The strange thing is: later that week I visited Seth Godin’s blog, and saw that earlier on Sunday and Monday he had posted a couple of items about flutes. He was puzzled by having seen two separate commuters in traffic that day, who were both playing the flute while driving. Later someone sent him a painting that depicted a man playing the flute in his car. He was a little disturbed about this and half-jokingly speculated that there was some worldwide underground movement of flute-playing drivers.

Even weirder, is that lately I have been listening to Seth Godin’s marketing audiobooks “Small is the New Big” and “All Marketers are Liars” very often. I really like his way of looking at the world. He does his own reading in the audiobooks, and his voice doesn’t have the generic professional voiceover person tone that can put me to sleep.

I wonder if listening to his voice through my iPod for hours on end, and getting in tune with his way of thinking, somehow enabled a transfer of this bizarre flute motif into my mind? Yes, I know that sounds pretty wacky, but come on: how often would you expect to be thinking about a subject like flute playing while at the same time an author you listen to is writing about recurring flutes in his daily life?

If (and I do say IF) some sort of telepathy is the explanation, I just wish that something more practical would have been the subject.

This is a simplified description of McMoneagle’s idea; he describes it further in the context of the collective subconscious, which would address questions like “If that’s true, then how can someone predict something beyond their physical lifespan” or “What if the person being tested is never told the correct answer”.  

It’s quite a good way of explaining the mechanism not only behind remote viewing, but also the more spontaneous deja vu.  However, I would like to propose an alternate explanation for deja vu, just speaking as someone with no training in neurology or cognitive sciences.  It revolves around the idea that parts of our minds may operate at different speeds.   Typically, one would think that all areas of the mind would be closely synchronized in terms of timing.  However, what if one part of your mind perceived some events at a slightly different pace than the rest of your mind?  A thought process could be delayed by a second or so, for whatever reason, maybe a glitch in the mental software.  

Example: you experience some new event, such as having a conversation about an obscure topic with someone for the first time.  Most of your mind is processing this conversation in real-time, and as each segment of dialogue progresses it’s filed into the category of “memory”, something that’s happened in the past.  But let’s say one part of your mind is slightly delayed.  As it’s catching up, it starts to perceive the parts of the conversation that have already passed by, but this part of your mind experiences the events as “new”.  This leads to the funny feeling of “remembering” a new event as its unfolding, because the rest of your mind considers it to me something in the past.

I don’t know if there’s any proof that all parts of your mind experience time in the same way.  Otherwise, this seems like a reasonable explanation for why deja vu occurs.  

If you’d like to learn more about Joseph McMoneagle and remote viewing in general here is his Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McMoneagle

“Within every adversity is an equal or greater opportunity.”

What could be the opportunity that springs from the adversity of traveling through the television wasteland? I’m not talking about the rare gems of “quality programs” in the fields of garbage. I mean: what greater purpose could be served through the saturation of the populace with junk programming?

Speaking as a civilian, I think it’s possible that an answer can be found in what happens at boot camp when people join the service. From what I understand, a lot of emphasis is placed on seemingly pointless things like making your bed 100% correctly and marching around in formation all day. Now, anyone halfway familiar with war movie cliches will recognize that although the recruits may gripe and moan about these things, eventually they will realize that the old drill sergeant was just trying to get them prepared for the real deal, by instilling in them a maniacal level of attention to detail and team discipline.

So, if we are repulsed by the senseless images, sounds and thoughts being dumped into a billion human minds, let us consider that this is merely boot camp. The ability to affect consciousness by technical means on this scale is an extremely recent phenomenon. Why should anyone be surprised that:

a) the early attempts are crude and tasteless,
b) humans need to be trained to be receptive to information injected into their minds in this way, and
c) training needs to begin with the basics, literally meaning the basest human needs such as sex/power/fame

Continual refinement of the means by which human attention is aggregated and focused should lead to a point where all minds can be set to operate in near unison. When this occurs, the television and mass media that we see now as being utterly without value, as pointless as making a bed perfectly, can be seen as a blessing and a gift, a power to be used when the time is right, by the right wielder, and for the right purpose.

The question naturally arises: what is the right purpose? Maybe the creation of the hive mind is itself the goal. We won’t know until we try.

(Warning— amateur philosophizing ahead, please use caution!)

If there is 1 person in a room, most people would agree that there is 1 consciousness in the room. But if there are 5 people, does this mean there are 5 consciousnesses? And if 100 people, then 100 consciousnesses?

Another example: assume Earth is only populated world in universe. As Earth population grows, then consciousness is also growing in proportion? And if there was some catastrophe that eliminated all life on Earth, then the quantity of consciousness in the universe drops down to zero?

It doesn’t make sense!

Using a plural form of the word consciousness is awkward (consciousnesses? consciousnessii?). I wonder if this is a clue that there is no plural form of the thing itself.

Similarly, if all the people in the room leave the room, leaving only a chair and a table, then how many minds are left in the room?

To quote from Ervin Laszlo:

What we call “matter” is the aspect we apprehend when we look at a person, a plant, or a molecule from the outside; “mind” is the readout we get when we look at the same thing from the inside.

With no people in the room, then the chair and table still represent a form of consciousness, incomprehensible to use because its in a different manifestation that we aren’t in tune with, just like we cannot comprehend the mind of an insect.

The interesting thing is, if one assumes that there is no separate consciousness, isnt this how sociopaths think? They are unable to empathize with other people, to some extent they do not even believe that other people and their feelings exist. So does this mean that sociopaths have a better understanding of reality than the rest of us?

Maybe not, because sociopaths operate in the incorrect belief that they are the only island in the ocean, without believing that other islands exist. A more correct view would be that other islands exist, but understanding that each is connected underneath the ocean and their apparent separate nature is just an illusion.

Watching this episode and the more pleasant “open ocean” episode that it’s paired with, I got wondering: what causes deep sea fish to be so terrifying (at least to this human), while dolphins are cute and sunny and get to play in the upper levels of their environment? Is it an evolutionary thing? Is it something from the subconscious, ie. knowledge that the bottom dwellers feed off of the dead?

Going down a weirder path: could it be related to some aspect of heaven and hell and the various other planes? Why should “below” be so commonly understood to imply evil, while “heaven” and the “higher planes” are conceptualized as being physically above us? Could those concepts find their origin in ancestoral memories of these creatures from when we all lived in the sea hundred of millions of years ago?

All I know for sure is that these things scare the bejeebus out of me.