Based on this idea, Huxley posited that ordinary consciousness represents only a fraction of what the mind can take in. In order to keep us focused on survival, Huxley claimed, the brain must act as a “reducing valve” on the flood of potentially overwhelming sights, sounds and sensations. What remains, Huxley wrote, is a “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” necessary to “help us to stay alive.”
A new study by British researchers supports this theory. It shows for the first time how psilocybin — the drug contained in magic mushrooms — affects the connectivity of the brain. Researchers found that the psychedelic chemical, which is known to trigger feelings of oneness with the universe and a trippy hyperconsciousness, does not work by ramping up the brain’s activity as they’d expected. Instead, it reduces it.
Consciousness
"Dennett argues that the ‘hard problem‘ is a red herring – the whole question of how conscious first person experience arises from the biological function of the brain assumes that consciousness is a single thing that needs explaining.
He suggests that there isn’t a single thing that is consciousness, just a collection of mental components, but the fact we’ve named it as a single thing fools us.
In his article Explaining the “Magic” of Consciousness, he gives a great analogy of how the use of the word ‘the’ was used in a card trick to make it seem completely mysterious even to fellow professional magicians." 
Kabat-Zinn - It's brutally simple. Not simple-minded, but brutally simple, but it's also not easy. And I want to emphasize that it's not easy. And it's not for everyone. You've got to be willing to actually be something of an athlete of your own consciousness, so to speak.
via Bodhi Tree BOOKSTORE more highlights : http://diigo.com/0mqc5 
"Darin Drda, author of The Four Global Truths, writes:
Although they speak different languages, both tell the same story: the fate of life on Earth will be determined by forces beyond humanity’s control. This idea strikes me as a very dangerous one, certain to accelerate our collective journey down the road to ruin. What’s more, it doesn’t jive with the powerful and paradigm-shifting insight of 20th century physics that reality is participatory."
"The true definition of ‘apocalypse’ is more akin to ‘the lifting of the veil.’ What has long been hidden shall be revealed. Is it possible to understand this potential, and how to apply it, without falling victim to the aforementioned ‘isms of divine destruction, collapse, or extraterrestrial saviours?"
"The dark matter of our unconscious has created the human world we inhabit, including the crises that we appear unable to solve. Our old story of the Self, that we are “isolated beings in an indifferent universe” (and all it’s variations), is breaking down, because in fact, it was never objectively real in the first place. It was constructed by our level of consciousness.
The new consciousness struggles to be born." "A common assumption in the philosophy of mind is that of substrate-independence. The idea is that mental states can supervene on any of a broad class of physical substrates. Provided a system implements the right sort of computational structures and processes, it can be associated with conscious experiences. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well."
by Nick Bostrom 
"This shift is being catalyzed by an increase of Divine Evolutionary Light pouring into Earth’s atmosphere. This light is the force behind all evolution throughout the universe… the process of every created thing unfolding its full divine potential and moving up the ladder of consciousness. We are currently experiencing a long, sometimes rocky transition into this higher state… a phase that may be likened to cosmic growing pains." - via in5d.com
Questions: @ddrrnt asks, "does it seem like a 'Divine Evolutionary Light' to you? Do you feel 'cosmic growing pains' or get the sense that you're moving up a 'ladder of consciousness'"? 
One of the most underappreciated figures in the history of evolutionary spirituality is the German philosopher and linguist Jean Gebser. His masterpiece, The Ever-Present Origin (1949), outlines his unique vision of the emergence of human consciousness. Gebser tracks human history through a series of “mutations,” or structures of consciousness, from the archaic mind of our ancestors to the more contemporary stage of mental focused awareness. In one particularly evocative passage, Gebser reflects on the beginnings of this mental awareness, as represented by the myth of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom who was born from the head of Zeus. To Gebser, such powerful imagery captures the heroic struggle of human development:
And it would be well for us to be mindful of one actuality: although the wound in the head of Zeus healed, it was once a wound. Every “novel” thought will tear open wounds . . . everyone who is intent upon surviving—not only earth but also life—with worth and dignity, and living rather than passively accepting life, must sooner or later pass through the agonies of emergent consciousness.
via EnlightenNext Magazine The concept of "medical materialism," so well described by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, is just one more form of reductionism that is sometimes applied to matters of religion. For our purposes here, we will define "reductionism" as any attempt to explain the greater in terms of the lesser, that is, any attempt to explain something large and deep and complex in terms of categories drawn from something simpler and smaller and easier to understand.
Reductionistic explanations do appeal to some people because they make something complex seem as if it can be understood in terms of something smaller and simpler to grasp. If we want to belittle the love that exists between two people and say that it's really nothing special, we might say that their "love" is nothing more than the actions resulting from hormones acting on their brains; or that their happy marriage is nothing but a mutually selfish relationship of economic convenience for both of them. What this does is attempt to reduce (hence the term "reductionism") the significance and meaning of something by ascribing it to more trivial causes. It is trying to explain the greater in terms of the lesser. What Are Gamma Brain Waves? The fastest documented brainwave frequency range is that of Gamma Brain Waves -- which oscillate within the range of 40 Hz to 70 ... "And just who are these people in the machine, anyway? The answer will depend on who you ask. If you ask the people in the machine, they will strenuously claim to be the original persons. For example, if we scan–let’s say myself–and record the exact state, level, and position of every neurotransmitter, synapse, neural connection, and every other relevant detail, and then reinstantiate this massive data base of information (which I estimate at thousands of trillions of bytes) into a neural computer of sufficient capacity, the person who then emerges in the machine will think that “he” is (and had been) me, or at least he will act that way. He will say “I grew up in Queens, New York, went to college at MIT, stayed in the Boston area, started and sold a few artificial intelligence companies, walked into a scanner there, and woke up in the machine here. Hey, this technology really works.”
But wait.
Is this really me? For one thing, old biological Ray (that’s me) still exists. I’ll still be here in my carbon-cell-based brain. Alas, I will have to sit back and watch the new Ray succeed in endeavors that I could only dream of."
by Ray Kurzweil 
"Researchers have discovered a new essential function for half of the brain's cells. Called glia cells, scientists have known them to hold the brain's neurons together, protecting the cells that determine our thoughts and behavior. But now they believe glia cells do much more, actually regulating the synapses and sorting information for learning purposes. "Messages may originate with the neurons, which use the synapses as their delivery system, but the glia serve as an overall moderator, regulating which messages are sent on and when.""
IdeaFeed | Big Think 
"If machines can and do become conscious, will we take their feelings into account? The history of our relations with the only nonhuman sentient beings we have encountered so far – animals – gives no ground for confidence that we would recognise sentient robots as beings with moral standing and interests that deserve consideration."
Peter Singer and Agata Sagan An excerpt from the 1994 documentary, "Meher Baba, The Awakener." The story of creation and evolution as revealed by the Indian Spiritual Master, Avatar Meher Baba (1894-1969). 
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Based on this idea, Huxley posited that ordinary consciousness represents only a fraction of what the mind can take in. In order to keep us focused on survival, Huxley claimed, the brain must act as a “reducing valve” on the flood of potentially overwhelming sights, sounds and sensations. What remains, Huxley wrote, is a “measly trickle of the kind of consciousness” necessary to “help us to stay alive.”
A new study by British researchers supports this theory. It shows for the first time how psilocybin — the drug contained in magic mushrooms — affects the connectivity of the brain. Researchers found that the psychedelic chemical, which is known to trigger feelings of oneness with the universe and a trippy hyperconsciousness, does not work by ramping up the brain’s activity as they’d expected. Instead, it reduces it.
A Noetic Experience may involve intuition, insight, psychic or mystical awareness. The Institute of Noetic Sciences studies the different aspects of "inner knowing" 
Quantum Entanglement is at the heart of understanding how significant events across the universe operate at the macro- and micro- level in split-second synchronicity despite considerable distance between them. We are beginning to see the entire universe as a holographically interlinked network of energy and information, organically whole. And as the mystic Rumi wrote around 800 years ago, "If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe would appear on the mirror of your perception! Via Anne Caspari "Alan Watts. If ego = control, then the formula for enlightenment is:
Develop and grasp at self-control until you reach complete frustration and then realize the contradictions and true nature of self-control, or self-guidance.
Striving for a type of self-control that is subtlely, inherently impossible builds up into complete frustration, until out of this mud, the lotus of re-conceptualization blooms.
This is the true heart of ego transcendence. 
Psycedelic eschatologist Terrence McKenna suggests a more modern perspective: I've taken [Whitehead's] notion of concresence and attempted to consttruct a terminal cosmology that literally stands on its head the scientific explanation of the origin of the universe. I don't believe the universe is the push outward into substntial existence by primal explosion. I believe the universe is being pulled and shaped into an ever more complexified and concrescent entity that is in fact a transcendental attractor ocated in the future. It's transcendental in the sense of residing in a higher dimension than ordinary space, and in the feeling/tone sense in which we ordinarily use the term "transcendental." Title:
Summary:
Gamma emission (40 Hz brainwaves) are present in the frontal lobes of people of "higher consciousness." Neurofeedback was used to train non-advanced meditators to emit gamma brainwaves, resulting in similiar subjective reports of "higher consciousness."
About the Author(s):
Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., is a prolific biophysicist associated with the Institute of Frontier Science and Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. Dr. Rubik presently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine, Integrative Medicine Insights, and ReVision.
For more, visit www.scientificexploration.org 
Searle on Antonio Damascio's "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain" "Finally, after more than 250 pages, we get to the problem of qualia—a term often used for qualitative conscious states. Damasio tells us that there are two kinds of qualia: Qualia I and Qualia II. Qualia I is about pain and pleasure, but the problem of Qualia II is why there should be any feelings at all. He thinks Qualia I is not a mystery but that the Qualia II problem is more difficult. About Qualia II we get the following stunning passage:
Qualia is part of the contents that come to be known as the self process, the self construction illuminating the mind construction. But somewhat paradoxically, Qualia II is also the grounding for the proto-self and thus sits astride mind and self, in a hybrid transition. The neural design that enables qualia provides the brain with felt perceptions, a sense of pure experience. After a protagonist is added to the process, the experience is claimed by its newly minted owner, the self." "You can’t understand the mind only by looking directly at the brain. (…) The difference comes from the ways in which hundreds of millions of neurons are wired together to process information. I see the brain as a kind of computer—not like any commercial computer made of silicon, obviously, but as a device that achieves intelligence for some of the same reasons that a computer achieves intelligence, namely processing of information. (…)" "Our concepts of experience are highly open ended. Because of the fundamentally bounded nature of p-consciousness, we cannot peer directly into other qualitative fields. We must, for instance, allow that a manta ray sensing electromagnetic radiation might have corresponding experiences that are completely foreign to us, just as a blind man must allow that those who can see have experiences that are completely foreign to him. Accordingly, we must allow that simpler and simpler beings might have more and more primitive forms of experience. As we move down this scale, there is no clear boundary at which point we are definitively forced to stop attributing experience. Our confidence may grow weaker for systems that increasingly do not resemble us, but weak confidence for a proposition does not amount to clear logical grounds for rejecting it outright." 
In this article I aim to broaden and deepen the evolution of consciousness discourse by integrating the integral theoretic narratives of Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and Ken Wilber, who each point to the emergence of new ways of thinking that could address the complex, critical challenges of our planetary moment. I undertake a wide scan of the evolution discourse, noting it is dominantly limited to biology-based notions of human origins that are grounded in scientific materialism. Via David McConville |
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