The Spiritual community says that before you can be reborn – have a new world-view – the old one must die. That is what the financial crisis and Global warming are all about. They are the death of the old paradigm. They are forcing people to rethink the way they do things. And Obama is seen as a new young leader that will take us toward a new way of being. Look how symbolic this election is. We have McCain who is very old and thinks in the old ways, against the very young Obama who thinks in new ways. Even his ethnic background is symbolic He is half white and half black. The old America is very racist, the new paradigm is not. Obama may not be the new paradigm but if elected may be the intermediary between the two paradigms - moving us in the direction of the new paradigm. Our children then would grow up in that new way and become the new paradigm.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

To be caring to ones neighbor is innate in humans. One would be hard put to find a small village or town in the past that did not take care of their own. When someone got sick or hurt the village took care of them. This is still true in some small towns in America, but for the most part America has lost its way and systematically turned its back on its neighbors. We have been so propagandized by the Republican machine that half of us believe that we shouldn’t have to pay our fair share to take care of our own citizens.

Sure, when disaster strikes like 9/11 we have lots of caring people who give up a lot to help out, and then we pat ourselves on the back and say, “Just look at how caring America is.”

What a MYTH! Where is the caring that really counts?  When the helpers at ground zero get sick from the toxins spewed into the air, and don’t have any health insurance, we say, “Too bad so sad, but I would rather have low taxes.” Where is the willingness to pay ones taxes so children won’t have to go hungry, and do without medical care? Where is the caring for the millions of uninsured, or the millions of children who are getting a poor education?

America ranks dead last in caring among the industrial countries of the world. LAST! We have the highest mortally rate, and highest health care cost. That is because it is for profit. Some things just should not be for profit! A recent study showed that the poorest person in England has better healthcare than most of the upper class in America.

When a Republican says he is going to fight the liberals in congress what he is saying is that he is perfectly happy with a dead last America. He doesn’t care if our schools are dead last. He doesn’t care that millions of Americans are hurting. He has no sympathy for people who go bankrupt because they can’t pay their medical bills. “Too bad so sad.”

When are we going to get it that the Republican agenda is about money and power, and they don’t give a damn about America or anyone living here? I have been watching politics since Ike, and I have yet to see a republican live up to a singe campaign promise to help the poor. The Republican Party is the puppet of the rich and powerful corporations, CEOs, and inherited wealth. They are telling everyone a romance fiction that we are an agrarian 18th century country and don’t need government or taxes.  That America is gone, DEAD! And we need to grow up and face reality. People are hurting out there, and when you vote for a Republican you agree that a DEAD LAST America is OK with you.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

One day in 1979 a man walked into a bank in Elberton, Georgia and gave his name as R. C. Christian. He then made a very strange request of the bank. He deposited a large sum of money in the bank along with instructions on how the money was to be spent. He then left the bank never to be heard of again. Per his instructions on March 22, 1980 a monument almost twenty feet tall, and made from six granite slabs weighing more than 100 tons total, was dedicated. One slab stands in the center, with four arranged around it in the four directions of the compass. A capstone lies on top of the five slabs, which is also astronomically aligned. An additional stone tablet, which is set in the ground a short distance to the west of the monument, provides some clarifying notes on the history and purpose of the Guidestones. Each side of the outer four slabs has inscribed on it 10 instructions to humanity, with each of the eight surfaces in a different modern language.

Over the next few blogs I am going to look at the 10 instructions and see if I can glean some wisdom from them.

The first instruction says:

Maintain Humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

When I first read this, my jaw dropped a little, and I thought “what a small number, after all the earth is now at 6.6 billion people!” That means that there are 6.1 billion more people than the author claims is optimum.

But the more I thought about it, I decided that the author may have a point. In the 14th Century the total human population was 300 million. The 6.6 billion we now have has become a cancer on the earth, and is leading us to the brink of the worst environmental crises in the history of humans. Just about every dimension of nature is under attack, and listed on some endangered list. A new “Worldwatch” research paper shows that not only are hundreds of species in great stress from our lack of understanding of nature’s balance, but our fresh water, air, and top soil are on the endangered list as well.

Just one part of the report reads:
“Billions of dollars spent for flood control, plus the effects of land degradation, actually increased the severity and cost of flooding on the Columbia, Rhine, and Mississippi rivers. Freshwater ecosystems are both disproportionately rich and disproportionately imperiled. Some 20% of 9,000 known freshwater fish species worldwide are already extinct or imperiled, with the toll much higher where human impact is heavy. In North America and Europe, about 40% of all native fish species are extinct or imperiled. In East Africa's heavily stressed Lake Victoria, 40% of its unique 350 native fish species are at risk, with 60% already extinct.”

In 1895, the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest provided a bounty of nearly 20,000 tons of salmon a year. One hundred years later, the catch had collapsed to just 533 tons. Projected for the next century, that is a loss of nearly 2 billion tons of salmon missing from the local economy and world food supply.”

If we humans don’t learn to maintain our population and nature’s balance, nature will do it for us. If you don’t think that nature can wipe us out as quick as it did the dinosaurs, think again, and if we don’t grow up and start working with nature very soon, we will be just a footnote in the history of earth.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Rumors and myths don’t appear out of a vacuum; there is always at least a kernel of truth somewhere. For years there were stories of a man that lived in a legally protected forest in Brazil. It seems that he was always digging holes, the stories went, sometimes as traps to catch large animals, but sometimes for no known reasons. He also seemed to be living in a hole because holes were found inside of little houses built of palm leaves.

In 1995 the Brazilian government’s Indian Affairs Department, called FUNAI, set out to investigate the stories, and in 1997 found him in one of his houses. The best that FUNAI can tell from their investigation is that the man is the sole survivor of a small indigenes tribe that had lived in the rain forest. The Cattle ranchers, who wanted the land to raise their cattle, had massacred the tribe in at least two raids.

Just imagine being the last surviving member of your tribe, and living in a forest where there are no other people. Studies now reveal that the man of the hole is not the only one who has this plight. There are an estimated 40,000 isolated people worldwide of which we don’t know very much about; many must be the last of their kind. Now, as part of the paradigm shift (I think), an international organization was launched this month called Survival International. Their goal is to support endangered tribal peoples, and for the man of the hole FUNAI has added 3000 protected hectares to include more areas of forest they know he uses. So where it is too late for the man of the hole, a new consciousness is growing and endangered tribal people will be treated with new dignity.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Just pause as you read this, and try to imagine – get a feel for, what is meant when we call something information. What are we talking about? Is it real?

We talk about it as if it were something real. We buy and sell it, but does it really exist? Isn’t it just a thought? Thoughts do not exist or do they? We look at the computer screen and think, “the computer screen is a real thing, but the information on it is not real, it is just made up, 1s and 0s. It is just thoughts.” Thoughts do not really exist. But yet the line between the reality of the physical world and the reality of the virtual one is blurring on a daily basis. Whole economies with “real” money from this reality, now exist in online virtual games. When a virtual person buys something in the virtual world from another virtual person real money in the world gets exchanged. To someone who plays the online virtual games the game becomes as real as this reality.

Modern science has now started using the word information to mean energy. Yes, instead of talking about the conservation of energy they now talk about the conservation of information. In other words the universe contains a set amount of information, which is used to describe it. Scientists measure this information in computer bits. Anything that happens in a computer requires a set amount of bits. An “off or on” speck of energy is one bit, or piece of information, that is needed to describe something that exists. For example to describe a number like one or five would take four bits of information. 0001=one and 0101=five, but to describe an object like a person would take thousands to millions of bits depending on the level of detail. An atom then takes a set amount of information to describe its existence, a set number of bits of energy. Then because nothing exists except atoms the whole universe can be described as information, and the difference between energy and information is just in the eye of the beholder.

But wait, is that not exactly the way the virtual world works, with the online games being nothing but off and on bits of energy, and made to appear on the computer screen? When someone throws a ball against a wall in the virtual world does it not impact the wall and bounce back just like the wall was really hard? What is the difference in that and what we call “real” reality? We are just made of atoms, which are, just bits of energy/information, and bits of energy exist in only one dimension. In other words there is nothing really there. Think about it, we can’t conceptualize something that is only one dimension. In order to imagine it, it must have size and the second it has size it is no longer one dimension. So what is the difference between the real and virtual worlds?

Let’s see, there are one-dimensional specks of energy that science calls quarks, which are there but yet they aren’t there. When these quarks are put together in groups of three they create a force field called a proton or neutron. Hum, little balls of force fields and yet there is nothing really there. It now seems that by putting together these little force fields, that are not really there, one can create an even bigger force field called an atom, and if the atoms work together they can create an even larger force fields, an object or thing. Therefore an object that is not really there at all, but is just something described by information – a thought (illusion?). So why stop there, let’s go one step further and make lots of different objects with bigger fields that oppose or push away other objects. Now you have an object that is called a ball, and another one that is called a wall. When the “ball” object gets close to the “wall” object their force fields push each other away, and the object called the human, who threw the ball, says, “boy that wall is hard!”

Now, the only question left is who is having the thought that created the information, which created this illusion of a ball hitting a wall? That should be obvious, why God of course. In other words the thoughts that you are having, as you read this, are really Gods thoughts. God is not a thing in a place. God is a thought that thinks thoughts, alpha and omega, a Dragon eating it’s own tail, or a hand drawing itself. Your brain and body are really just thoughts, or information. So by creating a thought object of you, and a thought object of me, God can see it’s own thoughts from different points of view. Clever!

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

There are three major tools used by the shadow government or corporate controllers that gives them their power. Our election system, allowing lobbying of congress, and Fear.

As long as the U.S requires elected officials to pay for their own campaigns they will be under strong influence, by moneyed interests, to be biased toward those interests. At the very least a system needs to be put together, which is paid for by the government and that creates a level playing field for all candidates. For example, a series of TV debates and town hall meetings paid for by the government. There are also radical new systems being worked on that were not possible for our founding fathers. The new system of government would not be centralized as it is today but government by a computer system that calls in groups of experts as they are needed for different problems.  Just how this would work is still being examined, but the point here is that our present system gives the shadow government great power over our government.

The right to lobby is the same problem. Where it does seem like a basic right to allow citizens to lobby their elected officers, the influence is disproportionately biased in favor of big money interests. In today’s world if a government official wants to know what the people think an internet poll could give him that information.

But the most powerful tool used by the shadow government to get their way is fear, and this is what 9/11 was all about. And boy did it work, from watering down our civil liberties to allowing the president to unilaterally attack another country just because he made a weak case that they were a perceived threat. If every country went around attacking other countries just because they “appeared” to be a threat the world would be in even more chaos than it is now.  

But the underlying reason for our vulnerability to corporate control of the world is our present worldview. As long as we have the view, that it is “Me against the world,” fear is going to dominate our lives, we are going to be more consumer oriented, and the corporate controllers are going to get their way. When our worldview shifts from the mechanical one we have now, to the understanding that we are a spiritual being having a physical experience, we will lose our fear. When we understand that it is relationships, and creativity that makes us happy and not things, we will have a new world free of the fear the corporations use to control us.

In other words as long as our needs come from outside of us, as opposed to from with-in, we are going to be controlled by others.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Last week I came to the conclusion that the twin towers were in fact a demolition job, but who could be capable of such an unspeakable crime?

Most people cannot conceptualize how anyone could demolition a building full of people. We all have an innate tendency to assume that what we know and feel is just the same as everyone else. That is because all that we can experience is confined to our individualness, and therefore we cannot truly know what others are thinking and feeling. All we can do is assume that everyone around us feels and thinks in the same way we do. We do know intellectually from experience, from talking to and observing other peoples behavior, that others outside ourselves do think and feel things differently than we do. But we can’t feel that, therefore because we would never demolition a building with people in it, we can’t conceptualize someone else doing it, and it is a shock to our self to believe someone would.

In spite of our feelings, there is a group of people in the world who would order the demolition, who psychologists call sociopaths and psychopaths. The main distinction between a sociopath and a psychopath is that a psychopath is a person who is born with an inability to have empathy, and a sociopath learns their behavior growing up. Most sociopaths, but not all, turn out to be petty criminals which makes them stand out in society. Most people then assume that there are “good” people and “bad” people, and you can tell them apart because the bad people get in trouble with the law.  The good people are law-abiding. But this picture is naďve. A high percent of psychopaths can appear to be very “normal” and law-abiding, and have a very high I.Q. In fact a number are idolized and made heroes by most people.  That is because most people idealize wealth and power. A psychopaths only goal in life is wealth and power, and they will not let anything stand in their way to getting it. Some even become very sadistic and enjoy killing. The two most common places that one will find the smart psychopaths is in the corporate world and the military where they can become military or corporate heroes. Of course not all heroes or corporate executives are psychopaths, in fact only a small percent are, but from the outside it is extremely difficult to tell them apart.

Psychologists estimate that around 3% of the population of mostly males, but some females, are sociopaths, and about 1% of males are psychopaths. At last count there were 106 million adult males in the U.S. If 1% are a psychopaths that would mean there are 1.06 million psychopaths in the U.S., and a high percent, are well hidden, smart and seemingly law abiding. To make matters worse, psychopaths tend to have higher than average intelligence. If you take just the upper 3% of that 1.06 million, the smartest of the smart, there would be 32,000 individuals in the U.S alone, many who would have the financial means, and who would without a moment’s hesitation demolition a building full of people - if they had something to gain, and could cover up the fact that they had done it.

So the picture that emerges is one of a potentially large group of people, all super rich, all psychopaths, whose only goal in life is to become even more rich and powerful with, of course, the biggest prize being “king of the world.” They believe that by working together they can do that, i.e. take over the world. Thus the potentiality that there is a group of rich and powerful people who are manipulating the world from behind the scenes is not only likely but also highly probable. To call them a shadow government is somewhat misleading because they do not govern the day-to-day activities of the country the way our government does. But they do everything they can to slide more and more of the control of the world under their influence. So looking at the consequences they have on our daily life, to call them a shadow government is a good name.

There is a serious flaw in our present system of government that gives this group the bulk of their power. Next week we will see what that is and how the new paradigm will change it.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

In the early 1990s I worked for a man who was always reading books on conspiracy theories and believed that there was a shadow government that was going to take over the world. I, of course, thought that was silly. We have an open government, and have a free press. The press would have uncovered that, and our government would have shut them down. Just to be nice I looked over one of his books and was even more convinced it was silliness. It was poorly written and the author appeared to be pulling completely unrelated facts and sandwiching them together to make it look like a conspiracy, when in fact it was unrelated material.

In the meantime he did me a big favor by poking holes in my scientifically trained mechanical worldview, the view that the world is nothing more than a complex chemical machine. I was already in a state of cognitive dissidence from reading a number of books on quantum theory. Quantum theory, which all our modern technology is derived from, cannot be squared with this mechanical worldview. What I realized was that the scientific community was doing the same thing that conspiracy theorists were doing, i.e. trying to sandwich together a mechanical worldview with a scientific one that said reality was some form of illusion, and strictly spiritual.

Fast-forward to 2001 and 9/11 happened, and the internet was filled with more conspiracy theories saying that it was not the airplanes that caused the buildings to collapse. Someone had planned ahead and wired the buildings with demolition explosives. In other words the Arabian hijackers were just pawns in a much bigger plan, and of course, as the theory went, it was all a scheme by the U.S. government to strike fear into the American people and create a reason for us to invade Iraq!

What? How could that be, I cannot think of a more repugnant thought. These people that write this conspiracy stuff must be crazy! How could our government possibly stoop so low as to kill it’s own people. But then I kept seeing the way those buildings just fell straight down, just like buildings demolitioned, and what about the third building, called building seven, that was not even hit by a plane? It too just came straight down. High rise fires before and after 9-11 have not collapsed but three buildings did that day.

Then I got a photo in an email that I just could not get out of my head. It was a picture of a large hole in the side of one of the towers where one of the airplanes had gone into the building. What was so haunting was the fact that there was an insert, of part of the photo, blown up larger. In the blow up you could see what looked like a woman standing at the edge of the opening looking out. She looks dazed because she was leaning against a building support. What is she doing there? Is she from the building or the airplane? One cannot see how she could have survived from either place. Either way, if there was enough heat to melt the steel and collapse the building how can she just be standing there?

Then I thought, lets assume that there was enough heat to make the building collapse, how would it fall? What are the odds that the building supports would give way on both sides of the building at precisely the same time? Not much. If you look at the photos, the airplane went into the corner of one of the buildings. It is clear that if the fire had caused that buildings supports to collapse that corner would have failed first, and the top of the building would have fallen off. Therefore I am completely convinced that the three buildings were in fact a demolition job.

Obviously then, the next question is who? Who could have had the resources and need to do such an unspeakable thing? Were the suicide terrorists that flew the airplanes into the buildings just pawns in a much bigger plan?

Next week, who I think did it and the new paradigm.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Positional truth leads to Nationalistic or local thinking, i.e. thinking that says what I know is better than that which I don’t know, and therefore I must be loyal to that which I know and is mine.  My family is better than yours, my school, my town, my nation are better than yours, and because they are more important to my life I must show my unwavering love and loyalty to them. Loyalty means that I must define as right whatever they do, for better or worse, right or wrong, because they are all I have. In other words they can do no wrong, and anyone who then points out a flaw is not doing their job of showing love and devotion. They are unpatriotic. This is just the way it is, so if you can’t accept that way, you’re the enemy i.e. love it or leave it.

This belief, that one’s own can do no wrong, leads to many sad and tragic events in life. From children that grow up with emotional problems because their parents turned a blind eye to the mistakes the children are making; to nations that commit horrible atrocities, as the citizens cheer them on and support their actions. The first picture that comes to mind is Nazi Germany, but a not so obvious one is the Iraqi war. Out of fear, Americans allowed their leaders to unilaterally attack another country that was totally unrelated to the real source of their fear.

This nationalistic thinking comes from fear, a fear of the unknown, and a fear of the future, a need to hold on to the present, with all its problems. “At least I know what the present problems are” the belief goes. It is like a ship that is sinking and passengers refuse to leave even though there is a better ship not too far away. The old ship is their home and the water is cold between them and the better ship. Statistically, at least 15% will elect to go down with the sinking ship or die with the old worldview.

Don’t be one of the 15%, look inside and look for the feeling that is already there which speaks of the new worldview, and start using the new words like: integrative, cooperative, holistic, balanced direction, mutual causality, self organizing, healing, sustainable, unifying, and globalization (this blog). Just stop and think how wonderful it would be to live on the other ship or in the worldview talked about here. A place where everyone on earth is your fellow citizen, and they care about you as you care about each one of them.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

The majority of Christians know for a fact that they have found the only truth that is possible. The majority of Muslims know for a fact that they have found the only truth that is possible. The majority of Scientists know for a fact that they have found the only truth that is possible, and a third of each of these groups believes their truth so strongly that they believe it is their job to force the rest of the world into accepting their truth. The means justifies the end. If they have to lie, cheat, steal, and even murder to get the rest of the world to see “the truth” (their truth) they are willing to do it.

There are now over two thousand Christian sects, all reading the same Bible and all interpreting it two thousand different ways. Buy the same token there are 6.6 billion people on earth and 6.6 billion truths. So who is right, who has the truth and why is it so important?

Maybe the answer to this question is that they all have the truth and are all wrong at the same time. Maybe the real truth is an individual thing and should never be imposed on another person. There may be an ultimate cosmic truth, but that truth is impossible for the brain, our individualness, to conceptualize. Our brain can only know and learn from our environment, which is made of three dimensions. Our best math and science says there are dimensions beyond our brains capacity to conceptualize. Therefore, no one can know that which they cannot conceptualize; humans cannot know the ultimate cosmic truth.

It is sciences intent to find ultimate cosmic truth, but try as they may they find themselves trapped in a description of physical reality only. A third then have a kind of concrete thinking that leads to the assumption that physical reality is all there is, and live in denial of evidence that says otherwise.

Religions intent is to find ultimate cosmic truth also, but just like the concrete scientists they pick up an ancient book and assume that it must have ultimate truth. They can’t see that they are limited in knowing ultimate truth because of the limits of our brains and the person’s brains who wrote the ancient book.

This concrete thinking, done by those who turn their personal truth into dogma, is the number one roadblock to the new worldview, and the number one cause of strife in the world.  There is no one truth in physical reality. Even the physical laws can and are broken all the time. Our perception of reality is trapped by time. We can only experience a series of “nows”; therefore the only reality we experience is always becoming and never is. We can, in no way, prove that the last “now” really existed or whether it was just “made up” – a record recorded in our head. Nor can we know what “now” will be next or even if it will happen.

Dogma then is Positional truths and can have no other purpose than to divide and create strife in the world. So maybe the answer is to learn to celebrate our diversity and not what the truth should be but what the truth is, our individuality. Just think what a Unifying thought that is, and what a unifying worldview would follow.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

One of the saddest attitudes that have developed from our present worldview is short-term focus. One of the hallmarks of past sustainable societies has been their focus on practices that take into account future generations. The most obvious example of long-term focus was the Native American practice of only doing things that would be good for the fifth generation in the future. Their cultures would still be strong today if it were not for European marauders who wiped them out.

For business this short-term focus is a direct result of Adam Smith’s idea that self-interest is the key motivation for doing business, but studies have shown that this is not necessarily the case. Many young business people go into business because it is “fun” but are soon beaten down by our ruthless business approach. The idea that the bottom line is all that matters, even at the expense of future growth and sustainability, is even written into our laws for corporations. This belief has lead to Enrons throughout the history of the U.S.  

This self-interest idea has spilled over into our personal belief system where our ideals are John Wayne’s, and Frank Sinatra’s, “I did it my way” – “Too bad, so sad, for anyone that gets in the way” – “My way or the highway,” etc. In other words all that is important is our present objective pleasure. The boomer generation has become the most self-absorbed, I want it now, generation ever in history.

This is starting to shift, in part because of all of the soccer moms who have trained a whole generation to be team players.  This new generation may be one of the keys to a new worldview with a greater focus on team play, long-term goals and sustainability.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

The ancient Chinese philosopher Er Li better known as Lao Tzu or “old master” said, “As soon as the world regards something as beautiful, ugliness simultaneously becomes apparent.” In other words judgments are the splitting of the true nature of things into polar extremes. Therefore from the true underlying reality or nature there is no beautiful/ugliness, good/bad, or right/wrong. These polar words were useful tools for early humans, that helped them navigate everyday reality, to know what was healthy for them and what to avoid, unhealthy.

But since the dawn of hierarchical thinking polar judgments have been used to promote societal classes and divisions.  Thus only beautiful, good, and right people are accepted into the higher classes of society. Only the people that practice your religion, belong to your club, or have your knowledge base are beautiful, good and right. Everyone else is then ugly, bad, and wrong. This social hierarchy of values, within a society, is the number one cause of haves and have nots, of resentment, bigotry, and crime.

But worst of all it divides people and things into loveable and un-loveable. This isn’t love at all. True Love and caring has no social judgments, and in a truly sustainable caring worldview there is no right or wrong only wounding and healing. As humans we can never get away from judgments because judgments are what create our reality. But we can learn to not use judgments to wound others.  

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Scientifically speaking a human is defined as an animal that has reached a stage in brain development where he/she is self-aware. This has turned out to be an incorrect assumption. We now know that at minimum Elephants, Dolphins, Whales, and Apes have the same self-awareness as humans, and the list is growing. A better way, I think, to define the human threshold is the dawn of agriculture around 11,000 years ago. This was the dawn of hierarchical organization, and as cities grew so did the complexity of the government. The leader, be it a king or queen needed people under him/her to help and an army which needed Generals, Lieutenants and Sergeants. The power of the hierarchy over the people who had less power led to divisions and class in the cities and society. This power over people then led to the abuse of power, bigotry, war, and genocide.

This abuse of power continues today, in spite of the dawn of democracy, and is as bad as ever in some parts of the world. In some respects it is even worse today than ever in history. This is because, in some cases, it has gone underground. Money is now the power and people with money use their power to control the democracy, out of site.

In an earlier blog I talked about a mental hospital that experimented with a self-organizing team approach with no hierarchy and the results were spectacular. What made this system work was that each individual on the team cared more for their contribution to the team, than having control of what was done. This can work on a national and global level. All that is needed for this to happen is for all individuals in society to be raised to a higher consciousness level. Even though this sounds impossible today, societies consciousness is rising and as the new worldview takes over it will accelerate. Slowly we will lose hierarchical thinking and become more self-organizing.  


http://www.32blogs.com/blogs_ma/members/ofrank/1692/

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Out present worldview is based on the 16th century idea of linear causation. This is the idea that the world is a machine and like gears in a machine everything that happens comes from something before it that caused it, on to infinity. This means that somewhere there has to be a first cause, something or someone that started all of the gears turning. For western religion, including Christians, modern Jews, and Muslims, this first cause is God, who made the universe and set it in motion. For Science it is a random fluctuation in the vacuum that started the “Big Bang” which expanded into our present universe.

The only problem with this idea is that it creates a number of unsolvable paradoxes, the most famous of which is called the “turtle paradox.” One day a teacher was trying to explain to a young student about the earth floating in space.  The student said that the teacher couldn’t be right because he was told the earth rested on the back of a turtle.  To this the teacher replied, “But what does the turtle rest on?”  The student then came back with, “Oh no, you can’t fool me; it’s turtles all the way down.” Do you see the dilemma here? What ground or sea is the turtle walking on or swimming in? Because we grew up with the idea of earth floating in space, we can see it in our mind, but by its very nature a three-dimensional object, like the earth or the universe, must have an end, a ground. Our brain starts going into overload when we try to imagine what is beyond the universe. We can’t conceptualize nothingness going on forever. Linear causation demands an answer. If there is a first cause there has to be an end in the chain of gears. You can’t have a beginning without an end; where does non-space end?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This question points out another unsolvable paradox, the very existence of which shows that linear causation must be wrong. Indeed the best science and math that we can muster says that linear causation is wrong, and that our perception of time, and three-dimensions is in fact an Illusion, and not real. There is no real three-dimensions at all. This means that our existence is really some type of dream we are having, of which we don’t fully understand-yet, if we ever will.

The fact is that reality just “is,” there is no first cause, and if reality is a dream. We are more than our bodies and this reality-dream is only a perception. We must, ourselves then, be eternal. There is no Either-Or as is believed in our present worldview. There is only Both-And, and once we shift our worldview to understand this we will start to see that even in the dream of reality Both-And is many times true. Many things in life do not have only one cause but mutual causes, and when one understands this one will start to see them. Neither the chicken nor the egg came first. They just are.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

In the 1950s a sociologist by the name of David Riesaman did an analysis of American society and coined a new set of terms that became the buzzwords of his day. These terms are Traditional-Directed, Inner-Directed and Outer-Directed.

The Traditional-Directed are those who believe that the old ways are as good today as ever. This usually means adhering to some old religious tradition such as the Amish or the Evangelicals.

The Inner-Directed are those who follow their own heart, take their guides from within themselves and from their present knowledge base. These people are quite often, but not necessarily, spiritual and typically don’t adhere to a specific religious tradition.

The Outer-Directed have a need to belong and be a part of a group. To this end they will do anything to fit in, keep up with the Joneses, or climb the corporate ladder, and they are always on the go, needing to be constantly entertained.

The study in the book concluded that the Outer-Directed group was on the rise, and would come to dominate our society. This is what has happened. Today we are inundated with Outer-Directed living; even our schools are geared to train our kids to be Outer-Directed. If someone is forced to sit still in silence for just five minutes they don’t know how to handle it. This life style leads to stress, burn out and physical illness.

A growing number of people are starting to see that a balance between inner and outer directions is critical for a truly meaningful life. Therefore the new trend is to learn to slow down and look within for guidance. There is a growing interest in eastern philosophies, which emphasizes Inner-Directed living. So the new worldview will be a balance between the inner and outer directions.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Another extremely destructive present worldview is the philosophy of Dualism and Separatism. This is the philosophy held by a number of world religions including Christians, Moslems, and present Jews. This adds a new dimension to the reductionist idea, which says, that the world is real and we are, as individuals, completely separate from each other. The dualists then go further and say, not only are we separate from each other but we are separate from our God, our creator, who exists in a completely separate place, and if we are good enough, we too may get to go live with God. In other words this God has all the same needs and wants as Humans, but because He is superior to us he gets what he wants, and what he wants is for us to worship him in the proper manner, the rules of which are laid down in books called The Torah, The New Testament, The Koran or The Bible, etc.

They say that God is perfect but then they turn around and say he has a need for humans to worship him! How can a God who is perfect need anything from us? If he has needs he can’t be perfect. If this were as far as this strange thinking went there would be no harm done, but this view leads to hierarchal thinking. Therefore the better one is at following God’s laws the more superior one is. Then someone else who does not do as good a job, or those people that don’t even follow God’s laws at all, well-they are completely inferior people and don’t deserve any respect.

This leads to men supposedly being better then women, whites being better than blacks, humans better than animals, and on and on. This thinking leads to all types of bigotry including immigration fights in the U.S., Darfur, 9/11, alQaeda, Israel/Arab conflicts, and our history is one conflict after another.

The new worldview, on the other hand, will emphasize our Holiness and not our apparent separateness. This idea leads to all being equal, and working together as a team.

In the eighties a psychiatric hospital had a ward of chronically ill patients who had been there for years and had to have nursing care 24/7 including bathing, feeding and teeth brushing. The staff of the hospital decided to do an experiment. They started by getting rid of the hospital hierarchy and having everyone, from the psychiatrist to the orderly, all work together as equal team members.

This new team then sat down together and said, what do these patients really need.  It was quickly understood that one of the reasons they had become so dependent was because they had lost their dignity as humans, and so the team set out to find a way to return the patients purpose and dignity. One of the things that give people their sense of dignity is having pride in what they do to earn a living.

So the staff set up a business in the hospital that made rugs, which they sold to the public. They then required all of the patients to work in the business and earn their meals. To get them started they gave tokens for very small things like brushing their own teeth. If they did not earn their meal it would be put in a blender and given to them to drink. It worked, within only a month all of these patients, who were too sick and crazy to take care of themselves, took care of themselves and went to work every day. Then in a number of months about a third were so back to normal they were sent home after being in the hospital for 15 years in some cases. The experiment was a spectacular success.

But why if this program was such a spectacular success don’t we see it used in every psychiatric hospital? The answer is simple; it goes against our present worldview of separateness and superiority to others. The psychiatrist is better than the psychologist, who is better than the nurses, who are better than the orderly, and the only way this will end is when we understand that in the underlying reality we are in fact all one and the same; there is no separateness, only the illusion of it.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Our second present belief that we have carried to the extreme is Competition. Where some competition, in some things, is a good and necessary thing, we have turned the whole world, and all of life into an ugly dog-eat-dog lifestyle that is pulling the very fabric of our humanity apart. Adam Smith, a philosopher, first formally introduced competition to Western cultures in the mid 1700s. He put together a system of economics, which was published in 1776, the same year that the U.S. was formed, and thus the U.S. adopted it as their economic system. Smith’s economics is based on a simple idea, which says in effect that the base, innate character of humans is selfishness. This idea was then reinforced in 1859 when Darwin introduced his theory of evolution, which was quickly called the “survival of the fittest” i.e., the selfish one wins. Then in 1976 Richard Dawkins, a biologist, wrote a book called “The Selfish Gene.” And now we have infected the whole world, and competition is spiraling out of control, becoming the primary rule lying under all our activities. “Nice guys finish last,” “no one likes a loser,” or the rule that came out of the Chicago Business school: “It is your responsibility to have the best bottom line possible, even if you have to lie, cheat and break the law to do so.” But even worse than this is the fact that extreme competition leads to preference for short-term gain over long-term thinking and sustainability.  

But it does not need to be that way. In the new worldview cooperation will replace competition as the primary system of choice, and this shift has already started. As early as the 1950s a mathematician, John Nash, showed that a cooperative economic system was not only possible but would be superior, but he was not recognized until 1994 when he received the Noble Prize for economics. Also as early as the 1970s a new movement within business emerged referred to as “CSR” or corporate social responsibility, and this movement has had new and growing momentum over the last 15 years.

Another trend can be seen in the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize given to Muhammad Yunuss for his microlender Grameen Bank. The Grameen bank also underscores a growing number of cooperative sub-economic systems referred to as alternative currencies. “And finally, economic measures such as gross national product (GNP) and gross domestic product (GDP) typically used to gauge how well a country is doing, are being challenged by a new generation of indicators, including the United Nations Human Development Index (HNH), Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index (GNH), the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, and the Happy Planet Index.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

Most people are so busy living their lives that they don’t realize the profound shift in worldview that is brewing below the surface. When I talk about it I simplify it and say that the new worldview will be the merging of science and spirit, but what does that really mean? With-in the present worldview that is impossible. Science and spirit will always be at odds.

The majority of Westerners are in some stage of being Christian to anti-Christians, or scientism to anti-science; however, they still all hold the same underlying Christian/mechanical science worldviews, including most scientists. Therefore, even though Science and Religion are at present diametrically opposed, and the fight between the two seems to grow by the day, under the surface they have the same mechanical worldview, which they approach from opposite ends. So what is the new worldview that is emergent? To answer that I am starting a series based on a list of 13 attitudes and beliefs. Each time I will compare the present attitude or belief to the one that will replace it.

The present science/religious worldview is first of all Reductionist/Analytical. Where this sounds like what science does, it is really a Western worldview that says that the world is made up of real physical things that are divided into a never ending array of independent parts, and the only way to understand the world is to break it down into smaller parts and analyze the parts. The more detail there is, the better one can understand reality. Therefore people are made of parts, i.e. hearts, stomach, lungs, and so on. These body parts are thought of as independent of each other and have very little if any effect on the other parts. Like a carburetor in a car, a person’s heart can be replaced without affecting any of the other parts. Funny thing though, after spending millions of dollars and years testing the best pump technology available they have yet to make an artificial heart that works – hummm maybe the heart is more than just a pump that pumps blood.

Then body parts are made of smaller parts called cells, which are made of smaller parts called molecules. This is never ending because then we go to atoms, and even the atoms have smaller parts called electrons, protons, and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are made of quarks and now they are trying to break up quarks and electrons into what are called faction charges! But has all this dividing helped us understand the universe any better? We certainly believe it does, we point to our technology and say, see we understand it so well we can make a cell phone. But if this is true, why is there such a crises of emptiness in the world? Why does the rate of mental illness and suicides constantly go up? Why are we facing the worst environmental crisis in human history, which is of our own making?

The new worldview will drop the belief that reductionism will bring understanding in favor of a more integrative and systems-oriented approach. For the first ten years of my marriage we were very poor financially. We had a 15-year-old car that was always breaking down, and in the beginning, when it would break down, I would a use only the number of parts needed to get it going, but I noted very quickly that this was not very cost effective because the new parts would put strain on some old part which would then go out also. I quickly learned that I could save myself a lot of time re-fixing the car if I thought of the car as system and when some part would go out I would go ahead and replace all parts that appeared to be related to the bad part. So even in a machine, that appears to be purely mechanical, parts are not as independent of each other as we perceive them to be.

In fact the separateness we see is an illusion, which we created with our perception and reductionist approach to life. Quantum theory, the theory that makes cell phones and DVDs possible, says that in the underlying reality, which makes everything, we are in fact all one. Therefore one can never understand a car by studying its carburetor, or any other part. The only way to understand a car or anything is by looking at it as an integrative system that cannot be separated. And then if you really understand a car in its wholeness, you will understand that a car is itself not just parts that give you transportation but is itself emerged into bigger systems that make our human society function. Our society is a part of all of humanity, which is a part of all life and the whole universe.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

One of the stories on the TV news magazine “60 minutes” was about the CNN anchor Lou Dobbs. When Lesley Stahl said to him that he had been called a racist he said that it was not true because he did not believe that one race was better than another, but yet other things that he said and believed had the same “tone” or attitude as a racist. As I thought about this it came to me that maybe the reason that people were using the term racist to describe Mr. Dobbs belief system, was not because they though he believed in racial inequity, but because of the attitude he projected. So maybe what is going on is that the term racist has expanded to describe an attitude, one which makes judgments about one belief being better than another, which is not racisms original meaning. It was the attitude that people were calling racist.

The attitude that people refer to as racist, but is more than the old term, appears to be a new and growing understanding that any judgment that says that something is innately better than some other thing makes no sense in the broader scheme of things or nature. Where this idea is not new to philosophers it is new in the sense that more and more people are embracing it and have an understanding of it. It is in fact one of the signs of the new paradigm. Things like nationalism are breaking down. The U.S. is not the best country; there is no best country, only countries that people like better than another. Most Americans like America best, but the ones that have the new understanding, understand that the Japanese like Japan the best, and from natures perspective one nation is not any better or worse than any other nation.

Pomegranates are not a popular fruit in the U.S., and some think of it as a messy and therefore bad fruit, but from natures perspective it is not better or worse than any other fruit. There are no bad or evil people from nature’s perspective, only people that do bad things. By the same token there are no good people only people who try to do the right thing by other people.

Mr. Dobbs told a story of having one of his professors in college put him down in front of the class for being from Idaho, which the professor called the “cultural wasteland of America.” The professor was projecting the attitude I am referring to here. He believed that because the eastern U.S. had a big city culture it was somehow better than the farm culture in Idaho. Growing up, the professor must not have heard the story of the country mouse and the city mouse. If he did he didn’t get the message. Then Mr. Dobbs said, “He was right, but he didn’t have to say it in front of the class.” This showed that Mr. Dobbs had the same judgmental attitude as the professor, a judgment that nature would not make.

Jesus of Nazareth is quoted as saying that unless we become like little children we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus was clearly trying to teach this new paradigm. What he meant was that little children don’t engage in Mr. Dobb’s or his professor’s judgments. The children’s world just is, then we adults teach them judgment, and the us against them attitude. Since Jesus believed that the kingdom of heaven was within us, he was saying we couldn’t have true inner peace until we look at the world from nature’s perspective.

Two thousands years before Jesus the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said it this way:

“As soon as the world regards something as beautiful,
ugliness simultaneously becomes apparent. As soon as the world regards something as good, evil simultaneously becomes apparent.”

Lao Tzu then went on to say that the more we get away from making judgments the more like nature we become, and the more inner peace we have. So maybe a broader definition of racism is progress.

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com

There is a TV show, or more precisely a play, on PBS called the World Wide Mind. The pilot takes place in the 22nd Century where some researchers come up with the concept of hooking everyone’s brain to the internet so they can communicate with anyone anywhere on earth. At present this is not technically possible and would require answering a number of the technical challenges, some of which are being looked into right now in hopes of helping physically challenged people. To make the World Wide Mind a reality would require hooking up thousands or even millions of electrodes in the brain. The researchers believe that it would be possible to thread microscopic electrodes into the places they would need to be by way of the capillary system in the brain, i.e. no surgery required.

“This would mean that we could monitor brain activity with such a high degree of resolution that with the appropriate software for analyzing the data, it might become possible to know what a person is thinking or feeling based on their neural activity. And conversely, to “force” the brain to think/feel particular things by sending the appropriate electrical triggers to the neurons. So, the challenges can be summed up as these:

   1. Physical insertion of the electrodes.
   2. Managing enormous amounts of data in real time.
   3. Cracking the neural code of mental activity.
   4. Translating the output of one brain into equivalent input for another brain.
   5. Developing modes of communication with the technology that are superior, or at any rate usefully different, to the ones we have now.”

Where the concept of the worldwide mind may someday be technically possible, I do not believe that it will ever happen. This is because it is based on a faulty assumption. That is - the 18th century assumption that we are separate individuals in ultimate reality, which most Westerns still believe. In other words there is nothing to the world except the physical reality we experience, and therefore psychic communication is impossible.

But in actuality we are not separate. The separateness we see is an illusion, and the big challenge to come is that we learn to use our natural ability to psychically communicate with each other. Quantum theory is very clear that this is possible, and a new meta analysis of all known research into psychic ability says that there is a 1.3x10^104 (1.3 followed by 104 zeros) to 1 chance that psychic ability is in fact real. In other words there is no doubt we have the ability right now to have a worldwide mind. All we need to do is learn to use it.  

O Frank Turner
Author and Speaker
The Science of Spirit: Beyond The Bleep www.ofrank.com