Wow. Just finished Alex Jones’ Endgame. I took a lot of notes for follow up research. Why? Because I don’t trust Alex Jones.

It seems like Alex Jones goes out of his way to discredit himself. The “global elites” he talks about so often could hardly design a more ridiculous opponent. Alex Jones is a caricature of a conspiracy theorist. It’s not that I disagree with everything he says, it’s that his presentation isn’t designed to convince even a fairly intelligent person of his case. Alex Jones is a showman whose audience consists of fellow conspiracy nuts. In that context, he seems to be doing a great job.

If you know of more credible sources for this kind of information, please share.

My friend Matt at Dancing in the Minefields posted such a great link in the comments the other day that I had to give it a post all its own. It’s an animation that helps you visualize how ten dimensions would work. I will probably have to watch it a couple of times to really wrap my head around it, but it’s pretty simple, you know, considering the subject.

Watch it: Imagining the Tenth Dimension

The author of the book that the video is based on, Rob Bryanton, also has a blog.

For the skeptics, here is a forum thread “debunking” the video. I don’t know enough about all of this to judge who is right, but maybe you will find it informative.

Here is a neat article from the Telegraph about a scientist named Itzhak Bars who claims to have discovered two new dimensions, one in space and one in time. He claims that the second dimension of time would resolve the grandfather paradox:

Bars first found hints of an extra time dimension in M-theory in 1995 and, when he looked into it, discovered the grandfather paradox and other fears could be overcome by using a new kind of symmetry - a mathematical property to work out the relationship between the quantities of position and momentum. It is this symmetry that might help reconcile the two mighty pillars of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity.

For those who don’t know, the grandfather paradox is a time-travel problem that seems to allow you to go back in time and kill your own grandfather, thereby preventing your own birth. I would really like to hear the explanation of how he resolves the paradox.

Later in the article, the reporter wonders if this is all just hypothetical:

The work poses a question: is his proposal a mathematical fix, rather than a real physical entity?

Bars insists his extra dimensions are more than mathematical sleight of hand. “Absolutely not,” he told New Scientist. “These extra dimensions are out there, as real as the three dimensions of space and one of time we experience directly.”

There are some very interesting points in the comments from the article:

There’s a saying: You can’t step in the same river twice. You can try to step in at a specific point that you think you know, but water has passed between your previous ‘knowledge’ of that spot and now. No two attempts will ever produce the same result. So if you went back to shoot your grandfather, you may not even find him because you’ll already be in an alternate universe. And if you do shoot him you are only possibly preventing another version of ‘you’ from being born.

I liked this guy’s point. I have no idea if it has any scientific merit, but it make sense to me. For the scientists out there, here is a link to Itzhak Bars’ paper, which was over my head. If you can explain it to me, I would appreciate it.

I struggle with polarity a lot. I generally feel like I have to be 100% this or 100% that. Lately this had been a problem for me in figuring out a career. For some reason I have always felt like I should either run an orphanage in Afghanistan or become an investment banker, no option in between the extremes. This kind of thinking has caused me a lot of stress, especially because no one else has ever seemed to understand it.

As usual, one of our favorite bloggers, Steve Pavlina, came to the rescue. I happened upon his poston polarity in lightworkers and darkworkers. He says:

If you polarize as a lightworker, you are dedicating your life to serving the greater good.

If you polarize as a darkworker, you are dedicating your life to serving yourself.

Neither lightworkers nor darkworkers are inherently good or bad. They just are. Society has a tendency to idolize both: think Gandhi (light) vs. Walt Disney (my personal favorite darkworker). Both the lightworking path and the darkworking path lead to enlightenment in the end by seeing that all truly is one.

The way I see it, lightworkers feel compelled to pour their internal energy out into the world, turning outward to make the world better and more in harmony. Darkworkers, conversely turn inwards, drawing energy into them to put themselves and their goals in harmony. For example, if darkworkers wanted to break free from an oppressive foreign power (say, England) their revolution would like the American Revolution, they’d be willing to kill for their goal. However, take a similar scenario headed by a lightworker, Gandhi, and you find someone willing to die for the goal, but not to kill. This is not to say that lightworkers are necessarily pacifists, it’s more to illustrate that for a darkworker the ends would justify the means, while for a lightworker they would not.

On further investigation of lightworkers I found mostly New Agey sites like this and this. I also found an interviewthat says that lightworkers are the precursors and often the parents of the Indigochildren. You’ll also notice from that Indigo link that Laura and I frequently refer to a 1% of humanity which is what Steve Pavlina calls lightworkers and darkworkers.

As for darkworkers, the best site I’ve found is darkworkers.org. Perhaps not surprisingly, this site is much more well written and informative than anything I could find on lightworkers. The site’s owner seems like Nietzsche channeling Howard Roark, a calm visionary. I like him.

Why polarize? I’m very glad to have Steve Pavlina backing me up on this one. When you are waffling around, not committing to yourself or to the universe, you get very little done. Clarity of vision helps you achieve great things, whether it’s nursing refugees or building your real estate empire. Most people let guilt stop them from darkworking or let societal pressures stop them from lightworking. If you’re drawn to a path, commit!

Good vs. Evil?

Some darkworkers and lightworkers seem to be in a battle against eachother. Ayn Rand and Nietzsche thought Christianity had an overall negative influence on the world. Although Gandhi and Mother Teresa seem to have been very accepting people, I doubt they would have praised the self-serving work of various titans of industry. I don’t think it needs to be this way. If polarity eventually leads to unification and acceptance of both paths, we should have respect for those that have chosen a different route. One thing lightworkers and darkworkers can agree upon, hypocrisy is bad. Whatever their ideals, they stick to them.

A Middle Path?

Some people are very uncomfortable with this idea of polarity. Some traditions emphasize balance detachment from either path. Asmoday says, “Buddhism teaches one to really do both Lightwork and Darkwork. While through compassion they might be operating with Lightworker ethics, the path to Liberation is entirely inwardly directed energy.” That’s really what Buddhism is all about, a Middle Way, between the extremes. If that works for you, great. If light or darkwork, works for you, great.

Lightwork and darkwork are important because they give us more paths towards enlightenment. No one path works for everyone, not even the middle path. Choosing the right route on your journey towards enlightenment can make the difference between a miserable, bumpy ride and a smoother, fulfilling one. The best path is the path that you feel comfortable and energized following. Whether making money, caring for the sick, or meditating on a hilltop, you should feel good in your work. That is how you know you are on the right path. Good luck!

(Since discovering all this polarity stuff, I’ve discovered that I’m a lightworker who has been trying desperately to be a darkworker for years, thus making myself miserable and accomplishing very little.)

When Emily and I were at the Singularity Summit, we were surprised by the amount of people who were intrigued, interested and even obsessed with utilizing technology created from the Singularity to live forever. In honor of yesterday’s post on time and Aubrey De Grey’s new book Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime we thought a post on immortality and aging was in order.

After the tenth question about uploading human minds into super-computers to achieve immortality a woman stood up and boldly asked the Singularity Summit Conference Attendees, “Is there anyone here who doesn’t want to live forever? Because I certainly don’t.” Her question was met with cheers and boos. I was cheering.

Reversing human aging sounds great. Who likes getting wrinkles, saggy arms and an achy back? We use technology to help cure innumerable illnesses; why not use it to reverse aging?

First, I want to acknowledge that we don’t currently have any reverse-aging procedures so this entire post could be simply a thought experiment. But I still think, it is useful to examine our beliefs and prejudices about aging.

So why do we think that aging is a bad thing that we want to get rid of? It brings physical discomforts, aggravation at not being able to do things we once were able to do, our mind isn’t as sharp and we are seemingly closer to death. Health, youth, vitality and vigor are important characteristics we value. Large numbers of people take huge doses of vitamins, get cosmetics and surgical work done or maintain low body weight in order to slow the aging process. Many people feel that if you work hard you can stay looking young and avoid the troubles of old age. Thomas the Tank Engine, a popular children’s TV character says “being really useful” is the most important and best quality anyone can have. Americans’ deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic isn’t compatible with aging. We’re acculturated to fear, dislike and fight against the aging process. If successful aging means maintaining our youth and living as long as possible, we all fail eventually.

However, lets take a different approach. Think about the stages of life, we go from children to teenagers. During this phase we lose our child-like aspects and move into a different arena, that of young adulthood. From there we move into middle age. This process is the process of life, during each of these stages we have a different physical form and we have different perspectives on life. Ask a well adjusted middle-aged person if they’d want to go back to being a teenager? Maybe some of them would, but probably most wouldn’t. These stages are like mini-deaths.

Researchers from Stanford developed a theory called “socioemotional selectivity,” which argues:

Under time constraints emotional aspects of life are illuminated. Goals shift from those aimed at novelty or information seeking to those related to emotional meaning… older people are not suffering from limited opportunities to pursue social relations with others. Rather, they are investing carefully and strategically.

The complexity of emotion deepens under conditions that limit time. And because age is inextricably correlated with time left in life, age is associated with changes in emotion…Events that at one time were simple and straightforward now evoke mixtures of emotions ­ happiness, sadness, joy, fear and pride ­ all in the same moment. We suspect that emotional experience in later life may be richer than ever before in life.

The Stanford researchers and I both agree, that to talk about aging one has to talk about how we view death. Death has become a great taboo recently. For example, we hide ourselves and our children about our favorite meals: hamburgers, hot dogs and fried chickens. Professor Ashliman from University of Pittsburg writes:

A pet, too old and frail to live much longer, is “put to sleep.” At the human level, we are even more isolated from the one final act that we must all experience. Few people die at home. Funeral “homes” turn the act of mourning a “departed” loved one into a sanitized reunion of family and friends. The deceased are not “dead,” they have merely “passed on.” Euphemisms proliferate.

It has not always been so.

We do not like to be reminded of our own mortality, and in today’s world, institutions such as hospitals, hospices, retirement centers, and funeral homes (euphemisms abound in the language of death!) shield us from the worst of the Grim Reaper’s ravages. We cope, or so it might seem, by pretending that death does not exist.

We are all going to experience some of the declines associated with aging. We are all going to get old and we are all going to die. That’s not a threat. The knowledge that our years are limited may be what makes life precious. The Buddha tells us that the most important meditation we can engage in is of death, “Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.”

Having said all this though, I don’t think we should give up the pursuit of anti-aging and rejuvinating techniques. I mostly wanted to point out some of the impetus and underlying fears and preoccupations that we a society have and how those fears are often shaping our discussion about life extension or immortality.

Perhaps this preoccupation with aging and death is our culture’s manifestation of its fear of death

Seth Godin had a fascinating post about a human rights group that posted signs around his college reading:

On Wednesday
Wear Blue Jeans
If You Are Gay

This of course caused a great deal of discussion and debate. Every person who had read the sign was forced to make a decision about what they were going to wear the next day and what that would mean.

This example relates directly to our post from yesterday. We all like to regulate our interactions with others. In Seth’s example, the human rights group threw a monkey wrench into our illusion. No matter what you would have worn people would have made assumptions about your sexual identity.

We may attempt to control our interactions by telling people about our personality traits, explaining our ideals and describing hobbies (or even if we attempt to control interactions by being as secretive and evasive as possible), but this is ultimately something we need to let go of. When we label ourselves we limit ourselves to behaviors or ideologies that fit the label.

For example, how would you feel if you’d unwittingly worn jeans on Wednesday and found out about the sign when you got to school? Conversely, how would you feel if you had worn khakis? Would you feel differently? Would you spend the whole day explaining that you didn’t know about the sign?

Notice your reactions the next time someone labels you in public. How do your reactions change based on your identification with the label? For example, I used to love being called a “Trekkie” in high school. The first thing I told people when I met them was that I was a Trekkie. However, I would get extremely annoyed when people described me as “nice.” Being “nice” seemed uninteresting and bland. Now, I no longer introduce myself as “Laura the Trekkie.” However I’ve noticed I do still get annoyed when I am described as “nice,” I guess I’m still coming to terms with that. Are you the same as the labels you place on yourself? How much of your identity is wrapped up in labels?

As I asked before, how much of this represents the “real” you and how much is simply a need to create a division between yourself and other people?

Our friends at The Speculist posted about a Soviet doomsday machine yesterday. This got me thinking about other rumored Russian plots. Serving as Peace Corps Volunteers in the Republic of Georgia, Laura and I were able to collect some interesting Soviet conspiracy theories from the front lines. Here are some of our favorites:

• The Russians can control the weather and in Soviet times, they always ensured a sunny day for propaganda events like parades.

• Putin hates Georgia because he has a bad relationship with his mother, who lives in Georgia (supposedly).

• Avian flu is actually a bogus media story thought up by the Russians to cause Georgians to kill their chickens and starve. (In 2006 the Georgian government recommended that all chickens be killed because of the Avian flu deaths in neighboring Turkey. The villagers were not happy.)

• Russia has an earthquake machine. From time to time they still send small quakes to Georgia just to remind them who’s boss.

Funny as these claims might seem to us, many Georgians take them completely seriously and they’re not the only ones. According to this article, Nikola Tesla was working on an earthquake device that could have fallen into Soviet hands. That article may not look particularly trustworthy, but even the popular TV show Mythbusters, took the earthquake machine seriously enough to investigate. Sure enough, their research showed that Tesla was working on such a device. After trying Tesla’s methods, Mythbusters was unable to produce strong results and deemed the earthquake machine myth, “busted”. Just because the Mythbusters staff couldn’t produce results from Tesla’s work, doesn’t mean the top scientists of the Soviet Union wouldn’t have been able to.

If there’s a grain of truth to a story that sounds as crazy as the earthquake machine, what about other conspiracy theories or regional folklore? It was very easy for us Americans, armed with the internet and college degrees, to dismiss the Georgian villagers’ stories as paranoid nonsense. The truth is, we may never know what kinds of shenanigans the American government is up to, let alone Russia. It’s important to always ask questions and do your own research. Serious inquiry into these sorts of things is what separates village legend from a New York Times whistle blower cover story. Pick your favorite conspiracy theory and dig a little deeper. You never know what you’ll discover.

Last night Laura and I watched The Corporation, a documentary about, you guessed it, corporations and how evil they are. What I found most interesting about the film was that everyone seemed to be passing the buck. The activists, the CEO’s, everyone pointed to the system as the problem. This really bothered me for reasons that will probably be apparent to those of you who read our Psychological Numbing post and its follow up.

So, today I’m bumbling around the internet and I find this Wikipedia article on Malamatiyya, which is a particular order of Sufism. Practicioners of Malamatiyya follow the Path of Blame. The Malamatiyya “totally divorced themselves from the world and people, and give no importance to the contempt that the world has for them.“ They only focussed their energy on adhering to the word of God and following their own paths.

Here is an example of Malamatiyya behavior via Wikipedia: “One of them was hailed by a large crowd when he entered a town; they tried to accompany the great saint; but on the road he publicly started urinating in an unlawful way so that all of them left him and no longer believed in his high spiritual rank.”

How’s that for Radical Honesty? All of these ideas are pointing toward one thing, examining yourself and your own actions as the path to enlightenment and to improve the world. According to this, the Malamatiyya tradition predates Islam, with roots in the Eastern Christianity and then to the Cynics of ancient Greece:

Wealth, popularity, and power tend to dethrone the authority of reason and to pervert the soul from the natural to the artificial. Man exists for and in himself alone; his highest end is self-knowledge and self-realization in conformity with the dictates of his reason, apart altogether from the state and society. For this end, disrepute and poverty are advantageous, insofar as they drive back the man upon himself, increasing his self-control and purifying his intellect from the dross of the external.

So interesting! I love finding things that are all related, way back into history. This even relates to the Singularity Summit. There was a lot of talk about augmenting humans’ brains or bodies with new technology. A lot of the guys talking about this were overweight and socially awkward. It was so interesting to see everyone talking about using technology to improve ourselves when we all have plenty to work on already.

As you can see, the idea of personal responsibility and self improvement is nothing new. It has been around for a long, long time and crosses many traditions. Today we have a tendency to look everywhere except in ourselves. At the Singularity Summit, technology was the savior. On The Corporation, the system was the problem while the individual players seemed helpless. The Malamatiyya and the Cynics looked within themselves for the source of the problems of the world and for the solutions. There must be a balance between these extremes. Where is it?

It’s really odd that all of these things are popping up in my life just as I’ve been struggling with these issues. Coincidence?

*We had a hard time finding good information on the Malamatiyya, so if anyone knows of good sources on this topic, please let us know.

Emily pointed out in her previous post. That one of the most important issues brought up at the Singularity Summit was the notion that the Singularity is the future of all human progress.

Essentially, all fields of study, all of human progress is leading up to the Singularity…In recent years I believe we have seen a shift from a divergence of specialized technologies, to a convergence of those parts into greater, cumulative technologies. Laser eye surgery is a great example of seemingly different fields, combining to great success. The Singularity will be the ultimate convergence of human progress.

While I’m a bit skeptical of this point, I do think it’s an interesting thought experiment to consider where the future of human progress lies. I found several speakers at the summit who had postulated futures that were surprisingly in-line with the ideas of one of the more bizarre and fringe philosophers I enjoy reading: Rudolf Steiner.

Steiner is one of the founders of Anthroposophy, his works outline the nature of the universe, other dimensions and other beings (rather broad, I know). However where I found many speakers, such as Wendell Wallach, converging with Steinerian ideals was on the issue of the evolution of human consciousness. Steiner believes the development of a:

…distinctively modern clairvoyant capability… [let us] contemplate this thought picture and recognize the present need to deepen and purify the scientific impulse by applying the kind of spiritual seeing of which the ancient world was capable, but which has not yet been applied to the external or natural world studied by contemporary scientific consciousness.

Steiner, and many singularity experts were pointing to this convergence of mystical and scientific as the direction human progress needs to take (although I grant you that just about no one at the Summit said this explicitly). How else can we begin to resolve issues of creating artificial general intelligence, especially “self improving” intelligence? It cannot be done without deeply contemplating the nature of our reality. The very heart of the issue plaguing the Singularity is how to do this.

Of course I am currently reading Steiner, so his ideas are fresh in my mind. Perhaps my conclusions are just another example for our much heralded view that thoughts create reality. I am interested in Steinerian thought and I found it in the Singularity Summit.

*From the Essential Steiner pg. 170

Laura and I have a theory, actually a borrowed theory from a friend, called the 1%. This refers to the small number of people who seem to be aware of something more to life than everyday reality. These people question the status quo and look for higher meaning. They also have special insights into life and our universe. We’d expect that most of our dedicated reader are part of the 1%. In my frequent internet wanderings I found another idea that sounds very much like the 1%: Indigo children.

Indigo children is a New Age term for people with an indigo colored aura who demonstrate certain characteristics:

• Are intelligent, though may not have had top grades.
• Are very creative and enjoy making things.
• Always need to know WHY, especially why they are being asked to do something.
• Had disgust and perhaps loathing for much of the required and repetitious work in school.
• May have experienced early existential depression and feelings of helplessness. These may have ranged from sadness to utter despair. Suicidal feelings while still in high school or younger are not uncommon.
• Frustration with or rejection of the traditional American dream - 9-5 career, marriage, 2.5 children, house with white picket fence, etc.
• Anger at rights being taken away, fear and/or fury at “Big Brother watching you.”
• Have a burning desire to do something to change and improve the world. May be stymied at what to do. May have trouble identifying their path.
• Have psychic or spiritual interest appear fairly young - in or before teen years.
• Have strong intuition.
• Random behavior pattern or mind style - (symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder). May have trouble focusing on assigned tasks, may jump around in conversations.
• May be electrically sensitive such as watches not working and street lights going out as you move under them, electrical equipment malfunctioning and lights blowing out.

These are just some of the characteristics of Indigos that I found. People who subscribe to this theory claim that Indigos started being born in small numbers around 1958 increasing in numbers until the 90’s when the number of Indigo births became the majority. They say that Indigos are going to bring an age of peace and spirituality to humanity.

We’re not sure how literally to take the Indigo concept (we tend not to), but we like the ideas behind it. First, rather than medicating all perceived problems (like ADD) with a cure-all pill, there may be ways to understand and nurture a child’s unique traits. Second, whether an indigo aura is present or not, gifted children should be encouraged to explore their spiritual side and well as their intellectual side.

Whether you’re an Indigo, part of the 1% or something else entirely, it can be hard feeling different. The Indigo movement focuses on the positive and provides tools to nurture the gifts that make some of us different, rather than trying to drive those qualities out for the sake of conformity.

More Indigo Links:

NY Times Article

Wikipedia

The Indigo Children