Watching the Matrix as a documentary, not science fiction July 17, 2017 – Posted in: LaboratoryofVisionaryPlay – Tags: beau lotto, bruce lipton, candace pert, consciousness, daniel pinchbeck, ista, ray kurzweil, sacred sexuality, shamanism, the matrix

As an experiment, I recently watched “The Matrix”, the original 1999 vintage of the film again. I may be late to this party, but it struck me (Thank you, Bruce Lipton) that the film categorized as science fiction in 1999, could also be lazily-categorized as a documentary in 2017.

Finding freedom in delusion and creation in chaos can require us to deviate from the bounds of perception and awaken from habitual thought patterns. Perception underpins everything we think, know, believe, or love. To understand perception, is not just to understand our neuroscience, but to understand what it means to be human. The more differently we look, the more is revealed.

– Beau Lotto, Neuroscientist

The frontier sciences of epigenetics and quantum biophysics reveal we are not victims of our genes, but administrators of our reality. Our perception directly affects our reality. We have the potential to live a life overflowing with abundance & aliveness, despite the fear-based narrative surrounding us in collective consciousness.

What is a paradigm shift?

In the early 2000s, as a mildly curious student studying Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering, I was disconnected, but could not articulate this feeling of disconnection. Waking up from my own slumber, I realized that though Newtonian principles gave way to discoveries of quantum physics more than a hundred years ago,  I & other fundamental sciences had yet to receive the memo.

I discovered that Thomas Kuhn, the physist and philosopher coined the term epistemological paradigm-shift to describe the magnitude of such fundamental shifts that make the older paradigm redundant. For example, the transition between the worldview of Newtonian physics and the Einsteinian relativistic worldview, the quantum world is called a paradigm shift.

The conventional paradigm, including the predominant medical model views the the body as a physical machine, that operates in a linear fashion, similar to a biochemical machine controlled by our genes. The conventional paradigm still has not shifted to include the role that energy plays in dis-ease, health or well-being.

The molecules of humor

Candace Pert, the neuroscientist  & pharmacologist who identified the opiate receptor was a significant contributor to the emergence of Mind-Body Medicine as an area of legitimate scientific research in the 1980’s.  She identified emotions as a key that explains how energy heals, how mind can create matter, & how we can create our reality.

“Emotions are also designed to reinforce something chemically in the long term memory. We now understand that every thought we think produces a molecule, and the quality of the molecule matches the thought.”

– Candace Pert,  Molecules of Emotion: The Scientific Basis Behind Mind-Body Medicine

Candace, in addition to being a highly creative neuroscientist, was also an activist, leading the charge to advance the cultural and scientific context in which we understand, experience, and employ our imagination, beliefs, and expectations to activate the realm of potentiality, via the emotions and their stored memories in what she called the BodyMind. No hyphen, to emphasize its unity.

On one hand, science has begun to acknowledge that low cost mind-body interventions work.

“When a person is exposed to a stressful event, their sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the “fight-or-flight” response) is triggered, which increases production of a molecule called nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kB). That molecule then activates genes to produce proteins called cytokines that cause inflammation at the cellular level, affecting the body, brain, and immune system. That’s useful as a short-lived fight-or-flight reaction. However, if persistent, it leads to a higher risk of cancer, accelerated aging, and psychiatric disorders like depression. But in a paper published June 16, 2017 in the open-access journal Frontiers in Immunology, the researchers reveal findings of 18 studies (featuring 846 participants over 11 years) indicating that people who practice mind-body interventions exhibit the opposite effect. They showed a decrease in production of NF-kB and cytokines — reducing the pro-inflammatory gene expression pattern and the risk of inflammation-related diseases and conditions.”

– Ray Kurzweil, Inventor & Futurist.

On the other hand, our economic reality determining value hasn’t yet evolved to calculate the cost of disembodiment. Somewhere in between those two realities, while another stand up comedian is writing another punchline about us humans, the comic joke is laughing back at us.

“Most psychologists treat the mind as disembodied, a phenomenon with little or no connection to the physical body. Conversely, physicians treat the body with no regard for the mind or the emotions. But the body and mind are not separate, and we cannot treat one without the other.”

–  Candace Pert, Neuroscientist & Pharmacologist, 1980

bodymind-ment; em-body – ment; m+body – ment; move-ment; Interestingly enough, movement is also “emotion”, derived from the Latin root of “emovere”, which means to move.

“The English word emotion comes from the Latin root emovere — something that sets the mind in motion for both harmful and neutral or positive activities. In Buddhism, on the other hand, we would call emotion something that conditions the mind and makes it adopt a certain perspective or vision of things.”

– Mathieu Ricard, Buddhist monk, Neuroscientist, Author, Photographer& Humanitarian.

Discovering the shaman within

We live in a collective consciousness disconnected from our energetic reality. As a consequence, we are disconnected from our emotional/shamanic bodies, our belly knowing, our gut instincts, our second brains. However, we have the potential to connect with and reclaim the sovereignty of our emotional bodies. We can uncover our own self-sabotaging shadow aspects.  And most importantly, we can’t just *talk* about reclaiming the emotional body but need to have our own *visceral, somatic, embodied* experience of reconnecting with our emotional body.

 In traditional cultures, the function of initiation is to impel the young member of the tribe or community to overcome their ego-based identity. They undergo a dangerous, frightening ordeal which forces them to realize a visionary or transpersonal state. Once they have survived this passage, they have the capacity to take responsibility for the community as a whole, overcoming self-interest when necessary.

– Daniel Pinchbeck, Author

I first connected my emotional body, while participating in the Spiritual, Sexual, Shamanic Experience training facilitated by the International School of Temple Arts. This is the experience I wish I received as my own initiation into adulthood. Having participated in this week in different capacities (participant, assistant, organizer, & co-facilitator)  in different cultures many times, I have experiences and witnessed the potential of taking the red pill, of sacred sexual technology first-hand.  (r)evolution is to reclaim the soveriegnity of our emotional bodies. I also call it discovering the shaman within. It supported me to unravel developmental programming that served me to survive, but not to thrive.

So now we’re at this next level of this threshold of transformation, where you could look at it almost like a birthing process, almost like contractions of a birth. And the question is whether we are going to push through into a different social model. And in fact another major theme of my book, which other people have also looked at, is this idea that what’s emerging is this potential for humanity to realize itself as a planetary superorganism. A superorganism that’s in a symbiotic relationship with the Earth’s ecology as a whole system.

So, if we think about that, if we see ourselves as like a giant hive, we can see that that’s also a trajectory of evolution. Biological evolution is often making this shift from competition, aggression, domination, to cooperation and symbiosis.

– Daniel Pinchbeck, Planetary Initiation

The cells that make up your body are all communities of bacteria But when the community got together and became the unit, then the function was to hook up with other units – which were other communities So you start with a bacteria as a community you make a cell, which is a community then what do the cells do? Well they started to join together to create, what? Multi-cellular communities! Yeah, and what did they do? The evolved ultimately to the highest form is the human! So the human has been created and is complete, it is a unit. What would be the next unit of evolution?

I would tell you because you didn’t listen. The next level of evolution is the unity of all the humans coming together to create the multi-cellular organism that is called humanity.

– Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief

The world as we knew it is dissolving, and a deeper sense of who and what we are is being activated.  The outer senses that have kept us locked in the 3D world are in some senses giving way. The matrix is being upgraded, presenting us with the opportunity to discover our multidimensional selves. We are at the threshold of a potentially fantastic time, with humanity waking up to expanded reality.