A Quote by William James
The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.
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The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
In its evolution from a more primitive nervous system, the brain, as an organ with ten or more billion neurons and many more connections between them must have changed and grown as a result of many accidents.
It is only the Sahasrara has to grow, not the Spirit. The more sensitive the Sahasrara is, the more it receives the spiritual qualities of the Spirit. Actually the peace is felt in the Sahasrara. The bliss is also felt in the Sahasrara because that is the brain and the brain is the epitome of our nervous system, central nervous system, of consciousness itself.
Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too.
In the field of consciousness research-and also in physics and astronomy-we are breaking past the cause-and-effect, mechanistic way of interpreting things. In the biological sciences, there is a vitalism coming in that goes much further toward positing a common universal consciousness of which our brain is simply an organ. Consciousness does not come from the brain. The brain is an organ of consciousness. It focuses consciousness and pulls it in and directs it through a time and space field. But the antecedent of that is the universal consciousness of which we are all just a part.
People regulate their level and distribution of effort in accordance with the effects they expect their actions to have. As a result, their behavior is better predicted from their beliefs than from the actual consequences of their actions
The real scientific study of the distribution of wealth has, we must confess, scarcely begun. The conventional academic study of the so-called theory of distribution into rent, interest, wages, and profits is only remotely related to the subject. This subject, the causes and cures for the actual distribution of capital and income among real persons, is one of the many now in need of our best efforts as scientific students of society.
A theory that denies that thoughts can regulate actions does not lend itself readily to the explanation of complex human behavior.
The earth has grown a nervous system, and it's us.
By immersing ourselves with our consciousness in a supersensible world, we now learn a new kind of thinking, a new life of mental pictures, one that is not dependent on the nervous system in the way ordinary thinking is. We know that previously we have had to make use of our nervous system, but now we no longer need our brain.
With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism.
Our brain and our whole nervous system and our whole body are only created in relation to other people and to the environment. So what we have here is an enormously complex notion of both consciousness and unconsciousness. That's why these models get very difficult, because you can't reduce our subjective and intersubjective experience to neural reductions.
The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.
It was the kind of terrified look that reminds you that no matter how rational or grown up a person might seem, some part of him is absolutely sure - knows - that an evil other-world exists just outside of our regular, everyday world. And that although we don't expect that world to collide with our calm, predictable one...well, really, at any moment that is exactly what might happen.
Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.
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