Steve Jobs Gone But Not From Our Lives

Steve Jobs - 1955-2011 Today we lost a true genius, a one of a kind visionary in the world of personal computers, personal consumer electronics, personal communication and entertainment devices; opening up a new era of personal en-lightenment. For under his watch, personal gadgetry did became lighter, smaller, more powerful, elegant and more fun.

The God Franchise

Many people today supplant a healthy thirst for knowledge about deeper meaning in their lives with a packaged set of beliefs their religions espouse.

Because these religions have assumed a license, they can implore people to believe in their brand of explanation as the final authority, so that followers think there is no need to question the subject more deeply.

The Conscious Universe

The average guy on the street doesn’t think about the “Big Bang”, quantum physics, or what twisted mood the Creator must have been in to whip up the warped little Universe we live in. Frankly, most of us are busy trying to keep enough money in the bank, the government out of our pockets and figuring out why our kid just has to have a nose ring. We haven’t got the time or inclination to speculate technically on why the Universe is the way it is.

Is There Any Science Behind The Claims Of "The Secret"?

In 2006, a little video called The Secret exploded onto the scene and created a tsunami wave of fresh enthusiasm for new age spirituality and personal empowerment.

The Australian producers of The Secret included a few scientists to bookend the usual cast of self-help gurus and pulled off what many would claim as a product marketing coup of the decade. Their claims were scientifically astounding. Quite simply, according to these mostly self-credentialed authors of self-help books, anyone can create and have any reality they want in our world merely by visualizing it to be so.

Since the initial release of this documentary style, feature length infomercial, millions of people began a quest to change the laws of physics and create fresh new realities that would sweep the globe, drowning out the voices of any naysayers standing in their way.

Now, almost seven years later, and millions in profits to the producers, what will history say about the benefits gained by purchasers of all those CD's, books and tapes? Surprisingly, the consensus is very encouraging. Regardless of whether The Secret actually helped people create any new reality they chose, most people seemed to feel their lives were better for having embraced the tenets espoused by The Secret line of products. And to be fair, there are endorsements by people who cite specific examples of life changing events they attribute to their investment in what The Secret revealed to them.

So that's not a bad thing right? Right. And furthermore, I say more power to them! But, is there any science to these claims or is everyone just feeling good about deciding to feel better about themselves? Let's take a look.

The "science" behind the claims are tied to what people have now come to accept as "the law of attraction". First of all, that's not new and it's hardly a secret. And notwithstanding the clever marketing twist in the movie that suggested there was some heinous plot to keep this information from the masses, thus benefiting only those horribly capitalistic captains of industry who needed uninspired cheap labor for their factories, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha, who was born somewhere near 563 BC, was quoted as saying:

"All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him."

Sound familiar? So now Buddhism has been talking about this "law" of attraction for a lot longer than the producers of The Secret. But even if that's true, is there any science to the - breaking it down into other words here: transformation of one reality through the visualization of another? In fact there is!

Science is now able to finally illustrate that reality itself is a condition, or state of existence that is constantly in flux, not something hard-wired into relentless evolution of the universe. Energy moves in and out and around the voids between fixed states of existence, or reality, which has become stable enough to appear solid, thus forming the tangible world around us. And then just as quickly it disappears again to be replaced by another new reality, to take the place of the "old" reality.

From moment to moment reality moves in and out of existence at a level and a frequency that we cannot perceive as individual units of reality, but rather what appears to be an unbroken stream of existence similar to a motion picture. We don't see the separate frames of film in a motion picture either - but they

are there nonetheless.

The "flicker effect" or a slight awareness of individual spaces of blackness between frames of film through a movie projector is subliminal. They pass by your eyes so quickly you begin to consciously overlook them; so they disappear as your brain compensates for them and no longer appear as individual still pictures anymore. Now they become a moving picture and the still photos simply blur as individual scenes that would otherwise be just a series of single frozen pictures in time.

But the really cool part is how WE make up the movie as we go along! Almost any outcome is possible. Letting that one creation play out without fiddling around with it and creating a new one in it's place is the trick. You just need to decide what movie you want to see and stick to it. In effect you are then choosing the outcome you want to experience. Click on the picture above and see what I mean (from a sample clip of the movie entitled: "What the Bleep do we know?")

So now that you're back, let's continue. What I'm illustrating here is that reality is a transformative illusion you move through on a daily basis pretty much on autopilot. You just live it and it moves you around as if you really weren't in control - when if fact you are. You just don't see yourself doing it anymore. You've lost that perception now over a very long time of living at Effect, rather than from Cause. And the worst part is that you keep changing your mind about what reality is really going to be for you. You second guess yourself and overlay the first reality you imagined, with a second and a third, on and on. So what you get is at worst a total surprise and at best a pretty good average of all the different realities you imagined.

So popular mind-over-matter theories marketed by products like the The Secret (2006), The Greatest Secret in the World (1972 by Og Mandino), PMA(Positive Mental Attitude) and Psycho-Cybernetics from the 60's (authored by Napoleon Hill who also authored the earlier seminal book on the subject entitled Think and Grow Rich and W. Clement Stone),  all relate the power of visualization to creating your future reality. To that extent they are supported by the latest scientific theories about how reality is being created at the base levels of subatomics, or the quantum level as it's now frequently referred to.

And therefor they ARE fairly well rooted in our new understanding of physics. And what is that exactly? It means that consciousness does appear to have influence on the fluid edge of reality. If that is true, then personal reality can be influenced by people thinking thoughts about what they want it to look like.

So The Secret is actually in good company with many other methodologies sold as remedies for your underperforming expectations for your life. It's just not much of a secret really. So go forth and conquer! Visualize your new life just the way you want it! Make of it what you will, but also know it will be as good or bad as you can focus on what you want - and stick to it.

What Good Is Reality If You Can't Change Anything?

In the past, we've all had this sort of classic view of reality which essentially is this: things happen and we just stand around watching it all go by--or, as in the case of some, it runs us over and there's pretty much nothing we can do about that.

Science has sneered at the notion shared by ancient Shamans and Sorcerers that reality was negotiable. After all, Science is about "stuff" which must all conform to the laws "stuff" is made from and that means everything has to pass the sniff test of physics, or it's just not real. If it's not real, science says it doesn't represent real-ity.

Well that has all changed now. In recent years scientists have had to come to grips with some cataclysmic shifts in their understanding of the make up of the "material" world around us. So now they are beginning to realize that "stuff" doesn't just happen. At the fluid edge of materiality, at a level far tinier than just sub-atomic, we the observers are influencing what sort of stuff happens. Sound spooky to you? Well you're not alone.

Do you remember the low budget film: What The (Bleep) Do We Know? The film makers sought to make a graphically visual connection between quantum mechanics and quantum consciousness. They were roundly criticised for it, but not on the basis of overall conceptual fallacy, rather they were dinged for inaccuracies in liberally citing certain data a bit out of context and glossing over scientific principles that academicians were uncomfortable with. The reluctance of science to whole heartedly endorse quantum consciousness is understandable. It literally flies in the face of everything they have dedicated their lives and reputations to.

Now however, the unquestioned new acceptance of quantum mechanics demonstrates the influence of consciousness on reality by the very nature of it's tenet theory. At the base level of matter, the tiniest level of sub atomic origins, quantum mechanics says the perspective of the observer must be present to define the location of the particles that makes up the stuff we see and bump into the world. Without the observer, meaning "us", those particles of matter would not appear in the locations we see them in around us. In fact they may never even come into existence at all!

So does that mean we actually create reality through consciousness? Some scientists now believe that is the general idea. In 2001 the BBC aired part of their Horizon series entitled Parallel Universes which offered a science supported theory that multiple universes exist and we may live in any one, or even all of them, at any given moment in time; simultaneously! This clearly suggests that any of a myriad potential outcomes for reality provides an infinite number of possibilities which can exist elsewhere in time and space and that the observer, or the inhabitants of these other universes, are the single point of relevance to the created reality of that dimensional universe.

The conclusion? That not only does quantum consciousness exist, demonstrating our active participation in the formulation of reality from moment to moment, but that even those realities that we don't decide to bring into our present world, can in fact appear and live out an existence elsewhere - in another parallel universe of time and space. And that another version of ourselves lives in that parallel world as well.

So even Science is now beginning to appreciate the advice of the Shaman and Sorcerer of ages past and is coming to a new age of understanding of not only what reality might be, but that we can decide what reality we like best and choose to make it into a better one.