Reality - Mental Training Workgroup

The discussion of the nature of reality would fill not only books but whole libraries of them... so how could we define "reality" in one line, without making the mistake of using a materialistic view only and therefore neglecting the other, spiritual half of reality?

Conclusion: If we don't like the reality which surrounds us, we need to change the hologram, by changing the feedback we are giving to it - as this is what keeps remodeling the hologram as it moves through time.

If reality were only a machine, a system of physical cogwheels interacting with each other, it would look different. There would be no Mona Lisa in the Louvre, no 9th symphony by Beethoven, no "ET" movie, no cancer epidemic in Hiroshima (not only because Man wouldn't have invented the nuclear bomb but also because he wouldn't have built Hiroshima), and no whale beachings after the sonar experiments of the American navy.

Without the impact of consciousness on the physical universe, there would be no civilization, neither the good nor the bad sides of it. At the most, big and maybe naked monkeys would still populate the forests of the subtropical zones - no cars, no telephones, no TV, no aeroplanes, no population explosion, no towns, no smog, no world wars.

Reality as we know it consists not only of physical objects, not only of a more or less balanced ecology - it is also shaped by the visions of human beings to a great degree. Or in other words, it is the result of an interaction between the automaticities of matter and the imagination of spirit projected onto the "movie set" of the physical universe.

In our model of existence, we have postulated that matter obeys to laws while spirit formulates them. Of course, it obeys first to the laws which rule its own branch of existence, the physical laws like gravity, and the laws of molecular interaction (chemistry and biochemistry). Spirit can manipulate matter most successfully if he makes use of these laws: it is easier and more reliable to move a bucket of wet concrete up to the attic with a pulley block based on the laws of leverage than to do magic dances to levitate it. Even if the levitation exercise succeeds, it will need such a long time that the concrete will be hard by the time it arrives.

But matter also responds to the will of spirit, even if the spiritual unit is as small as an individual soul. We all have seen many times that things happened just because they were intended to happen by somebody. People get up from their deathbed because they have decided to live. The weather changes because somebody wanted rain on his fields, or sunshine at his wedding. Very embarassing for the TV weatherman who has to take back his predictions!

It goes down to funny details - like somebody offering you a piece of chocolate after you just thought "I would like a piece of cholocate now". Among church members, the power of prayers is known everywhere in the world - a prayer is nothing else than an intention projected at the physical universe, sometimes by an individual and sometimes reinforced by a whole group intending the same thing. It has been statistically established by a medical study that patients for whom somebody is praying will have a better recovery than patients who just get their treatment. It would be a mistake to believe that God helped in these cases: it is better, God did it - in one or several of his incarnations in a human body, the very person or people who said the prayers!

We are familiar with the phenomenon of feedback as far as mechanical principles are involved. But what does it have to do with the physical/spiritual composite of reality, and how is all that related to the concept of the hologram?

It is a fact that other than daisies, fleas, grassblades and earthworms, human beings change their environment by first visualizing a different environment, and then changing the actual environment until it looks like the visualization. It is not simply an instinctive reaction to an event - like running away from a tiger -, it is the result of a thought process. A hut made from palm leaves as a protection against heat and rain would be a simple example. The ISS, the international space station, is already a little more complicated. But both have in common that they first were a vision in some human being's mind before they became part of the environment. Yes, we do change reality!

So far, science has not been able to explain exactly how the human brain creates these visions - not even how it stores memories. But it is obvious that we are not only recorders, we are also projectors. And a critical look reveals striking similarities with the principle of the hologram.

Scientific mystery

Whether the brain is actually the substrate of these recordings, has not been established. It seems that the assumption that the brain does it all is over-simplified. Too many people whose brain was not working because they were physically dead (no heartbeat - no oxygen to the brain) have been reanimated and then told how they perceived their environment with great clarity. They could tell details about the talks and actions of people who surrounded them. How is such a perception created, and where is such a memory stored if the brain has been knocked out? Many stories of children and adults who told their memories of past lifetimes - which later got verified by pioneer researchers like Dr. Ian Stevenson - point into the same direction: the actual substrate of memories and thoughts is not the brain, the brain is just a switchboard between body and spirit.
	Near Death Ian Stevenson Reincarnation

	Near Death Ian Stevenson Reincarnation

Fortunately, for our purposes it doesn't matter where and how we store the holographic recordings of our environment. We can treat the mechanics of it as a black box, and leave the research to the lucky scientist who can get the funds for it. The answer is not necessary for the work we want to do - we don't need to waste our energy with the attempt to prove how the recordings come about.

After all, there are 6 billions of hologram recorders on this planet at this very moment, most of whom are in perfect shape and prove every day that yes, they are making 3-dimensional recordings and yes, they project visualizations, no matter how. Actually they record much more than the 3-dimensional shapes of the objects they perceive in their environment: They also record sounds, smells, movement - which makes the 3-dimensional recording 4-dimensional, if we want to look at time as a 4th dimension -, and many more details which go far beyond optics.

Especially interesting is that thoughts and feelings are recorded too. Each time we replay the recording of a certain memory, we not only get the looks, sounds and smells of that environment back, but also whether we felt happy, angry or sad. The little movie of going to the breakfast table thinking "I am afraid of my first school day!" can still be replayed by most people at the age of 80, even if they have sorted out and thrown away many other movies. Who needs quarrels with their mother-in-law anyway?

If we look at the explanation of the feedback loop again, we realize that it is time which makes it possible for the sound waves between the speaker and the microphone to become amplified to such an unbearable volume that we feel the urge to run out of the room. The sound moves from the microphone to the speaker through a cable and an amplifier at the speed of electricity. Then it moves back from the speaker to the microphone - through the air - at the speed of sound. These two time spans counted together are the length of one cycle. It requires only very few cycles for the feedback loop to increase the sound volume enough to destroy the speakers (or our ears, whichever goes first).

Now: A frustrated and tired father comes home from the night shift just when the kids have gone to school. He tries to get some sleep but the baby - who has been sleeping all night - is now screaming for attention. Not a chance to get any sleep. After a month of this, he beats the baby for the first time. From there on, it gets worse. And worse. And worse.

25 years later the same baby is now a father who beats his wife and his twins, plus their little sister. Another 25 years later the three of them, plus their other two siblings who arrived later, beat their kids, wives, husbands, and dogs. One of them goes to jail for it, the others get away with it. We are now in the third generation of a feedback loop which will never stop again. We record it, we replay it. We record it, we replay it - that's how recorders are built. And of course, because we have more than one child, we not only replay it, we multiply it. We multiply it, over and over and over.

It gets worse than that. In a culture, boys get taught to defend their honor with knives. They teach their sons to defend their honor with knives. A whole culture gets built on defending one's honor with knives! Another culture has the glorious idea of ethnic cleansing. Why are we not surprised that the survivors of their holocaust, 60 years later, have turned ethnic cleansing into an art form? They are recorders, they do what they are built for: they record, they replay, they record, they replay... and the whole world gets covered with blood resulting from revenge actions. How is this for a feedback loop?

We are no longer looking at the holographic projections of a mother and a daughter chatting on the phone. They were two single voices, sweet voices enjoying idyllic baby talk - but we are looking at a choir of millions, no, billions of voices who keep replaying their recordings of terror and violence. The holographic images they send out merge into one gigantic image, filled with hopelessness and ever-contagious pain: the image of reality on our planet Earth.

There is a chance. We have enjoyed several thousand years of projecting changes into the environment. The whole world has changed its face under our influence. Now it is time to change ourselves.

The recorders need an upgrade. Their design is too simple. They record, they replay, they record, they replay. But they need to do an additional step. They need to select what they replay. Only one additional chip must be put into the circuit. One additional piece of intelligence: a smart chip which takes the fatal automaticity out of the system, which causes it to replay everything once recorded without making a difference between the constructive and the destructive.

This time, we don't project our vision out into the physical universe, we project our vision back into ourselves. We project it, and record our own projection, and then replay it to our family and friends. What we need is this: we need a select/absorb mechanism, a new feature which evaluates a recording before it is played back, and cuts out all the destructive pieces. What we do with these pieces is not really important. We can swallow them or spit them out, whatever - just one thing counts: That we don't replay them, not even once.

This one feature in our minds - and only this one - can change the feedback loop of reality. We will later discuss the mental training exercises to accomplish this. For now, all we need is to really, really understand what we are talking about. And next: to reserve some time in our daily schedule to do the exercises. There is no money involved, no equipment, no physical effort - nothing which would make it difficult to do. We just open a hologram recorder - our own mind - and put an extra feature into it, a feature which makes the difference between hell and a paradise.

For now, let's just have a look at one more diagram and think about it for a while. It shows the difference between recorders with and without the smart selector chip: