No!

The Global Dialogue Institute held its annual Global Philosophy Forum at Haverford College. I left inspired and energized and clearer in mind and heart.

I'm putting some notes up here for commenting on in little bite sized pieces later, and maybe these will be an interesting read in and of themselves. It was certainly a fascinating series of talks. The notes:

Ashok Gangadean, chair of the college's philosophy department; his talk very elegantly summarized nearly 3,000 years of human philosophical and spiritual development and almost had me contemplating grad school (...almost):
-'quest for the unified field of reality' has been the activity of both religion and science
-**we are not educated to step back and the see the lens (or aspect of the mind through which we're interpreting a particular situation)
-**if you take the other through your lens, you're violating their heart and their mind and their being
-the self who is in the lens of the "I" is NOT the self who crosses over beyond dualistic experience [Oops!]

From Pim van Lommel, MD, who has researched near death experiences (NDE's):
- **NDE's happen while people are unconscious, which is surprising in that the cells [braincells?] that facilitate subjective experience should be severly impaired while the patient is comatose. So, consciousness is not a side effect of a functioning brain. The brain is neither the seat of consciousness nor of memories nor of subjective experience.
- paradigms induce expecations [and I would think they induce collective rage in the face of frustrated collective expectations; my guess is that immortality is our biggest collective expectation]
- consciousness and memories are rooted in non-local space as informational fields (waves)
       *the cerebral cortex is a [receiver? relayer or processor? I missed the word] for these fields
       *the voice inside our telephone is not inside our telephone!
-consciousness can exist independently of brain function
       *van Lommel spoke about a girl who left her body and still had thoughts and  experienced emotions
       *[I have a clear memory of leaving my body once and still experiencing subtle sensations and thoughts and emotions; I was still somewhat in it at the head and wonder how that would affect the experience]
- I have a body; not I am a body. I am consciousness, not I have consciousness.
- 'Our ideas about death define how we live our life.' - Dag Hammerskjold, Noble Prize for Peace


Joseph Chilton Pierce, who wrote The Biology of Transcendence and lectured on the connection between the heart and the brain and the negative effect of social conditioning on evolution:
-mother's emotional state pre and post natal determines quality of fetus' brain
-from a book called Consciousness Understood: the reptilian brain allowed for the development of visual capacity so that the universe can look at itself!
-**brain puts together model of reality from frequencies that come from outside of time and space [the person uses the brain to tune into a field which contains all possible realities?]
- the orbito-frontal loop impels children to:
    1. engage in sensory exploration of anything unknown
    2. maintain contact with their caretaker (emphasis on the mother) - the greatest fear of the infant, child, and even adolescent is to lose contact with their caretaker
    **our social structures create situations in which we experience a conflict between the two; the constant experience of this conflict has dramatically altered the physical structure of the brain
- the heart is the major endocrine gland of the whole body and pituitary system
    *heart's great job is to maintain perfect coherence and relationship between all parts of the body
    *the heart  is the most powerful electromagnetic generator known (60x greater in amplitude than the brain)
    ***there are neural cells in the heart; we can develop and nourish a connection between the prefrontal cortex and the heart, or we can nourish a connection between the p.f. cortex and the reptilian brain, which is the machine that's programmed for biting and storing negative experiences (and helping to recreate them) if you run energy through it
-the energetic forms of the human, the planet Earth, and the atom may all be tauroid
    *tauruses (sp?) may be the most stable and efficient structure for the efficient distribution of electromagnetic energy
    *they're also holographic and tend to replicate [or maintain? he used both words but seemed to be correcting himself] themselves
[I figure  human beings are holographic structures through which the living entity inhabiting the body experiences a particular reality for the same reasons that we watch a movie or read a book; the reality that being experiences is also holographic in nature. A holographic structure is one in which each part has access to or 'contains' the whole structure while maintaining its individuality as a distinct part. So, through your mind, you can experience the experience of the person sitting next to you as they experience it to the extent that your state of consciousness includes theirs.]
-**it's morally and ethically unacceptable to condemn any member of our society for their actions given the fact that our destructive behaviors are a product of our social conditioning and because we can retrain ourselves as the brain has an infinite capacity for self-regeneration

Karen Malik, a facilitator of programs at the Monroe Institute in VA.
[Unfortunately time constraints cut her presentation a little short]
-The very fiber of our being is all of the qualities we value in their purest form
-The living being can transcend physical death

Links:
http://www.heartmath.org/
(Re: the link between cognitive function, emotions, and heart-brain communication)

http://www.monroeinstitute.com/
(Pioneers in using sound to promote the development of human consciousness; I intend to attend courses there in the next year and volunteer there if they develop programs)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography
(Re: Holograms. The 'Technical Description' section is especially interesting and if read considering the possibility that describes the structure of our minds and DNA just might liberate you from the illusions of time and space.)