these calls from her every day begging me to settle and not go to court. I felt very pulled. Between my loyalty to her as a person, and to her family… And to doing the right thing perhaps…

FFA: So now you think that taking it to court would have been the right thing?

EH: Well it would have been the more normal action to take under those circumstances…. But also I felt that there had already been enough legal action in our lives. I mean, she had created such a huge mess of legal actions for us already. It was all lawyers and law firms galore… for years. No one was winning except the law firms as they say. But because I had made peace within myself about it, and she was pushing hard for an out of court settlement, I looked at both outcomes… Part of me really wanted to “get justice”. Because in business that’s what you do. If someone commits a criminal act, they deserve to get what they get, right? Justice, to the full extent of the law. I got that. But at what cost to me and my own sanity? And at what cost to my family and friends? They’d already been through the ringer because of what happened. I reflected on it and prayed about it a lot… And it just seemed like settling it was the right thing to do. To put it behind us as quickly and smoothly as possible.

FFA: Plus you assumed that once you settled that it would really be over and behind you as you say.

EH: Yes, I did. Totally. I thought that would be the end of it. The end of “the Naomi saga” once and for all. It happened. It was bad. But the ball was in my court. I could sue and drag it out in court for years, or I could forgive and settle and move on with my life.

FFA: But it didn’t end there. After all that, the settlement agreement remains unfulfilled. Which is what led to the major setback you experienced. So do you regret that decision now?

EH: Yes and no. Yes, because I wish it were over. I regret what I had to go through. And I am sublimely shocked that we’re still talking about it years later. I don’t honestly know how she can deal with it still being out there open and unresolved. But no, because in that moment I feel like I made the most responsible and mature decision that could have been made at that time. Trust me, forgiveness in those kinds of situations is difficult… but it’s the HIGH road. Being vindictive or seeking vengeance, that may be the more common road, but it’s not the high road.

FFA: Yes, as an Avatar I completely understand you choosing forgiveness over revenge. Even though in the end it was a costly decision…

EH: Yes, it was. So far at least. But I’m still giving her the benefit of the doubt. That’s the part that a lot of people don’t understand. At first she swore up and down that she had nothing to do with it, that she was “forced into it by her husband and this pack of evil attorneys” they had hired. I didn’t necessarily believe her… But you know, when you’re close to someone like that… It’s hard to cut the line completely that connects you. There is still love there. And compassion. You want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

FFA: But it sounds like a very one-sided kind of compassion.

EH: Maybe it is… That’s something I wonder about sometimes. Long story short, she swore up and down that she had every intention of fulfilling the agreement, and more than anything she was just afraid. At the time I felt like I was doing the right thing, by being compassionate and forgiving, because that’s what WE do, right? And protecting her…

FFA: Yes, I agree. That’s what we do. But this brings up the question of when is it better to look out for yourself by taking a more Guardian Heart approach? [Guardian Heart is a concept explored in the book Resurfacing by Harry Palmer.]

EH: I know… There’s a fine line between being a nice person or a good person and letting someone take advantage of you… They are two different things. And sometimes we confuse them. Maybe I’ve crossed that line now… I hope not. But I can tell you now, after going through all of that, I understand the importance of the Guardian Heart a lot more now, of not confusing being a nice person with being someone who allows others to take advantage of them. That IS something that we tend to get confused sometimes as humans. I also see the importance of standing up for what we believe in or just being committed to protecting ourselves and our loved ones. I know what you’re getting at. And I am in no way attempting to promote forgiveness as being equal to letting people take advantage of us.

FFA: There is a certain responsibility we have to ourselves and to others in defending integrity and justice for the good of everyone…

EH: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s one of the reasons why I decided to write the book about what happened. It’s not just about the inspiration factor. But more about the responsibility to others. Not just to inspire other people who might be going through a similar challenge, but also to warn people that this kind of thing can happen to the best of us. No matter how nice we are or how good of people we are. No one is immune to it. You have to look out for yourself, no matter how nice of a person you are. But it is how we deal with it that is the true measure of a person.

I remember Tony Robbins telling a story once about how he went through a similar experience in his business life. His CFO was also his best friend and he discovered that this guy had been embezzling a ton of money from their company and it just shattered him; challenged his optimistic outlook for a while. When he told that story, I couldn’t relate to it at all. I was too young. I had never gone through anything like that. But when almost the same exact thing happened to ME… THEN I could relate to it. And knowing ahead of time that he lived through it really helped me. His story and his struggle with that inspired me. And I’m sure there are a lot of people who would be surprised that something like this even happened to me, because I’ve never really talked about it openly before. But I get it now. That responsibility to share it so other people can learn from it. That’s important.

FFA: I believe it is too. Not to spoil the finale of your book, but can you share at least a little about how you were able to rebuild from something like that? Tangible things, actions that you took.

EH: Yes, absolutely. If you can imagine waking up one day and being absolutely flat broke after years of working and having made a ton of money… Going from wealthy to broke overnight. That money still exists, but you just can’t get to it. Someone else now has control of it. You can’t even afford your next meal because your bank accounts have been taken over. Horrible right?

FFA: I find it hard to imagine. I think most people would.

EH: Well me too… Until it happened. After it happened, I wasn’t just broke; I was also extremely disheartened. It was hard to believe in humanity at all. But I didn’t want to become a jaded person. Or cynical. Or believe the worst in people. So I used the Avatar tools to let all those potentially negative beliefs go. I discreated them. And I deliberately created being who I really believed I was: a generally positive and optimistic person who believed in myself and others. I took every guitar I had and walked each one to a different friend’s house and left it there and said “I’ve been hit in a bad way. You know this. I need money for an attorney and money to eat. Here’s a guitar. This is what it’s worth. If you’re willing to help, I’ll leave it here till I can pay you back.” And you know, every friend I had was more than willing to help me out. It makes me emotional still. Because it really showed me how powerful friendships are. I had guitars all over the city in different people’s homes as collateral. And honestly half of my friends didn’t even care about collateral. That was just for me. To make me feel more comfortable in receiving help…

FFA: That’s exactly the kind of thing I was hoping you would share. These tangible actions that you took. I think people will find them very inspiring and informative.

EH: Well yeah, obviously in that kind of situation you have to find a way to get on your feet. Just to be able to eat. The part that hurt the worst is that Naomi and I were connected at the hip for ten years before that. We were engaged to be married for God’s sake. AND business partners for years after that. So she knew that once she did that that I would literally not have a cent to my name, nor even a way to eat. It was astounding to me that someone could do that. But once it happens you have to move on and find a way out of it. So that’s the first thing I did. Then I hired an attorney to help me sort out just what the hell happened. And then I started doing consulting work to bring in money. Business and health consulting. And of course liquidating assets. Physical things… And then I started hardcore trading again.

FFA: You mean trading in the stock market?

EH: Yes. Something I already had a lot of experience with. But besides real estate there’s no faster way to make money fast when your funds are limited. Of course it works in the reverse as well. So you really have to have a strong stomach and nerves of steel. But it was all about taking very real and tangible actions to move forward and start to rebuild. All of this AND still trying to finish recording the new albums with the band at that time and play shows in different cities.

FFA: I remember that. I bet a lot of people wondered why you changed so many things in your life at the time.

EH: Yes I’m sure they did. Because I also leased out my apartment in Manhattan for a while to make money. Whatever it took. Living with family and friends. It was a freaking nightmare honestly. But it was also a tremendous challenge and so kind of fun… When people asked me what was up, I didn’t hide the truth. But I also didn’t advertise it. I just kept moving forward. It was an insane position to be in. But you start from where you are. You start with the basics. You create being happy to be you, and simple things like “I can do this”. “I can make it happen”. “I believe in me”. Things like that. Using the Avatar tools to create those realities. Or whatever “tools” you have available to you. In spite of how challenging things may appear. You do it anyway. And at the same time you announce it to the world. Tell everyone what you’re doing. For me that meant telling everyone “The Ambassador is down but he’s not out! I’m rebuilding the empire!” Perceive it as a challenge, a doable challenge. And set about every day to being real with where you are… but also striving toward bigger things. I truly believed that I had learned a valuable lesson, but that I was not meant to stay down for long. That was not my destiny. I didn’t take all these courses and read all these books to let one major setback ruin my life forever. I was totally committed to rebuilding in spite of that setback.

FFA: When the first song from your new solo album made it onto the Billboard Charts, after going through all that, did it feel like your hard work had finally paid off?

EH: Are you kidding? Yeah. It was amazing! We laughed, we cried. And then laughed some more. A lot of jumping up and down screaming. One of the greatest days of my life. Friends calling from all over the country because they just heard the song on the radio or in their car… Things like that. I think because of the immense disadvantage I had been placed in – and everyone knowing about it…. That’s what made it so much more enjoyable for everyone. To be down like that and to rebuild it all from scratch and then top it off by hitting the Top 40 a few times. That was an amazing moment for sure.

FFA: You really did “bounce back when flat” as you say.

EH: Yeah, it’s hard to believe. But we did it!

IV

FFA: And it didn’t end there. Around the same time, you were invited to be one of only a handful of Americans to visit Iran post-revolution on a peace mission. How did that come about? [Hale visited Iran in 2009 on a well-publicized Civilian Diplomacy mission along with eleven other Americans in leadership positions from a wide cross section of different industries. He represented the arts. He just returned from a similar trip to Israel-Palestine recently. In between he’s also visited countries in Africa, Europe and Central and South America to build homes and community centers.]

EH: I’m glad you asked. Because it’s actually a really magical story in a way. I was at this silent retreat at a convent of nuns…

FFA: You always say these things that sound so outrageous… Like you’re narrating a movie.

EH: Hah! Well I’m telling you, this is what happened. It sounds crazy. But that’s how it went down. I was at a silent retreat at a convent of all these sisters in the middle of nowhere in upstate New York. Episcopalian I think. And you couldn’t talk for like a week. So I used that time to just unwind and decompress. But they had this policy where during meals you could do some light talking… something like that. I met this one sister who was really cool, very hip. And we shared this passion for global human rights activism. We couldn’t really talk that much. But we got to know each other. And at the very end of the retreat she told me about this historic upcoming delegation of Americans who were headed to the country of Iran for a two week peace mission. She said that the application process had expired, but that if I got mine in really quickly that she’d put in a good word for me with the international organization that was putting the thing together. I had been trying to get into Iran for five years. I must have applied ten times and was denied every time. I had already been studying the language, Farsi, so I could speak the language a little bit… That helped. And you know, there’s more, but basically it all came down to me being at this silent retreat in the middle of nowhere that got me into Iran. Sort of. I suppose it was more than that. But that was the original impetus.

FFA: Being in the right place at the right time. It’s fascinating how these little miracles happen in our lives when we’ve put our attention and intention on them.

EH: Exactly! First our attention, then our intention, get rid of beliefs or ideas that are in the way and BAM! Things manifest!

FFA: Can you talk a little bit about your activism?

EH: Well it is something that I am passionate about. I think it’s an easy way to feel good. Because you’re giving back. It’s not all about you. It’s nice to step outside of it being all about us sometimes. A lot of times actually. [laughs. Hale has become reanimated. His eyes have that light back in them.] Every one of those trips will stay with me forever. I hope this is only the beginning.

FFA: And again you started a business around it. But this one was a non-profit. What is the goal of your PeaceWithIran.com organization?

EH: Just that. Peace with Iran. Exactly what it says. I honestly see it as a reality. I see it happening. Maybe not this year. But soon. The alternatives are far worse than the simple act of a peaceful reconciliation between the two countries.

FFA: From your mouth to God’s ears. What was the most important thing you learned from your trip to Iran?

EH: Great question. I’ve written a lot about this already, but I’d say that the first thing that struck me was how genuinely nice they are there and how much they love Americans. That was very much a surprise for me, for all of us on that trip. We never hear about what nice people the Iranians are here in the States. And we also don’t hear about how much they love and admire us here. That’s an important thing to share I think.

FFA: What other areas of activism are you interested in moving forward?

EH: Well now a lot of my focus lately has been on Israel and Palestine… That’s the real hotbed I believe… Even in regards to Iran, it seems to all come down to Israel and Palestine at the foundation.

V

FFA: Before we go too far off into world politics, can you talk a little bit about your new albums? What keeps you motivated to keep making music at such a rapid pace?

EH: Well I tend to write a lot of songs. AND at the same time I tend to have a lot of ambition when it comes to always wanting to out-do what we did last time, artistically. Every time we get an opportunity to make a new album it feels like such a privilege. So at first we just head into the studio to record our quote-unquote next album. It always starts out as a simple process and then it just starts to slowly get more and more complicated. So it’s just me wanting to challenge myself, see how far I can take it I guess. And the fans, their reaction to it…

FFA: So are the album titles official now? The ones that were just released to the public?

EH: Almost positively yes. Welcome to the Rest of the World for one, and Another Day in the Apocalypse for the other. They’re starting to sound really different from each other now. And the songs have been chosen for each. So we can see the finish line… finally.

FFA: So when can people expect to hear the first single or finished product?

EH: We’re not 100% sure, but my guess would be sometime this spring or summer…

FFA: Well I know a lot of people are excited to hear the albums. The last thing I want to ask you is if there was one thing that you could share with people about any of the Avatar Courses, what would it be? As someone who has taken all the courses and continues to do so.

EH: Well that’s easy. And hard, because there’s so much you could say about it. I mean, it’s a HUGE thing, right? I write about it a lot actually. On the one hand, it’s a way of life. It’s a way of being… You learn a whole new way of being, through becoming more adept at feeling and using your intuition… You become more honest and real. More in line with the truth. But on the other hand, it’s also just a series of courses. You know, it is what it is, whatever each person makes it out to be. I guess that’s what I would say about it. That in essence, the Avatar Course is essentially just a series of courses that contain all this confidential knowledge that you sort of already know, way down deep inside, like it resonates strongly when you read it, as if you’ve known it all your life, right? [Hale is once again excited and animated] And yet now it’s been broken down into very easy to understand and doable steps. That’s amazing! No one had ever done that before. I could go on and on… but put it like this: Take all the cool stuff that we’ve read about in metaphysical and new age books, AND all those documentaries about quantum physics and the so-called paranormal, and then turn all that into a nine day course filled with exercises and processes that teach you how to actually do THOSE things. Tools to help you gain more control over your life and the world around you… more personal power. Now do that with hundreds of thousands of other people from all over the world speaking seventy-something different languages! THAT’S what Avatar has turned into now after almost 30 years. A giant collection of the most enlightened or maybe better put the most enlightenment-seeking people on planet earth. It’s the coolest thing happening in the world right now hands down. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world working on being the best they can be AND trying to make the world a better place! Incredible stuff. People always ask me, “Is it worth the money?” And I’m like “Oh my God, no… it’s worth ten times as much.” Talk about a paradigm shift. If someone is looking for a real paradigm shift –something really transformative in their lives – I can’t think of anything else as powerful or noteworthy. At least not yet anyway. Out of everything out there. And I’ve tried it all and then some.

To find out more about an upcoming Avatar Course, visit www.Avatarepc.com

To find out more about Ed Hale, visit iTunes or www.edhale.com

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Expanding the Definition of Consciousness and its Various Components

February 18, 2014

It’s 3:30 am. I have awoken so many times in the last two hours since falling asleep at around 1:00 that I finally decided to just lean up, grab my phone and take down some notes about what kept waking me up. As with most things we deem totally inspiring and amazing when we are half asleep and dreaming, I am sure this too will seem just as pedestrian and unimportant once it’s written down here; or worse, pure gibberish. One day, as technology continues to advance, we WILL be able to translate the magnitude of our dream-states into real world semantics in a way that truly gets across just how incredible those sights sounds feelings and visions are to us when dreaming… I see it… But for now we accept that we often miss the mark. Nine times out of ten that’s what we end up with when we attempt to pull to the earthly plane the mindblowing cosmic dances and brilliant ideas that enthrall and entertain us when we are dreaming, mundane blah or irrelevant gibberish. But in line with sticking to the promise I made to myself and my creator years ago, I do my best to never let one idea slip away into the recesses of that dark cavern we call “I can’t remember” — seeing each and every creative thought and idea as a precious gift. No matter what it is or what it’s for or about. Of course the primary effect this has had on my life is assuring that in another ten years or so my infinitely tolerant wife and I will be found dead in one of our large homes, asphyxiated to death and buried by hundreds of thousands of pounds of little pieces of paper, notebooks, journals, file folders and post it notes.

If only there were two of me — a technological inevitability I am thirsting for far more than most; I could continue to be me and do my thing, which is get the ideas and make note of them, do my damnedest to flesh them out and release them in some form or another — my career, AND at the same time still try to maintain some semblance of a home and family life, but the other me, my clone let’s call him, could work uninterrupted 24 hours a day just on finishing and fleshing out the ideas and projects I don’t have the time to get to. With me it’s never been about lack of ideas or writers block or laziness or lack of ambition, but rather always simply a matter of not enough time in the day. Made exponentially worse once I got married, as much as I hate to admit it. Little did I know. But marriage, cultivating a loving caring safe and secure home and family takes an enormous amount of time away from your work — no matter how many times in the dead of night with your wife sleeping there beside you you pray silently to yourself and your idea of God promising to DO more. I had no idea how much free time for work one is compelled to give up in the name of having a good marriage. So I do the best I can with what I have. Nights like tonight where “we” went to bed at a decent hour but I stayed up well past 1am writing and now sit here in the pitch black of early morning doing the same while everyone else in the house is asleep.

You probably didn’t notice it, but I just had to take a few seconds off here to wake our Cavalier, Alistair, because he was asleep so soundly that he was snoring. The whole house is fast asleep as I sit here in the dark. If he wakes Princess Little Tree up she will not be pleased with seeing me hunched over the glowing light of a phone in the dead of night madly typing away–knowing full well that my mental and physical health is just as sensitive and prone to weakness from abuse as the next person’s and it needs sleep to function optimally. She worries. And I love her for it.

I fell asleep listening to Joel Osteen last night. Call it a guilty pleasure.

[Joel is funny that way. He’s one person you won’t gain much street cred from name dropping. My friends in the art and entertainment world who are nearly all secular AND my more intellectual and scientifically minded friends both find it fascinating and curious that I of all people would ever entertain the “inane ramblings” (their words not mine) of a modern christian evangelical preacher. It seems anathema to everything I seem to stand for according to their point of view. I get that. They just haven’t heard that call. Perhaps they never will. Or perhaps they’ve heard another call, equally divine and important to them. My friends who share in my Christian Jewish Buddhist Taoist Hindu faith (or at least the Christian portion of it) don’t do well with Joel Osteen either. They, being more liberal or progressive minded, find any type of evangelical or fundamentalist form of Christianity to be close minded, suspect, a step backwards. And ironically, even my hardcore born-again fundamentalist christian friends don’t seem to like Joel. They find his brand of Christianity to be too liberal and “new agey” and feel-good oriented, a far cry from the old fashioned fire and brimstone kind of fundamentalist Christianity that they’re accustomed to. He just doesn’t fit into anyone’s mold and for all the love and praise the man receives from so many millions of people the world over, he seems to elicit an equal amount of haters. Perhaps this is one of the things that has contributed to his being the head pastor at the largest Christian mega-church in America today. This fact that, try as one might, one can’t stick him into any one box very easily. He fits no mold. Always suspect. Suspect for his happiness. Suspect for his popularity. Suspect for his wealth. Suspect for his unique theology. But regardless of all that I like the man. I dig his sermons and I like him as a person. I’ve only met him a few times, but each time I FELT him, fully, inside and out, and there is nothing to fear there. He’s as real as real can be. He fully believes in what he’s doing, in his faith and in his mission. More power to him for that.]

One of the last things I remember Joel speaking about tonight was the importance in his view of praying boldly. Not weakly or timidly or shyly — but boldly. It struck a chord in me. I see prayer being not very dissimilar from using any other consciousness tool for reality creation. They are nearly one and the same as I have pointed out in earlier posts. To pray boldly to a Christian might mean visualize and affirm more boldly to someone more metaphysically minded or create your primary (your desired outcome in avatar speak) more boldly to an Avatar. To not hold anything back. To not only give it your all in the doing, but also to remember to ask for it all. Create it all. Everything you want. Not just a piece of it, but all of it. Let go of your broken heart…. that brokenness that tells you to hold back when asking for what you want, that sense of guilt or not-deserving… To me this is one of the keys to praying for or creating everything we want fully and boldly.

I was so inspired by Joel as he spoke that I made a few notes in my master list of new primaries that I wanted to create — big ones. Ones that really juiced me. (Primaries being avatar speak (broadly and generally paraphrasing here) for “anything that is created”, but more specific to our purposes here: “something that you want to create” i.e. a desired outcome (in Tony Robins speak). To a Christian or another kind of religious person this could simply mean “something I pray to God about everyday because I desire it to happen”. As I drifted off to sleep tonight I began to pray as I always do before falling asleep, as I’ve done since I can remember, since I was old enough to speak. But this time I did it from the perspective that “God truly takes great pleasure in favoring us and helping us to be happy and live joyful lives, that He/She/It loves to help and guide us to create the life of our dreams, our greatest desires.”

I have a lot of friends. It comes with the territory of being The Ambassador I suppose. Plenty of them absolutely despise that kind of thinking and speaking. It makes them gag for some reason. They consider themselves realists. I would call them fatalists or nihilists more appropriately. The labels are unimportant. The point is that there are many among us who gag at the mere mention of God or the universe having any ability whatsoever to intercede in our lives, let alone the idea that these “concepts” of “God” or “an alive universe” even exist in reality. I love and respect them just the same.

Out of all the ones that I wrote done, the primary that juiced me the most in that moment was something to the effect of “I have found my true calling and I am thriving in it!” So I began to pray to God about this desire, once we were done with the greetings, small talk, formalities and pleasantries, I just continued to focus in on it and hammer it into my consciousness, continuing to ask for God’s assistance in guiding me down the right path towards this goal. I must admit it felt great. Especially after I began letting go of all the Secondaries (avatar speak for “anything that is other than the primary”, in other words anything that may get in the way of or distract you from or diminish your ability to create the primary or desired outcome.) A primary is easiest to create when there are NO secondaries. One easy example to understand the concept would be to ask yourself out loud what is your name. The answer… that’s a primary. And trust me, your very primary about this. You probably had no problem answering the question “What’s my name?” Now ask yourself out loud if you have any secondaries to that primary. Any doubts suspicions or any skepticism? Or perhaps hearing your name out loud makes you laugh or perhaps even wince. Who knows? It’s your consciousness. Any reaction you have at all to uttering those words, to stating your name, is a secondary. Why? Because it’s not the primary. See? It’s easy. You probably found it easy to do this. Meaning you are pretty primary about your name? Why? Because you had no secondaries about what your name is.

Avatars learn a variety of different techniques like this for creating primaries AND for discreating any secondaries that might come up. The power to discreate — thoughts feelings emotions ideas beliefs realities — is one of the greatest gifts ever given to humankind in my humble opinion… second only to the gift of life and our connection to the Divine Force in the universe. (For the record, a man by the name of Harry Palmer was the person who both re-discovered this innate ability we all possess — to create and discreate reality, AND the person who invented the numerous tools and processes we can use to do so.) (It is best to learn this knowledge and these tools from a professionally licensed avatar master or trainer on an avatar course. There’re always courses being given all over the world at any given time so it isn’t difficult to find one and jump into one. I highly recommend doing it. It’s the coolest game on earth at the moment. Like super-hero / Jedi Knight training cool. Seriously badass stuff. )

The last thing I remember before falling asleep was repeating this prayer/primary over and over again until I started mumbling and drifting off into a deep and restful sleep. As soon as I started to dream I got caught up in this mind boggling concept about how we create reality. We know that there is always a touch of randomness and chaos to what we call reality. Quantum mechanics teaches us that. It isn’t perfect, perhaps it’s not meant to be, but it’s perfectly imperfect. Or vice versa. In a way that we can semi-understand it at least. Other than the pure randomness and chaos of quantum mechanics at play, the rest of reality is being created by consciousness; and to a certain degree by non-conscious life. Life, meaning trees or starfish or chimpanzees or even algae. They’re all living and organic and indeed they do create reality. Just step outside and see for yourself. Reality is being created all around us by what we normally label “non conscious organic life”.

Most human beings do not usually believe these living things mentioned above have “consciousness”; nor that many living organisms on earth besides humans possess a “conscience”. I’d go so far as to say that many people don’t even believe that other living organisms in the world besides humans possess “consciousness”. Unless of course you’re the exception and you do. Which is great. After all, we don’t yet know everything there is to know. Some life forms like humans or dogs or apes or chimps or yes maybe even horses do seem to possess consciousness. If you’ve ever studied the work of Dr. Hagimura and his work on sound vibrations and their effect on plants and water then you’re familiar with the fact that even plant life and water – in all three of its various forms, ice, liquid, and vapor — seem to possess consciousness, albeit a slightly different variation than what we are used to as human beings — because they react to sound and vibration — as if consciously. It’s astoundingly ground-breaking work. Personally, I’d submit that there’s some kind of consciousness at play there. It’s “some kind” of consciousness that is reacting to the music and sound waves.

[As a side-note, most recently, today in fact, I discovered a group of Russian scientists who claim to have proven that they can alter and program DNA with sound and vibration… more on that later, perhaps in another post. Look for it. It’s a fascinating read and quite pertinent to what we’re discussing here.]

But what kept me awake this evening was this idea that here I was praying for and focusing on something I wanted to create… But HOW was it going to happen…? HOW does it work? “What” it was (that I wished to create) isn’t of import. What’s important is that after nearly twenty years studying this field of research and practicing using this knowledge and these materials, I am very sure of our ability to create reality with our beliefs/thoughts/feelings and/or vibrations.

It appears there are three ways to create reality: 1. Using physical action. I want to get up and walk from here to there. So I get up and walk from here to there. Physical action. 2. Not doing anything at all leads a reality to be created FOR us by someone or something else. I want to get up and walk from here to there. But I don’t. Eventually someone is going to come in the room, notice I haven’t moved from this spot in a few days/weeks/months and move me — whether I want them to or not. Not doing anything is another way to create reality; simply by allowing others to create for you. 3. Using consciousness. Our thoughts, ideas, beliefs, feelings, vibrations have an ability to set reality in motion. BEFORE we take physical action. [There may be additional ways to create reality than the methods described above.]

What was fascinating me this evening is: So what about thoughts? Feelings? Emotions? Ideas? We know they are OF consciousness… Creations of consciousness… But are they ONLY effects of consciousness? Or could it be possible that they too can be conscious or become consciousness? This is what kept gnawing at me. Try as I might to get it out of my head, or at least come to some sort of resolution with it, I just couldn’t let it go; I kept getting more and more excited thinking about it.

from Dr. Wayne Dyer to Deepak Chopra to Avatar to Sedona Method to Abraham Hicks (or that movie created about their teachings called The Secret) to the work of Amit Gowswami or Hassim Haramein, all have the same general message: Think it, feel it, envision it, focus on it, affirm it, imagine it over and over and eventually you stand a much better chance of being able to create it than if you only took physical action.

(In previous posts we’ve already discussed the idea that prayer is just another form of the above methods. Prayer seems to work in a limited number of cases because it forces the person to focus on what they desire to create, to affirm it, to envision it, etc. I would assert that the only reason that prayer doesn’t work more often is because the person doesn’t commit enough time or effort to prayer; and thus they aren’t committing enough time and effort to focusing on, affirming and envisioning whatever it is they wish to create. If they did, i.e. prayed for something more often, they would probably be able to increase their quantitative effectiveness of prayer as a method of reality creation. (When people pray for something and it does NOT transpire, they usually resort to the old adage that “God knows best. I guess God has something else in mind that I just can’t see yet”. In reality, they should instead dedicate more time and effort to praying — which would in turn increase the amount of time and effort they are focusing on and envisioning that which they desire: this would increase their chances of creating what they desire immensely more than giving up and assuming “God has a plan I just can’t see yet.” In fact, succumbing to that age-old concept is more akin to reality creation method #2 — not doing anything and letting other people or things create reality for us; it seems to be a form of giving up. But let’s not get hung up here.)

We’ve all experienced thinking about something and then seeing it transpire out of the blue without us having to do anything. Perhaps a person calls that we were just thinking about, or we see a word we just learned the definition of. These are the simple and easy ones. (ones that actually have other explanations for their occurrence than just reality creation). But I’m trying to use examples that everyone can relate to. Let’s for a moment assume that YOU are way beyond this kind of reality creation. That you’ve used some of the techniques described above and really experienced creating some incredible realities using nothing but thought, belief, feeling, vibration. Thousands of studies are taking place all over planet earth at this time by renowned scientists who are now starting to prove scientifically that this is possible. So the concept itself is starting to leave the realm of the paranormal /supernatural/ metaphysical and entering the world of science. Finally. It’s definitely about time.

But HOW does it happen? THAT’s the question… I spent a good fifteen minutes this evening in deep meditative prayer — i.e. focusing on, affirming, and envisioning that which I desired to create. It has now started to create. Within the next couple of days I will begin to see tangible proof that I created this reality. But how? Obviously it’s an energy thing. Yes? And that’s my point. We know it works. But as of yet we haven’t broken down HOW it works. This is where scientists will come in handy — as they begin to first prove it to be true (as a side effect they will also prove the effectiveness of prayer along the way — for the reasons I lay out above), and then begin to analyze and break down the mechanical aspects of HOW it works.

My presumption is that once released from consciousness, thoughts, ideas, beliefs and feelings become conscious. They may not necessarily become “consciousness” themselves. Though I haven’t ruled this idea out. But my guess is that they take on an energy of their own — as if they are conscious. At it’s most pure, we see that “vibration” — i.e. what someone vibrates — creates reality. But we aren’t just idly “vibrating”. Almost never… Unless in deep meditation…. And even then there are hundreds if not thousands of extraneous other aspects to our vibrations than pure awareness… So… our vibrations, whatever they may be in each moment, i.e. the energy that we are sending out — comes FROM our thoughts, beliefs, ideas and feelings. Thus, as we use consciousness to focus in on something that we desire (or resist), as we affirm it repeatedly, envision it, send thought energy to it, and we do that until we literally FEEL it… all those thoughts feelings and visions turn into an energy… it’s the energy that creates what we are vibrating. What we vibrate determines the realities that we create. My feeling is that these thoughts, ideas, feelings and visions turn “conscious” in effect. They leave our consciousness, but continue to exist. Sure they started out emanating FROM us, out of us. But then they leave our space and continue on out into the world… vibrating… existing as energy on their own. They then come into contact with other vibrations that are out there and together create realities.

The basic premise here is that in time scientists will not just prove that thoughts, ideas, feelings and beliefs create reality, but that they will soon discover that they are composed of matter. They are material in nature. Not just mental constructs. Eventually they will be able to determine what molecular material thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and visions are composed of. All of which lead to what we now label “vibrations”. Even these vibrations as we call them are still nothing more than mental constructs at this time in history. But not for long. We haven’t been able to see or measure them yet. But in time we will be able to. No different than how we are able to see and measure light and sound waves as vibrations. Soon we will be able to see and measure these other kinds of vibrations that we as conscious beings emanate from our thoughts, ideas, feelings and beliefs. Furthermore we will even be able to see and measure the different material that composes each of these different as-of-now mental-constructs: ideas, beliefs, thoughts, feelings. Maybe even desires and resistances. I can foresee a time when we will be able to hook someone up to electrodes and without them telling us WHAT they are feeling/thinking/doing/seeing, we will be able to tell THEM what it is. As in we will be able to SEE it on a screen: okay that’s a thought, that’s a feeling, that’s an idea, that’s a belief. Perhaps even further: that’s a desire, that’s a resistance, that’s rather neutral… Probably all just slightly different forms of the same basic materials, different atomic combinations and subsets…

That’s enough for now. The sun is rising. I must get some sleep.

— Posted by The Ambassador using BlogPress on an iPhone 8s Custom.

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Uncategorized Abraham Hicks, Amit Gowswami, Avatar, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Hagimura, Hassim Haramein, how prayer works, reality creation, Sedona Method, the Secret movie, vibrations create reality, Wayne dyer, what are beliefs composed of

Joel Osteen Teaches Avatar and Abraham Hicks

February 9, 2014

Over the weekend I was watching the excellent “Ascent of Money” documentary, when in the corner of my eye I spotted another video that also looked interesting; several in fact. Even though I was completely entrenched in The Ascent of Money movie, I didn’t want to forget about this other one that caught my eye. So as not to miss it, I clicked on it in order to share it publicly, to FB or Twitter or even Instagram, and ask people to let me know if it was any good or not. That video was entitled “Our History is Not What We Think“. As soon as I clicked on it to save to a playlist and share it I found myself completely captivated by its content. It’s one hell of a ride. So I began watching IT instead. (Don’t you hate when that happens?)

Most of it is stuff that we’ve already seen or heard before. It’s more than a tad challenging for yours truly at this point to find anything I haven’t already seen or heard of or studied– outside of the ever expanding “tech” underworld that is. Much of the material in this one hour animated presentation seems to be based on the work of Drunvalo Melchizedek. This guy is WAY out there, mind you. By most people’s account he’d be considered a total crackpot, IF they’d heard of him or his work, which they haven’t. His focus is on something he terms The Flower of Life, a pseudo-science theory roughly arranged around sacred geometry, tantric sex and ancient alien theories. I had first started studying him back in the mid-nineties, long before there was a thriving internet or animated YouTube presentations to lend credibility to outlandish claims. Back then we would trade paperback books and pamphlets, rough-copied VHS tapes or snail-mailed cheaply printed newsprint quarterly newsletters in this very hush-hush underground world of alternate history and conspiracy theories. Now there are whole TV shows and networks dedicated to this kind of thinking. Like all things once “niche” it too has become rather mainstream.

In a nutshell the basic idea of this particular “alternate history” movie is that humankind has forgotten it’s real history and has instead embraced the much newer history that the major religions and empires of the world have put forth more recently in our history — think Roman Empire, Christendom, Islam or the British Empire. Nothing too outlandish about that. Perfectly believable premise frankly. Anyone who has really studied the underbelly of human history understands that our true history has been lost for ages and replaced by a revisionist history that is always being written and rewritten by whichever group happens to be in control at the time; in other words — the meanest strongest toughest or cruelest people at any given time in our slow evolution as a species rewrites our shared history in their own image and demands that everyone believe. And for the most part, most people do.

But from that first point of feasibility, the documentary leaps out onto a slippery slope so outlandish that it’s more entertainment than believable academic study. It questions how the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian cultures were so advanced, how the Mayans were able to create the world’s most accurate calendar or have an understanding of the precession of the equinox; brings into light ideas about alternate universes, higher dimensions, the Tree of Life, the Flower of Life, the Merkaba, the Talmud, the Kabala, Ascended Masters, Spirit Guides, you name it. It even asserts that the Hebrews are a non-earthly lifeform that emigrated to earth tens of thousands of years ago, along with the Martians and the Greys. Nothing new in here. Heard it all before. Just all put together quite neatly and succinctly. For the pure pleasure of taking the trip, it’s more than enjoyable, and if this kind of knowledge does interest you, there are tidbits here and there that are interesting.

I was fascinated by the onslaught of comments in the right-hand column by people infuriated that anyone would or could possibly believe such “nonsense” — especially the religious lot of them. They spoke as if the video’s very existence was an insult to their life. Many engaged in endless debates with others filled with angry tirades, misspelled words, red herrings, non-sequitors, slippery slope assertions, ad hominem attacks and insults and the worst grammar this side of kindergarten. I’ve never understood the merit of arguing with someone who you don’t know personally, will never meet and whom you have nothing in common with. Especially when you’re in a public place and on their turf. It’s one thing, if that’s your schtick and you wholeheartedly disagree with what you consider blatant misinformation. But if you’re a practicing theist, you’ve already stepped out onto the ledge and into the land Oz. So why bother starting a fight with people who have absolutely no conception of your view of the world and no intention of changing theirs? More than anything, the video — though it claims to offer a realistic alternative take on human history if one just opens their mind — is so far fetched that I can’t believe anyone would take it any more seriously than the latest sci-fi flick. I certainly don’t get why anyone would bother arguing the merits of such outlandish claims. Especially when they themselves are already professing to believe equally outlandish belief systems such as any of the Big Four religions that have so preoccupied humankind over the last two-thousand years.

It did get me thinking though. About a subject that I have been meaning to write about for some time. What we find on planet earth presently is a variety of different groups of people who each believe a different set of religious or spiritual beliefs or principles that all seem opposed to one another — which has been one of the major causes of war and bloodshed in our short recorded history on earth. Christians will tell you that new agers are all wrong; as will Muslims or other theist types. New Agers will claim that those who practice any of the Big Four religions are brainwashed and closed-minded. Atheists consider the whole lot of them crackpots. Which I think is hilarious since atheism itself is just as whacky and far fetched a religion as any of the Big Three or Four (depending on if you include Hinduism in the group). It’s just the opposite side of the same coin, Atheism that is. There is a God. There isn’t a God. Okay…. prove it. Right? Impossible on either side. So I tend to be more open minded, choosing instead to take the “honestly I have no idea” view. You can’t prove there is no “god” any more than you can prove that there is a “god”. Taking either side is pointless and reeks of ignorance, or at least a mind that is not very well thought out.

For example we know that Christianity is not an original idea, but a ragtag amalgam of different belief systems that stem from primarily paganism, Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman mythology. Islam is pretty much the same thing but just the 7th century Arabian’s version of it. Judaism stems from Persia’s Zoroastrianism along with a variety of ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, Sumerian, and Pagan beliefs with a good lot of ancient Greek mathematics thrown into it, which lends a more mystical feel to the more esoteric aspects of it, and a hell of a lot of “our God is the best and strongest and he likes us the best” type of survivalist rhetoric. Judaism is very Darwinian in that respect: cultural survival of the fittest speak disguised as religion.

All the major Big Four religions currently being obsessed over by human beings have much in common and tend to agree more than disagree when you break them all down. The primary difference between them all is that THEIR GOD just happens to be “the best” and prefer THEM as “his chosen people” more than any other people. There’s an anthropological irony to it all that is so obvious that it makes it hard not to laugh when pondering or writing about it. If there had not been so much human life lost and so much misery caused by all of them through the centuries, this laughter would be a bit easier and not always feel so distasteful. But one just cannot get beyond the fact that as hysterically irrational and laughable modern religious systems are, they’re also extremely dangerous to the general survival of the human species in general; especially if you don’t happen to subscribe to one of them at any given moment in history — depending on who is in control at the time. Presently it’s the Christians and Jews running things with the Muslims in a close second. The Hindus have given up being in control in modern times, so they’re perfectly content letting their religious beliefs play second fiddle to the rest of them and being a punch-line to numerous jokes about “how many Gods they have” etc. In this respect, Hinduism has more a chance of serving the sincere seeker more simply because the religion itself has less need to prove it’s rightness or political import and believers can focus more on just using the beneficial aspects of the belief system to their own personal advantage rather than worry about how strong of a grip the religion itself has on the mechanisms of modern society or its politics.

To get back to this documentary, if we forget the more primitive legends and myths associated with the religions explored in it, it’s mind boggling how mathematically advanced early humans were when you begin to study the more esoteric Judaic writings. PI, The Golden Mean and the Fibonacci Sequence all come into play in early Judaism, which is more than impressive and suspicious. Advanced stuff for a people supposedly extremely “primitive” and still given to animal sacrificing and blanket misogyny. But again, the perception we have today of Judaism or Christianity is the “modern accepted view” of Judeo-Christian beliefs, AFTER both the rabbis of that day AND the Roman Empire stripped anything remotely intelligent from the writings or teachings offered to the masses. [This in and of itself is one of the greatest cons and conspiracies perpetrated on humans by humans in the history of humankind.] The real meat of both these religions is available to anyone interested in digging a bit deeper. Some of it can be quite advanced. It’s just not knowledge you’ll find being preached about or taught in modern churches or synagogues. Instead you get Noah and the Ark, Adam and Eve, Joseph’s magic coat and Jesus being born in a manger on December 25th when just about everyone knows that Jesus wasn’t even born in the winter, let alone December. But for now these principles seem to work for most people. If they only knew…

Speaking personally, it’s no big secret that I personally practice a loose version of Christianity, belong to the Methodist denomination and even attend and volunteer at a real church on a regular basis. It’s also no great mystery that I’m also an avid student of Avatar, Abraham Hicks, Sedona Method, quantum mechanics, witchcraft and high magic, ancient alien theory and just about anything “new age”, supernatural or paranormal if it interests me. I justify such apparent contradictions in my own belief system by stating that “it works for me”. And in the end, whatever works for you and doesn’t hurt anyone else, should be tolerated by others no matter how different it may be from what works for them. That’s the truly libertarian way to view the world and our fellow man. Frankly I don’t really see that much contradiction between Christian theology and New Age thinking, IF you understand the basics underneath them all.

You just have to, one, go to the roots — learn the history — the real history, and two, learn how to read between the lines. Let’s take two rather popular –though seemingly opposite and contradictory — viewpoints and break them down to show just how similar they really are. On the one hand we have the Theist viewpoint: this would include any of the Big Four religions of modern humankind, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam. All contend that a great and powerful all-knowing/seeing God exists who can hear our inner-most thoughts, hopes, dreams, fears and desires and does his or her best to intercede in our lives when we need it. If we pray to him or her, we have a better chance of experiencing the life of our dreams; because “God answers our prayers”. Take Joel Osteen as an example of your average Christian leader. Osteen is a friend. He’s someone I admire. [Though I must admit he sadly disappointed me a few years ago when he publicly flip-flopped on his views of homosexuals and “God’s view of them”, stating “I have plenty of homosexuals in my congregation and God loves all of his flock equally, I’m sure. But I couldn’t in good conscience attend a wedding or officiate at a wedding between two same-sex couples, because I believe that homosexuality is a sin.” This was a very different viewpoint than what Joel had previously professed just a few short months before. He was obviously feeling the heat from the bigger community of Christian pastors around the country — the so-called Moral Majority or Christian Right. Too bad. Because up until that point, Joel really held a great advantage over the rest of this group, even gaining access to people like me, those in the world of the intelligencia who would normally never even give someone like him the time of day. But I’m still holding out hope for Joel. One day he’s going to regret ever saying something so silly and small-minded. I trust in his connection with the Divine. He’s going to come around…]

So… Joel Osteen. He leads the largest congregation of Christians in the United States. He’s adored by millions and apparently hated by an equal number of people who find his brand of Christianity too wish-washy and easy. These types prefer a more stern and conservative “God” construct. They think that Joel is “perverting God’s word”. Little do they know that we’ve been doing that since the moment that we decided to attempt to write down “god’s thoughts” in the first place. As if. Joel preaches a very New Age version of Christianity. Yet he still calls it Christianity. His style has caught on with millions of people all over the world. He focuses less on God’s wrath and more on God’s love. The reason why this has caught such fire with so many people all over the world is because this idea resonates with something that we as human beings have been feeling in our hearts about our own view of “god” for hundreds of years. We just couldn’t shout it out loud because up until Joel (and plenty of others before him to be fair) came along, it just didn’t seem to vibe with what the general consensus of “god” was in mass consciousness. The Unity Church had been preaching this same thing for a hundred years at least. So too had Marianne Williamson and plenty of others. Joel just took it mainstream by cloaking it in traditional Christianity.

Personally, I’ve always found Joel to be an admirable person and an inspiring speaker. His sermons, though never as intelligent or thought provoking as say Stephen Bauman’s — perhaps the most intellectual Christian speaker of our time, are always moving and inspiring. One thing is certain about him: he wholeheartedly believes in a Divine Power in the universe that knows us, loves us and we can access from this dimension (call it the earthly dimension) through prayer. If one prays enough, they can create the life that they desire because God answers our prayers. He claims that his mother cured herself of cancer through prayer — that God cured her of cancer — and that the doctors and hospitals have confirmed this fact and consider it “a miracle”. I have no problem believing this. But perhaps not for the same reasons that Joel and his mother do.

Let’s take the other side of the coin: the so-called New Age theories about the mechanics of the universe. We can use Avatar as an example of it, or the Sedona Method, or Abraham Hicks or even the recent New Age phenomenon of the century — that movie The Secret. The basic theory of all these systems is that “we ourselves are creating our own reality based on our beliefs or vibrations”. If we change our beliefs, if we change our vibrations, we can change our experiences. That’s it in a nutshell. Some belief systems subscribe to a Divine Power at play. And some don’t, instead choosing to skip over that whole paradigm. Some call this divine power “The Universe” or “The Great Spirit” or “The Force” or “Source”…. None of that really matters. What matters is that these systems promote a more pro-active technique for reality creation, i.e. rather than praying to a God to create our lives for us, we create our own lives based on our beliefs and our general vibration. To me this ideology has always felt much less like a victim mentality than pure religiosity, which tends to promote a more sublimated approach to beingness; one must sublimate themselves to this divine all powerful force in the universe to be in “good favor” with it.

We can dissect the pros and cons of both systems ad infinitum, going as deep as humankind ever has, quote the greats and the not so greats till we’re blue in the face and our ego is as big as a hot air balloon, and still not actually get anywhere. This is called “going to seminary” or “becoming a rabbi or an Imam or a priest” in the religious world or “becoming ordained” in the New Age world. A lot of studying and memorizing things that other men made up. But we’re going to skip over all that and head right to the main thesis.

These two systems, the Theist view versus the New Age view, seem diametrically opposed to one another. One preaches a higher power is in control of everything — in an almost fatalistic sense, and one preaches that WE are actually in control of everything that happens to us. I tend to fall right smack dab in the middle of these two groups. Or completely outside of them. Depending on how one looks at it. Being an avid student of science, especially more advanced and esoteric quantum physics, I believe it is only a matter of time before science discovers that there really is a “Divine Force” in the universe. Einstein called it the Unified Field Theory — he was looking for the “fifth force” in the universe that controls the other four forces (those being gravity, electro-magnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces) and helps them to all work together. At present science is having a tough time figuring out how the current four forces in the universe all work together so seamlessly when they appear to be so opposed to each other. Especially gravity. He believed that there was a fifth force at play that we just hadn’t discovered yet. Science has come very close as of late to discovering this fifth force. Some assert that Dark Matter and Dark Forces are that fifth force. Some say that we’re still hypothesizing and haven’t proven the existence of Dark Matter or the Dark Forces. Some say that we have yet to discover this fifth force. Some claim that it may lie in the boson, the so-called “god particle”. Personally I don’t think that possessing a knowledge of the names of things is half as important as having an understanding of how it all works. An innate tangible or palpable understanding, as in knowing how to harness the power of these systems, regardless of whether one knows the names that man has arbitrarily attached to them or not.

Either way, I believe there is a good chance that in our lifetimes we will discover this fifth force, and that yes indeed it will tie all the other ones together quite neatly and explain a lot of what we have heretofore considered mysteries of the cosmos. Will it be “God”? Well that all depends on how attached one is to needing to believe that “God” resembles human beings. See, that’s the problem with modern theists’ view of “god”. They seem to have an uncontrollable and inexplicable need for “god” to resemble humankind. They’re all caught up in that whole “God created Man in his image” nonsense. So they’re expecting “god” to be a living breathing intelligent life-like organism. Fat chance. As I have explored numerous times here already, God is most likely a force alright, a mighty big and powerful one; but he/she/it is probably much less life-like and much more like “consciousness” itself. Without the need for an external body or vehicle to get around in. In fact, if I had to guess, I would say that “God” is probably just a giant ball or cluster of all consciousness that’s ever existed since the existence of the universe itself. And in that respect, “god” would not be physical at all. Though that shouldn’t stop scientists from searching for it. They’re definitely onto something in their exploration of Dark Matter or anti-matter and these mysterious bosons. The invisible equal to all things that are visible in the known universe.

So let us say that there is this pulsating Divine Power or Force in the universe that just IS…. It’s an “isness” more than a physical being. It’s most likely “being-less” that still “is”. But that doesn’t preclude it from being “something”. It could still be a very powerful force, perhaps the all-powerful force that theists have postulated for millennia. It just might not be a living breathing organic being in the human being/animal sense of the word. This is why some New Age thinkers tend to just refer to it as “the universe”. I personally don’t prefer this label, “the universe”, because as we already know that the universe as we currently label it is nothing but a giant vacuum that holds all that is. This force either exists inside of “the universe” — is a part of it, OR exists OUTside of it and holds all that is, including the universe, inside of IT. Either way, we fit in somewhere in this equation, albeit quite possibly in a very small near miniscule way. And there’s a good chance that WE as living breathing organic life-streams with access to consciousness can access this powerful force.

THIS is why prayer works. AND this is also why creating and discreating and changing our beliefs and vibration works. Either technique is going to achieve some kind of result, because both techniques summon this force. Some might say that through prayer they are accessing “God” and that “God is granting their wish to come true” because they’ve been good pray-ers. Others might say that because they’ve changed their beliefs and are thus vibrating more closely to that which they wish to experience that THEY are then more easily able to create the outcomes they desire. Both techniques seem to “work”.

In my humble opinion, both parties are doing pretty much the same thing. They’re just calling it different things. If a person walks around all day asserting that “God is my protector. God wants me to be healthy and happy and prosperous. God loves me and takes care of me”, and they experience this, are they not just talking themselves into believing this? And through believing this, are they not then vibrating this? In turn creating it as a reality? No different really than someone else who skips the “god” part of the equation entirely and simply asserts “I deserve to be happy and healthy and prosperous. I am filled with love. My life is wonderful”. They too experience the same outcome. Why? Because through constant affirmation of said statements they are slowly shifting their beliefs toward these vibrations and hence creating these experiences for themselves.

Both are really doing the same thing. Whether they include a “god” in it or not. Perhaps there is a great and all powerful force at play. This force is indeed helping to control and sustain the other four forces in the universe AND consciousness itself. Through connecting with and aligning with this force, any conscious being can create reality. Through affirming good things, we are attaching ourselves in consciousness to the more positive aspect of this force and using it to help create the outcomes that we desire in our lives that we consider to be “good”. And vice versa. Plenty of very bad things have been created in the world in the “name of God” and have manifested. Slavery, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the Genocide of the Native Americans… How do we explain “God” being all-good when humans have consistently used this force called “god” to do some very bad things throughout history? Unless this force doesn’t actually judge whether things are “good” or “bad”. Perhaps as some people claim, “god” is just a force that doesn’t recognize the duality of good and bad. I sincerely doubt it. But that’s just me wishful-thinking — attaching my own human views of good and bad onto my desired view of what “god” might be like. Not very fair to “god”. But how can I help it? I want there to be a “god” and I want him/her/it to be “good”. The problem of course is that one person’s “good” is another person’s “bad” is another person’s “who cares”.

If we choose instead to view “god” as a pure force… a pure energy… one that can be harnessed for both good or bad… by any organic organism — and I hesitate to limit consciousness to being solely organic in nature only — so instead let’s change that to “any state of consciousness”… — then what that means is that anyone or anything that extends enough will and effort to access this “god force” can do so and can use it to create whatever they so choose. Think Star Wars and the idea of “the Force”. When Joel Osteen advises us to walk around all day affirming how much god loves us and how much god wants us to succeed and be happy, in essence he’s really just advising us to do whatever it takes to change our “state” (Tony Robbins and NLP) or change our vibration (The Secret and Abraham Hicks) or change our beliefs (Avatar and Sedona Method) in order to create the reality that we prefer. He’s just using the “god” idea because it’s been so pre-programmed and indoctrinated into human consciousness for so many thousands of years. So for many people, it really helps them to think that “god” is at play in their lives. What they’re really doing of course is changing their state or beliefs or vibrations. And in exchange for them doing this, they can sometimes experience that their greatest wishes and desires come true in their lives. Why? They claim it’s because God answers prayers. But it might just be that they’ve begun to align themselves or their vibration with that which they prefer to experience through incessant affirmation and thought THROUGH praying. [Ultimately does it really make a difference?]

Or perhaps there really IS a “god” in the universe and that’s why prayer works AND that’s why affirmations and changing our state or beliefs or vibration helps — because through doing so we are more readily attaching our own consciousness to “god’s” and he in turn is picking up on what we’re sending out and rewarding us by granting us our deepest desires and wishes. Who knows?

The simple truth is that NO ONE really knows. Anyone who claims to know — be that person a rabbi or pastor or priest or pope or Imam or spiritual leader — is not being honest. They’re lying. At best they’re fooling themselves, through latching on to a quasi-state of a mass-consciousness belief system, participating in a state of mass hypnosis, no different than they did when they claimed “god supported and condoned slavery”. At worst, they know they’re not being honest, but benefitting too greatly from it to admit it. But in reality, most any intelligent or rational person we’d ever sit down in a quiet place with and talk one to one with would admit that they have no more a clue as to if a “god” exists in the world than the next person. And that’s perfectly fine. In fact, it’s preferable to someone who would swear up and down that they really believe that they KNOW that a “god” exists. After all, one day we’re going to be called out on this belief. And “god” help the man whose bluff is called and they can’t summon the power of this great and all powerful “god” when they need to. Best to keep the jury out on this one I say.

But absolutely nothing wrong with admitting that we’d LOVE for there to be a “god” in the universe, regardless of what form it decides to take or not take, visible or invisible. The real meat of the issue is that it does appear that we ARE capable of creating our experiences, our lives, our day to day experiences and circumstances… and the “how” is in our beliefs and vibrations. The true scientific mechanisms of how all this works we will leave to the scientists as we always have. One day I am sure they will figure it all out and let us know what’s really going on. In the meantime, we at least have a clue as to how to make things work out better for ourselves or at least more in our favor. And that’s a very good thing.

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Uncategorized Abraham Hicks, Avatar, christianity, dark matter, Drunvalo Melchizedek, Eintein, flower of life, harry palmer, Hinduism, instant manifestation, islam, Joel Osteen, Judaism, physics, quantum mechanics, reality creation, sacred geometry, Sedona Method, Stephen Bauman, The Secret, tony robbins, tree of life

The Science of the Avatar

July 4, 2012

Just caught this DVD — surpringly filmed in front of a small audience way back in 2004 — presentation of a lecture by William A. Tiller, the physicist, wherein he presents proof through clinical studies and formulas that human beings through intention can significantly affect physical reality. Another grand leap for science into territory that has normally been reserved for spiritual, new age, occult or paranormal paradigms and often dismissed by the scientific community.
Of course Dr. tiller’s discoveries are not new to the world of science. Those who have been following this exciting vectoring and merging of the two assumed disparate fields remember well the infamous book The Tao of Physics, to name but one. But Dr. Tiller’s work here only adds to what many outside of hard science have known for millennia, that there is much more to our human potential than just doing our best to navigate the events that “happen to us”… But rather it is us who are actually creating those events. They may “happen”, indeed; but not without our direct or indirect intention in one way or another.
Harry Palmer, the discoverer, inventor and author of the Avatar series of knowledge and techniques — books, DVD lectures, and most importantly courses — has been the chief proponent of these theories over the last thirty years, long before the concept took hold and became hip as a pop culture phenom. [Palmer wasn’t the first to propose the idea that beliefs precede experience or that human beings create their own reality.

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Uncategorized conscious acts of creation, Deepak Chopra, Dr. william A. Tiller, harry palmer, Labels: avatar course, physics, reality creation, Wayne dyer

TheTranscendenceDiaries

Tag: reality creation

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