Energy Beings

In this episode, we investigate the question of "are we energy beings?", from multiple angles, looking at different sources of information on the subject, many of which have credible, documented scientific sources.

Chapters:

1. A medical doctor's perspective.

2. The 4 fundamental Energy Centers of the human mind, a concept put forward by Manly P. Hall in https://youtu.be/wOh3o-XgbMI?si=lPJZB-fXgy6aNWM-&t=572

3. The 100th monkey effect.

4. The "Noosphere" - evidence that human minds impact activity at the quantum level, as shown by research at Princeton University.

5. Negative entropy - the opposite of disorder.

6. The body of humanity: the concept one innate consciousness arises from all humans collectively by natural processes.

7. A little experiment of our own.

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Music Credits:
Insiders by Joe Crotty | https://soundcloud.com/joecrotty
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I once had a medical doctor friend. We would get together for dinner periodically and get into some deep, engaging conversations. There's one thing in particular that he said that has always stuck in my mind. And it goes like this. If you were able to track and trace each molecule and atom that makes up your body, you would discover that in the course of seven to eight years that everything in your body has changed over. Let's think about that for a second. So all the material stuff that made up your body seven years ago, all that's gone. It's all been replaced. It's all been swapped out. And that is an extraordinary concept because I'm still here. I haven't collapsed into a puddle of goo. I've got memories going back seven, fourteen, twenty-one years, and you name it. It's extraordinary because if we're not made up of the same stuff that we were made up from seven years ago, and how is it that we still continue? Somehow it's that process, it's that constant replenishment and changeover that maintains us. When you look at it from that perspective, our physical bodies, our physical being. You can see that we are energy beings. It's that constant energy that's being spent that maintains us, that keeps us going. But yes, at the physical level, we are energy beings. There's a lot more to us, of course, than just being a physical body. The human mind is a very active, energetic thing. When the human body is at rest, twenty percent of the energy being used by our body is used by the brain. And interestingly, this doesn't go down significantly when we're sleeping or not mentally active. When we're at rest, the mind is at a very slow frequency. But when our minds are active and engaged, those frequencies increase. If you've ever seen an EEG electroencephalogram, you'll see all kinds of electrical activity going on at different frequencies and amplitudes. And so clearly the human mind is an energetic entity. That's the cold scientific outside in looking view on the subject. But what about the view from the inside looking out? That's a very interesting place. In some of the eastern schools of spirituality, we run across the concept of chakras. What these are is an interpretation of that inside out view, where it's possible to look at the human mind as having structure. And you could think of this as layers, as levels. You could equally look at them as being centers. And there's energy flowing between all these different centers, between all these different levels at all times. Now in the commonly accepted view, there are seven chakras, but when I look at it just from this layman's perspective, and I want to zoom back on it to the maximum degree of generality without losing the basic meaning. What I see are four different levels. We could zoom into one of them and break them down into more detail. We're not going to do that today, but we're going to go for a tour of those four most basic levels, those four most basic centers that make up an energy structure of the living human mind. The base layer I like to refer to as the physical. We feel physical pain, physical pleasure, physical discomfort, physical comfort. It's a dimension of its own. And yet you can also see that it's related because if we have positive or negative physical inputs, we relate that to what's going on around us, and we start engaging our broader thinking capacity into making sense out of it. Now the second level to this view, this the second center is our emotional center. And again, emotionally we can feel pleasure, we can feel pain, we can feel comfort, we can feel discomfort. It's its own dimension, distinct and separate from the physical, although it's often related. The third level or third center is where our thinking minds reside. I like to think of it as the intellectual level or the intellectual center. Some might call it the ego, but I think that's narrowing it down a little too much. It's where our analytical minds in our verbal processes have a home. This is also where our creative capacities find expression. Although it could certainly be said that it's the inspiration that comes through connecting with those other centers that fuels that creative process. Now the fourth level I like to call the spiritual level. Although I guess you could also think of it as an overall temperature reading on the entire system. How well are all those different parts working together not only internally within ourselves, but with the world around us? All the people, places, and things that we interact with are things in harmony. One of the reasons I like to call this the spiritual level is because the environment we live in is largely a social environment, and if that society is spiritually in tune with beneficial philosophies and living and working around those mutually beneficial actions that come from a beneficial philosophy on life, then you can see that that's going to be an environment where we as individuals are going to find more comfort than discomfort, where we're going to find more pleasure than pain, and where we're going to find clarity instead of confusion. And so if we look at the human mind as this layer cake, there's a physical layer, an emotional layer, an intellectual layer, and a spiritual level. In that view, we could look at a human being as being a bridge, a bridge between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Now in the spiritual world, is there a structure? Is there any evidence out there that might indicate that such things exist? And sure enough, there is. One such piece of evidence is commonly referred to as the one hundredth monkey effect. In nineteen eighty-two, the Japanese government commissioned a twenty-year study of the behavior of macaque monkeys that were living on small remote islands around Japan. The monkeys were very hard to observe when they were up in the forest, so the scientists would throw out sweet potatoes on the beach to draw the monkeys out of the forests. Apparently, macaque monkeys love sweet potatoes. And this would bring them out on the beach and they could keep track of the population, observe behaviors, interactions, things like that. Well during the course of the study, one day an 18-month-old female did something unusual. She picked up her sweet potato, went down to the water, and washed off the sand. You can imagine what it would be like to bite into something, say like a carrot, and it was covered in sand, and you're chewing through the sand along with the food, it's not going to be terribly pleasant, right? It wasn't very long before her mother picked up on the behavior, and then some of the younger monkeys in the troupe also started washing their sweet potatoes. As time went on, more and more of the monkeys adopted this behavior. Now the reason why this is called the hundredth monkey effect, the number wasn't a hundred, it was less than that. There wasn't even one hundred monkeys living on that island, but at some point a critical mass was reached, and all of the monkeys on all of the islands that they were observing started washing their sweet potatoes. And there's no way that there could have been any type of direct communication between these isolated populations, so that is something that is a bit of a mystery. Let's just say an official explanation is yet to be found for that. And so that is what is commonly referred to as the hundredth monkey effect. But there's other things, other events that have been recorded and scientifically studied. And another one that comes to mind is the Jerusalem Meditation Experiment. And I believe this was done in 1983 during the Israel Lebanon War. A group of about ten thousand people would get together in Jerusalem and they would meditate on peace on certain days. And what happened was on those days when they got together and meditated on peace, hostilities decreased, casualties decreased, and it was a statistically significant correlation. It was not something that could be written off to random chance. They did this on several different days. And I've heard information, although I don't have confirmation on it, that even crime and car accidents went down on those days. So again, that has to make you wonder. Was this similar along the lines of that hundredth monkey effect? Apparently, this experiment has been repeated many times around the world, and every time it's had an effect. It's had an effect that is statistically significant, and therefore scientifically significant. A little over one hundred years ago, a great psychiatrist by the name of Carl Jung came out with the concept of the collective unconscious. Now I sometimes wonder could there be such a thing as a collective consciousness? Just as our own personal consciousness arises from this massive number of neurons in the brain that are interconnected and communicating with each other. Could there be consciousness manifesting itself from those eight billion plus human beings on this planet that are interconnected and communicating with each other? It's an intriguing thought, isn't it? There is actually some science being done in this direction, which seems to indicate that such a thing may well be possible. And this brings us into the realm of the Noosphere. That's spelled N-O-O-S-P-H-E-R-E. And there's actually research going on at different places, but one of the notable ones is Princeton University. You can check out their website, noosphere.princeton.edu if you're interested. One of the experiments they've done that I find most interesting is using a type of random number generator. And this is measuring effects down at the quantum level. It's using something called quantum tunneling that I'm not going to get into in any detail. But let's just say it's a physical device that generates random numbers. And these are detected and recorded by computers. Now there are several of these devices at different locations around North America and Western Europe. They're separated by hundreds and even thousands of miles. And they've found that at times there's a coherence occurring between these different locations. There's an alignment, and that these events concur, they happen at the same time as events that grab a lot of people's attention. Could be a major sporting event like the World's Cup, it could be a terrorist attack, it could be a natural disaster, it could be the unexpected death of a notable person. Now they've calculated the probability of these random numbers coalescing. And in order for this to happen randomly, the probability was in the order of one in a trillion. That's one in one thousand billion. To put it into perspective, your chances of winning the lottery are much better than that. So what's being measured here? When there's this coherence of millions of people's minds focused on one event, there seems to be this ripple effect that has an impact right down to the quantum level. It's almost as though what we're witnessing here is a glitch in the matrix or the footprints of the gods, or evidence of spiritual life. At the very least, it can be said when there's widespread coherence amongst a large number of human minds, it has an effect far beyond that which we would expect. But what is randomness? In the realm of science, randomness is sometimes quantified as entropy. One of the fundamental signals for the presence of life is something referred to as negative entropy or negantropy. Entropy is a concept developed in the realm of physics that describes the amount of energy that is lost to disorder in a system. You could think of it as energy that's fighting itself with no net effect other than an increase in temperature. One of the fundamental laws found in the study of physics is that entropy is always increasing. Well, like I said, there's a fundamental signal in life. It's as though living beings are bubbles of negative entropy. And think about it, if you were to get a scratch or cut, it heals. It heals. And if we were to take that law of physics, literally, a little tiny scratch would trigger this cascade failure, ending up in your premature demise. But of course that doesn't happen. We heal instead. Entropy loses and life prevails. The route I like to go with this, it starts with looking at ourselves as being part of something larger. We are like a cell in the body of humanity. When you look at the current state of the body of humanity, you can see that well some parts are trying to kill other parts. Some parts are trying to enslave other parts and pull up all the resources for themselves and leave other portions of that body without enough. What we're looking for in this body of humanity is balance. When one part of your body is trying to kill another part of your body, medically that's referred to as an autoimmune disorder. Your immune system is going after part of your body and it ends up causing problems overall. When one small portion of the body tries to gobble up resources that should be distributed equitably, it's like a cancer. It's drawing so much of that life energy into itself that it can destroy the host. And so it's pretty straightforward to see that these are not examples of living in balance. When we look at things like the hundredth monkey effect and the Jerusalem Meditation Experiment and the experiments in noetics, you can't help but wonder are we more powerful than we think we are? Could it be that we've always had this power, but we weren't conscious of it? There's an ancient saying that you're probably familiar with. Some say that this bit of wisdom dates back all the way to ancient Egypt. It goes like this as above so below, and as below so above. One thing that I've become aware of in the process of pulling together this episode is that I cannot think of one religion or one spiritual tradition that does not include prayer or meditation. I would like to propose we do a little experiment of our own, and in doing so you do not need to join a religion, you do not need to leave a religion, you don't need to send anyone any money. What we do is the following Take some time as often as you can, but try to do this at least once a day. Take some time to say a prayer or to meditate on the following on peace on mutual respect on compassion on forgiveness peace, compassion, mutual respect and forgiveness. We push that energy up into the spiritual realm because I think when we do that we strengthen those positive forces above us, and we're more likely to see that energy come back down to us. There are no preset words to repeat. This is not an incantation, it's not a spell. It's something that has to come from your heart. You just express it in your own way, in a way that makes sense to you, in a way that fits with your traditions. And who knows, maybe you will be that one hundredth monkey. Maybe you'll be the ninety ninth monkey. Maybe you'll be the second monkey that doesn't matter. Everyone that does this brings us one step closer to achieving that critical mass that can turn things around. You've been listening to the This Light Shines podcast. You can find all of our content as well as leave your feedback at thislightshines.net. If you enjoy this podcast, if you get something out of it, support us. Click on that art icon on your podcast player or click on the support link in the show notes. Thank you for listening, and as always, God bless.