im a blue monkey white dog
seeking out a yellow star
i'm a new age high priest
in an old age pyschadelic jaguar

gonna break open the skull
emerge into the new light
got make love in the sun
and make lust in the night

im a spiritual man
with a heartfull of soul
im the enemy of banality
and staus quo

gonna put away fun
because its time to play
your weapons are love
so put your gun away

now you know
it just can't be stopped
emergence is the time
the world will rock

dear blog
what words are left to fill the empty space, to make patterns coherent and digestible for the human brain, the monkey mind, the dolphin heart falls apart when it's left alone without a home or a partner in crime to play with when the tv explodes and light escapes back to where it's meant to be. lets see.
the science says we are stardust, i know this is true, every man woman an child is a star. we originate from space at the beginning of time caught in the densest dimension the one of form, as the explosion slows, these moments are the now, the front wave of the big bang, behind us it leaves it's train, in front of us it unfolds in possibilities.

i'm mixed up at the moment, i need a band and i'm having trouble finding one. i'm looking for a guitar player, a keyboard player and a drummer and probably a bass player. i don't even know where or how to look, and i'm not looking for the usual suspects, i need quiet people who just play music for the love of music, people who understand my limitations but like my songs. i want to record with them and play at my cd launch. i need to manifest them. now. this is the face of my explosion, this is my potentiality and my intent. make it so.

it's remarkable, how accurate my mayan sign is, intuition tells me it's correct. As soon as i read the number is 11 it was as if a hammer had struck me in the chest, for the number 11:11 is the number that i follows me everywhere. If there are patterns that run through our lives then here is the numerical equivalent. i always translate it as a number that indicates i am on the correct path, like a cosmic confirmation.



Blue Magnetic Monkey

I unify in order to play
Attracting illusion
I seal the process of magic
With the Magnetic tone of purpose
I am guided by my own power doubled
March 10 1962


Seal of the Day, Destiny

Blue Monkey (CHUEN) Plays and emphasizes Magic.
The seal of the day is the basis of life destiny, with power of the solar tribe.
Kin 131 of 260 day cycle.

Tone of the day
Tone 1 Magnetic, creative power to Unify Purpose,action of Attraction.

Blue Monkey (CHUEN) Plays and emphasizes Magic.

Cosmic - Occult tone of the day
Occult of the Day, the Hidden power

White Dog (OC) Loves and emphasizes Heart (truth).
The seal for the Occult of the day enhances the oracle reading with Hidden power (the unexpected).
Analog of the Day, the Like-Minded power

Yellow Star (LAMAT) Beautifies and emphasizes Elegance.
The seal for the Analog of the day enhances the oracle reading with Like-Minded power (galactic-solar planetary power).

Tone one starts the Wavespell
Tone 1 Magnetic, creative power to Unify Purpose,action of Attraction
Tone 1 Magnetic

Blue Monkey (CHUEN) Plays and emphasizes Magic.

Tone of the Year
Tone 8 Galactic, creative power to Harmonize Integrity,action of Modeling
Tone 8 Galactic

Seal of the Year, Destiny
Occult

Blue Monkey is your Conscious Self - who you are and who you are becoming.
Blue Monkey represents the Divine Child, the child that is ever in a state of open-hearted wisdom, innocence, trust, simplicity and joyful wonder. What would it feel like to actually BE a magical child in this culture and time? The secret that very few know - because they may feel more comfortable trying to protect themselves - is that the divine child offers the strongest of all protections, the invulnerability of openhearted Love. Through innocence, a kind of immunity is created that allows the divine child to be TRANSPARENT so that the apparent 'slings and arrows' of the world can pass right through without being personalized into wounds, reactions or hurt feelings. This is the path of innocence regained. Transparency is the path of the new consciousness.

Look deeply into the eyes of a happy two year old. There you will see the innocent trust, openheartedness, and spontaneous joy that typifies the divine child. Imagine yourself as an enlightened two-year old, in a state of ecstatic communion and delight. In childhood, you didn't have to remember to be playful - you could easily and fluidly express your emotions. You didn't have to understand whys and wherefores - you knew with your heart. This if your natural state of being, the state of ecstasy, the path of revealed innocence.

In Western culture, many people have a distorted understanding about what it is to be a human being. We are often taught that sucessful adults are responsible, serious, rigid, controlled and goal oriented. In your journey with society, your developmental stages may have been incomplete. The natural sensitivity, fluidity, and freedom of the child may have been left behind in partial passage. Perhaps your inner child was wounded or treated insensitively, and you carried this unresolved process into adulthood. Blue Monkey encourages you to bring forth this incomplete or wounded part for integration and healing.

In this New Myth, your spontaneous, divine child will usher in and anchor the new frequency. How can you heal your inner child? Explore what truly gives you joy. Find types of work that support your sensitivity and create deep satisfaction. Be simple: love, play, dance, draw, colour, sing. These activities are for all divine children - they serve the expression of the magical child in everyone. Consciously make time for the joyful freedom and magic of play!

The number for Blue Monkey is eleven, the vibration wherein novelty and spontaneity break down resistant forms. When unity merges with Essence Self, a mystical foundation is created that disintegrates old patterns. This is actually integration in disguide. As your walls tumble down, they crack into a smile, and the illumination of self shines through.
Blue Monkey is also your Higher Self & Guide. (you are guided by your own power doubled)

Blue Monkey's playful wisdom is also represented by the dolphin. The dolphin, which represents an evolved state of consciousness, joyfully expresses in spontaneous ways in the present moment. Blue Monkey can assist you in learning to play your way through any situation. Lighten up! Monkey around! Don't take life so seriously! Remember: "Man is, that he might have joy!"

Blue Monkey can help you get the cosmic joke that appearances in this three-dimensional world are illusory, so you might as well laugh and make "light" of them! Since you are the co-creator of your reality, why not write a delightful script? You have created for yourself learning situations that may appear to be difficult and uncomfortable. Humour can serve as a pressure valve and healer, helping you to laugh and dance with the illusion.

Speak your truth directly. Be vulnerable, sensitive and openhearted. Accept life's 'disruptions' with good humour. Reaccess your sensitivity by healing your inner child.


White Dog is your Subconscious Self and Hidden Helper.

One of the gifts of White Dog is the calling in and recognition of other companions of destiny. Other beings with the same longing are waiting to meet and acknowledge you - beings who can see you as you authrentically are. When you have truly been seen, you feel empowered, and remembrance of a shared sacred trust is ignited. This is a natural process, divinely designed for recognition through vibrational affinity, freed from personal expectations.

White Dog can be seen as an access point for developing relationships with guides, totems, allies and guardians. There are many ways to work with these spiritual guides, including guided visualizations, shamanic journeys, and meditation. A useful construct is viewing them as aspects of yourself, part of your life stream that is asking to be integrated. Remember, there is no 'other'. In this grand adventure, you are being asked to embody all that you are.
Profound insights are garnered through shared purpose and relationship with others who are willing to be in their truth and integrity about the light and shadow aspects they perceive in themselves.

Similarly, intimate relationships can be viewed as unique opportunities to bring forward in each other deep emotional patterns to be transformed. In this case, those you have drawn to you hold the ability to assist you in your own integration as well. There are no mistakes. Be willing to look deeply into the truth held within any relationship. The expression of intimacy is a gift of love; the lack of it may be a symptom asking for honest communication and healing. It may also be guiding you to reevaluate your relationship and the purpose it is serving.

White Dog signals a breakthrough in your life: new beginnings, new perceptions, new allies and friends. As you express more authentically who you are, you draw your true family closer to you.With your guides and companions, you have the ability to manifest your inspired visions and dreams. Recognize the eyes and hearts that spark the remembrance of a sacred trust.

The harmonic wisdom of White Dog is affinity, the attraction of like vibration or substances for one another. Spiritual affinity is not limited to family kinship - it is part of the natural affinity between companions of destiny. Such companions of are drawn together by the same aligned force that draws iron filings to a magnet. Companions of destiny are drawn togther to do work that is naturally harmonious.

On the surface at times, it may seem that you have little in common with these companions, yet the attraction remains. This is because Essence Selves are often committed to work together long before they meet in the physical world. This is a natural process of affinity, rather than a process motivated from personal desire. Follow this guidance into your unfoldment within the larger pattern.

Red Dragon represents your Challenge and Gift. With maturity and awareness this challenge will turn into a Focus. This is what you desire to learn in this lifetime.

In the shadow of Red Dragon are found issues of trust. This can appear as a lack of basic trust in the Source to nurture you and provide what is needed for your journey. Perhaps you do not trust in life's transformational process to bring you the perfect lessons and gifts required for your growth. Primal trust implies the understanding that there are no mistakes and no victims - only lessons, gifts, and growth processes on the way to wholenes. If you perceive that there are no mistakes as you move toward wholeness, then learning to trust the transformational process becomes much easier.

Trusting, however, does not mean acting blindly without awareness or waiting without action; it means moving forward with and learning from your journey of experience. No matter what the appearance, whatever manifests in your world actually holds potential gifts on the path to wholeness. In the cycle of giving and receiving, trust is like the lubricant that eases the way for the transformational process. And when you understand that every particle of the universe is made up of love, then trusting can be perceived as a natural state of being.

In the shadow of Red Dragon are hidden feelings of unworthiness to receive, often manifested as embarrassment or discomfort when others offer you something. These feelings can stem from many places. Often then stem from early childhood, when your gifts may not have been received or when you heard that "it is better to give than to receive." Or perhaps you developed a reality based on praise for being "self-sufficient" or not owing anyone anything. Regardless of the source, these feelings spring from only a partial truth. You are intrinsically worthy to receive, simply because you are. Love just is, and you are part of the cycle of love.

In the shadow of Red Dragon, you may also be overly identified with being a source of support and nurturance for others - the caretaker or a 'cosmic mama.' Giving without receiving is limiting. In Western society we are unknowingly taught to be dependent and co-dependent. Perhaps from an inability or unwillingness to nurture and support yourself, you have abandoned yourself for another. Perhaps you expect that other to know intuitively what your needs are and to meet them without direct communication.

As an example, the shadow of Red Dragon might say, "If they really loved me, they would understand how I feel"; or "If I have to ask for it, it's not worth it." In other words, you may be avoiding responsibility for being aware of and communicating your own desires and feelings. In the shadow of Red Dragon there is the belief that love is magical, that relationships should just 'happen', and that love is a need rather than a natural state of being.

If you are in the shadow of Red Dragon, you are being encouraged to step into the primal waters of your being to discover the core of your self-acceptance, your intrinsic value, your own wholeness. Find the wellspring of your feelings. Be willing to explore more fully and honestly, expressing your true desires, dreams, and truths.



Yellow Star is your Compliment - something that comes naturally to you.

You are a starseed! You contain a holographic 'seed packet' of your evolution into the Mind of Light and the energy that directs you toward wholeness. This resonance offers an expanded view of the larger self and new ways of perceiving reality. Through self-acceptance, you are gifted with this journey. Yellow Star is ignition, like a cosmic milkweed explosion of resonant sparks. It is the launching pad from which you can hear the rumble of the rocket of your accelerated evolution.

The energy of Yellow Star may be experienced as a gentle rocking that becoes a floating and spiraling sensation, ending in a rush of feeling as you move into expanded reality. This sensation has been described as gently cascading fireworks, shimmering burst on the tapesty of Creation. Cascade into this unchartged perspective. Flow on the cosmic winds wherever Divinity directs, arching back to this reality wth a new experience of self.

Yellow Star's starseeded gift is the revelation of the harmony that unites all things. Instead of just aspiring to be harmonious, become harmony. Practice harmony not just as an abstraction, but as a living reality. This practice blends different energies, thoughts, people, and processes. Act on intuitive guidance as to what to combine and when. As you begin to follow your heart, you will know the feeling of being on the return path to the stars.

Yellow Star offers you the ability to hold a greatly expanded focus, a unity of awareness that encompasses aspects of the larger constellation of self. An example of this would be a simultaneous awarenss of the desires of the existential self and the truth of the Essence Self. This star harmony encompasses the greatly enlarged perspective of your starseeded self, the part within you that holds the potential of your greatest destiny.

Unlike the preceding 7 tones, which were seperate and distinct, Yellow Star begins a more complex harmonic series as it completes the preceding octave. On a spiritual level, Yellow Star begins the development of higher being. The fundamental tones that occur in this series are of a more expanded frequency than those of the preceding seven tones. In this new octave, there is alignment in the harmonies of Earth and the harmonies of the stars that are now being sounded on Earth. Yellow Star is the first in a series of star harmonies that evoke accelerated growth of the starseed potential within you.

Your Tone is Tone 1 - Magnetic

Unconditional love, the one heart, indivisible essence, core vibration, new beginnings, chalice of the infinite, All That Is.

One is the ray of unity with self and Source. Call forth the resonance of your true vibration. Feel the pulse of this ecstatic frequency of the One. You are being offered profound awakenings and the exquisite radiance of unconditional love. This is a time of new beginnings in your life. Be active in your individual expression, committed to the growth of your Essence Self.

You contain the paradox of the "separate" self and unity with the One. You are simultaneously the primal point of beginning and the crowing culmination. You are the initiator. You are the one who opens the way. You may feel alone or separated from Source. If so, stand in the unity of your Essence Self and focus on the reality of the one heart. You are the wisdom you seek!

my insular night is disturbed by the phone, im doing my yoga and meditations and i should have switched it off. it's lisa 1 wanting to come out and play. i'm saying no no no but my resistance is low and i get sucked out for dinner with the two lisas and gravey. we laugh quite a lot, it's actually a great night. we round it off at the pizza place having exotic ice cream drinks with coffee shots and liquors made by italian monks.
morning i am in glebe, picking up books and flirting with girls all looking like summer is upon us. bright dresses and flowers everywhere, i buy a couple of books and head home, weary and exhausted, i fall into a deep sleep.
strange nights are upon me, dreams of death
im some how connected to a young band, they are from the US or canada and are touring sydney, i played with them in the US and they showed me around the traps, took me to parties and sightseeing. now its my turn but the girl the keyboard player, she's on loan from another band, the dandy warhols or something and she's a party girl, she likes to have a good time, si we've spent the day at radio shows being interviewed and we went on tv, and now we are on some kind of harbour cruise, however the water is choppy, and out heroine is very pissed, in fact she falls in and drowns immediately. i look in horror at the situation as it unfolds. i'm some how feeling responsible.
i wake up, theres a storm blowing trough the house, mission control is exposed to the elementals, they swirl around as i baton down the hatches. mission control becomes very cold.

last night i forced myself to learn a bit about the mayan calender, i have understood the theory before but never looked at it in detail. the mayan calender is not like any calender i've seen before, its magnificent. its a number of calenders interlocking and revealing more extensive cycles. the calender maps out a plan of evolution tat is quite remarkably accurate, the cycles indicate phases of consciousness and measures periods of change that are ever increasing. there's a fantastic significance the mayans give to their calenders because they were aware of the plan, therefore they had an inner calender that gave them meaning each day and each day was devoted to that meaning. when the mayans were aligned with the calender and their consciousness they called it 8 division sky palace, another term would be heaven. according to the calender we are in the end of the ethics cycle and about to enter the galactic cycle, which will be followed by the universal conscious co creation cycle.

soon every one will be talking about a new film called zietglist which i saw about a year ago, the sequel is out and i saw that last night. at the end of the first film your left feeling sad and angry and helpless, and then came the second film which suddenly takes a turn half way through towards a cure for the madness we are all trapped within. the cure is found with a project called the venus project and it was created by this man, below, here he explains what he is doing and why. check out their website.

Q: Why do you feel that an approach as revolutionary as The Venus Project is necessary?

A: Our current system is not capable of providing a high standard of living for everyone, nor can it ensure the protection of the environment because the major motive is profit. Businesses aren't entirely to blame; they are forced to operate this way in order to retain the competitive edge. Additionally, with the advent of automation, cybernation, and artificial intelligence, there will be an ever-increasing replacement of people by automated systems. As a result, fewer people will be able to purchase goods and services even though our capability to produce an abundance will continue to exist. This is well-documented in Jeremy Rifkin's new book The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era (Putnam, 1995). The Venus Project offers a fresh approach that reverses the negative aspects experienced in our current applications of automation and artificial intelligence. This project eliminates the disastrous consequences that such approaches can have on our society, i.e. the displacement of millions of workers, skilled and unskilled alike.

Q: Elaborate a bit, if you will, on your views regarding money.

A:If all the money in the world were destroyed, as long as we have sufficient arable land, the factories, the necessary resources, and technical personnel, we could build anything and even supply an abundance. During the Depression, there were vacuum cleaners in store windows and automobiles in car lots. The Earth was still the same place. There was just no money in people's wallets and very little purchasing power. At the beginning of World War II, the U.S. had about 600 first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short-supply by turning out over 90,000 planes per year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money or gold, but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources and technical personnel that enabled the U.S. to achieve the production and efficiency required to win the war.

It appears that the real wealth of any nation is in its natural resources and its people who are working toward a more humane life-style through the elimination of scarcity. All social systems, regardless of the political philosophy, religious beliefs, or social mores, ultimately depend upon natural resources -- i.e. clean air and water and arable land area -- and the industrial equipment and technical personnel for a high standard of living. The money- based system was designed hundreds of years ago and was hardly appropriate for that time. We still utilize this same outmoded system, which is probably responsible for most of today's problems. I have no doubt that even the wealthiest person today would be far better off in the high-energy society that The Venus Project proposes.

Q: What will bring about the kind of society you envision?

A: I do not believe it can be brought about by the free exchange of ideas alone. It takes more than words and verbal exchange to bring about an innovative society. At the present time, the world is not a rational place. It will require a new set of values more appropriate to our needs.

The Venus Project's proposals and methods for arriving at a new social design are as follows:

Phase 1: The 25-acre planning center in Venus, Florida, which is already complete.

Phase 2: The production of books, pamphlets, and videos inviting the participation of people who advocate a similar direction. The Venus Project would also like to produce a feature-length motion picture and a television series, which would be a very effective way of presenting this evolutionary vision to a much larger audience.

Phase 3: The building of a new experimental city.

If our project appeals to a sufficient number of people and enough funds are made available, it will be directed toward the building of the first university city. The size and complexity of the city would depend on the funds available. This first experimental city would be a major planning, research, and development center where new technologies could be developed. It would also serve as a showplace for these new, clean technologies, operating in a pollution-free environment with built-in processes for recycling waste. Another of its functions would be to serve as a center for the dissemination of information in all areas of the social complex. It could serve as a global networking center, eventually inviting the participation of all nations, individuals, and organizations.

This would not be a private-enterprise venture for a selected few. Rather, it would be an open city for the public. Included in its design proposal is a theme park that could provide an exciting visual presentation of the operations of this new society designed to enhance the lives of all people; it would present to the public a positive, hopeful, attainable vision of the future. In our present culture, there is no comprehensive plan for a sustainable future; therefore the probability of a smooth transition from today's economy to a resource-based economy is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, what is most likely to occur is a breakdown in our current economic system and a reduction in the quality of life for most people. However, such conditions would not necessarily bring about a change for the better. Today the rate of change is so fast: new plants, technologies, and processes become obsolete in a relatively short time. To effect a smooth transition, we recommend that you inquire into the design proposals of The Venus Project. In order to realize our aims, it will require unrelenting effort from those genuinely interested in social change to better the lives of everyone, otherwise we are just engaged in a verbal hobby. We invite everyone's inquiry and participation to further this direction.

Q: In this new culture do you propose to utilize a technical elite that would decide the direction for society?

A:No. The Venus Project calls for a cybernated society in which computers could replace the outmoded system of electing politicians that, in most cases, represent the entrenched vested interests. Technology will never dictate or monitor individuals' lives, as this would be considered socially offensive and counterproductive. Motion pictures such as 1984, Brave New World, Blade- Runner, and Terminator 2 have spawned fear in some people regarding the takeover of technology in our society. The Venus Project's only purpose is to elevate the spiritual and intellectual potential of all people while also providing the goods and services that will meet their individual material needs.

It has been said that many people employed by private corporations feel they serve in private dictatorships from the moment they step though the door and punch the time clock. The Venus Project, on the other hand, would utilize the best of technology to better the lives of everyone. In the proposed system, the workday will be shortened, thus providing individuals with more leisure time, a healthier life-style, and a stress-free environment.

Q: How does The Venus Project deal with incentive? Doesn't the competitive money system generate incentive?

A: The free-enterprise system does create incentive to achieve, however it also breeds the incentive for corruption, graft, and greed. Our aim is to encourage a new incentive system, one no longer directed toward the shallow and self-centered goals of wealth, property, and power. Today, financial barriers place enormous limitations on innovation, individual creativity, and personal incentive. In The Venus Project, money would not be required to help one achieve or create, as facilities would be made available to serve everyone's needs.

Q: Why the emphasis on the cybernated approach to the social operation?

A: There is sufficient evidence to show that technology is evolving in this direction. As computers and artificial intelligence continue to evolve through environmental feedback, computers can arrive at more appropriate decisions in the operation of our social system. Today, automated systems can launch and guide the flight path of spaceships to distant planets. In a cybernated society with sophisticated technology, we will ultimately surpass the need for human participation in government, manufacturing, and distribution of goods and services. Through cybernated systems, a balanced-load economy can easily be maintained. This will free human beings from the boring and monotonous tasks of the work-day world. Yes, most jobs will eventually be phased out.

Q: What will people do?

A:They will engage in all manner of research and development, the creative arts and crafts, travel and exploration, and participation in all of the other limitless horizons the future has to offer. The ultimate realization of the potential of cybernated and computerized technology solely to improve people's lives could produce the most revolutionary system ever to evolve. It will eventually eliminate all superficial boundaries set up by nations; as we are beginning to witness with the introduction of satellite communication and personal computers, it is almost impossible for nations today to censor ideas and information.

Q: What actions do you recommend people take to prepare for the future?

A: Well, a lot of people are going to school today to learn a profession that will probably be obsolete in the next few years. Frank Ogden says that parents often ask him what profession their children should prepare for. His response is: "A profession that you've never heard of."

Q: What are the safeguards against abuse of power in the society you envision?

A:In a resource-based economy, we surpass the need for money which is the basis for most corruption. The society we envision makes all goods and services available for everyone without a price tag. This is what the function of government could be, by surpassing the need for politics in the management of human affairs. At present, governmental decisions have always been subject to the influence of the power elite. The cybernated complex would only manage and improve the distribution of resources, to provide clean air, clean water, and all of the amenities that enhance human life. Again, it does not control people or manage the lives of individuals -- on the contrary, it could encourage the development of individual initiative and creativity far beyond that of our present-day money- oriented culture.

There are many who fear the installations of cybernated systems. This fear is unfounded. It is not technology that is to be feared. Our concern should be with the abuse of this technology, rather than with the inanimate technology itself.

Q: What is your approach to research and development?

A: The facilities for this would be available to everyone.

Q: You place great emphasis on human behavior as opposed to human nature. Would you define both?

A:There is no such thing as human nature in the conventional sense of being a set of predetermined, preprogrammed behaviors and values to which all human beings are predisposed. What we are concerned with is human behavior and values, which can certainly be changed. If they could not, we would still be living in caves.

The question we should be concerned with is: What are the factors that shape human behavior? We feel that human behavior is just as lawful as any natural phenomenon. Our customs, behaviors, and values are by-products of our culture. If the environment is unaltered, similar problems and behaviors will reoccur. The Venus Project proposes to provide an environment that will bring out the best in human behavior and to extend maximum courtesy to all nations.

Take, for example, the situation witnessed after W.W. II: even the most respectable families could be seen fighting over scraps of food. When people's basic needs are not met, they resort to whatever behavior is necessary to ensure the necessities of life for themselves and their families. By making the necessities of life available to all in this participatory democracy and through a meaningful and productive education, we can dramatically reduce counterproductive behavior.

Q: What can you tell us about The Venus Project's approach to education?

A:A high emphasis would be placed on education. The better informed children are, the richer everyone's life could be. Every child shooting up drugs today is a wasted life that you and I will ultimately pay for. Although books, videos, computers, and virtual reality would be used, most of the educational processes would be of a participatory nature in which students could interact directly with the physical environment. They would become aware of the symbiotic interrelationships between plant and animal life. They would learn by doing in a hands-on approach in which education and the communicative sciences would be brought into sharp focus, enabling the student actually to grasp the significance of physical phenomena in a much more concrete way. Above all, they would learn how to interact effectively with others, to share experiences, examine alternative approaches to problems, and accept ethnic and cultural differences, replacing intolerance with understanding.

A comprehensive overview of the history of all civilizations would be essential to understanding other cultures, values, and the forces that shape them. The generalist education, as proposed by The Venus Project, will enable students to gain a better understanding of cultures that differ from their own, leading to a better understanding of the advantage of all nations joining together for the preservation of life on planet Earth. With emphasis on a world viewpoint, it would be more difficult to persuade anyone to engage in aggressive, offensive, or belligerent behavior toward individuals and other nations. With this broader education, children would come to see that the Earth is a fantastic and bountiful\ place where all nations can share and prosper.

Q: One last question. What about religion?

A:The concepts presented by The Venus Project are in no way inconsistent with most of the religious teachings of the world. Perhaps the major difference is that we would like actually to transform these lofty ideals into a working reality for the nations of our planet.

In closing, to achieve this new social design, it will require much voluntary, unselfish participation for it's realization. The future does not depend solely on The Venus Project. We only propose a direction. Our future depends on the decisions we make today.

john dee smokes a jazz cigarette
he wears his favorite purple cloak
edward kelly more formally attired
stares at the exhaled smoke
then in the mirror black as hades
now opaque give way
to something of not quite form
a symbol struggles to be born
the angels appear in sound and vision
receiving direct communication
edward and john map their charts
many years will come
some will pass
for they have no purpose but to proceed
and deliver us through ways and means
the enochian tables
the language of the angels

these two characters are pretty interesting chaps, give em a google, and see the mischief they got up to and the remarkable achievements the contributed to history, wanna find out who james bond is modelled on? wanna know the truth about the spanish armada?
magick has always played a role in english history, not so much now but in ye olden days. and none of histories characters are as colourful as john dee and edward kelly.
i studied some of their work, a system called enochian which appears very very complex but in actual fact is quite simple. the issue i found hardest is making all the props. however its possible and practical. the other thing one has to understand is the information was received in a code because that's what kelly was a code breaker, he received the information in a language he could appreciate. and what a code it is, so rich it has a life of its own.
to look at all the charts, tables, symbols is to be overwhelmed but there is a clear system a method to this madness as Lon Milo DuQuett describes in his wonderful book enochian vision magick. finally a book that gives a comprehensive account of how to operate enochian and what it is all about made simple. it's such a fantastic system, ever evolving, even dee and kelly didn't fully understand it. it is only know with contributions by crowely and various others that the system is coming together and being fully understood. i hope to organize myself and conduct some rituals around enochian soon, i'll keep you posted on the results and use this blog as a diary.

i woke after a strange and terrible dream shocked me to conciousness,
i was visiting my friend ed at his home on the northern beaches, his father and i were standing outside with him on a sort of bridge made by a wooden plank as a murkey horrible sludge surrounded his house. it was almost sewage and gunk. suddenly eds dad fell into the gunk and sunk very fast, as he went under i looked at the shock on eds face and then stumbled, there was a moment where i almost recovered my self but physocs dictated that i obey the law of gravity and i fell forward into the gunk, sinking fast. i had one moment to think, 'oh i really was expecting a better more dramatic end to my life' there was a feeling of disappointment and i was submerged. i opened my mouth. and woke up.

i did a yoga class today and then had my first private lesson, because i need to make sure i'm learning correctly. there's no point me learning if i am doing it wrong and i chose my teacher carefully after months of looking around. i basically looked for some one who would tell me they would be able to help me, which justin did. he is amazing to watch effortlessly moving from pose to pose, fluid and easy as if there is no friction. i've had so many breaks and fractures that have not healed correctly i do find the asanas quite difficult plus my flow is erratic and almost non existent. justin sat with me after the class and gave me instruction, a great teacher. i really connected with him and he with i. and then i found out why.
justin spent time in peru studying shamanism. he to had experimented with the vine.
we shared our stories and i felt somewhat connected in ways that i can't explain, it really was a great spending time with justin, he gave me some exercises to do and we said goodbye, but i think i'll meet him again soon.

i awake early the sun blaring through the windows and the early morning heat oppressive and intense, it's beautiful to wake up in heat so to speak rather than the cold, it motivates me towards the outdoors which has to be a healthy place to be however this morning i have a mission. big city mission and i have to return my tv which may be a blessing in disguise, i only watch the simpsons on it and they seem to be all repeats, i do love watching lateline but the news is becoming predictable. who ever did not see an economic melt down occurring is out of whack with the ether net. however this morning i wanted to check the time and day, so i switched on the tv and there was a news item that was really interesting, pictographs of a new planet outside our solar system. the new planets have just formed and its the first time anything like them has been seen outside our solar system, as the astronomer was being interviewed i watched the presenter ask the most ridiculas questions but i was overjoyed, a new planet, very cool.
my trip into the city was productive, i have some interesting plants and a new book by charles stross and english sci fi writer whom i enjoy and can see many movies being made from his stories one day. however when i returned home i saw i already had the book in my now vast library.
saturday morning i saw a photograph of sydney at night taken by an astronaut in space, it was amazing because it looked exactly like a huge synaptic nerve. imagine all that energy transmitting light at the moment but in the future that light will be information, gaia will have a central nervous system if it's used correctly.
i've seen the future and its expansive. my vision is the planets vision, its a blessing and a curse but one has to always take the long term approach, that's evolution.

like everyone who is honest i look for love, i'm a romantic at heart, that's an incredibly sad place to be for a single guy who's heart has been broken once to many times, but that's the sad truth. relationships have eluded me, i have had many and they have left me disappointed, mostly in myself. ayahuscia indicates i am incredibly loved, more loved than any other experience i have ever experienced, parental love, romantic love, true love, smart love, dumb love, i felt that love lift me.
but what's missing is the partner to share it with, my observations, my reckonings, my perspective and hers. that strange common ground, where my failings are loved equally as my strengths. it's evaded me. i am truly a hard man to live with, i don't have electric lights, i don't wanna watch tv when i can read, i keep everything clean and tidy except my mess. i have an extremely critical mind when it comes to people, unforgiving in some ways, i need to loosen up perhaps but the reality is i am pretty freaking loose, im to loose, i am loose wolf looking for a woman to run with.
my friend lilly said, i will only marry a man who has read that book.'
i told her i had read it as well as a lot of other feminist lit.

crop circles, i have heard all the theories, the skeptics and the believers, in then end i don't hold faith that these are created by aliens but neither do i believe these are the product of man. this is my theory of the crop circle phenomenon.
if you believe that the earth is indeed an intelligent and conscious entity (gaia) then it stands to reason that in some point in time it will awaken to human activity and consciousness and communicate in some form.
when one looks at crop circles the big surprise is these blades of grass or wheat are on the outside untouched but in theory individual centres they indicate a high thermal signature, they have been altered from the inside. the patterns are complex and mathematical, they occur instantly and usually in the northern hemisphere. to me this is the earth communicating to us, we don't yet have the ability to understand the message, it may be just a greeting or some way of saying, 'hey we are all in this together so be environmentally aware.'

im walking through babylon, its packed for some inexplicable reason, cars everywhere, people running around like crazy, i notice a familiar car drive past, it's a friend, a huge giant of a man, one of Australia's leading barristers whom i have known for many years, we have an unusual friendship that began in a strange cult we experienced (more of that later)
it's an incongruous friendship that puzzles people greatly, tim is a giant in stature as well as huge in presence. he's the most switched on man i know but his years in the business of human law has made him see reality of society as less than animal, for which i am in agreement especially dealing with the legal system. however we both fall prey to it's chaos but are smart enough to play with it rather than invest in it.
tim is my equal, he needs my spirit for his own liberation and i need his experience for my soul. its a deal we made several lifetimes ago when we faced certain death together. out tormenters wanted our fear but we gave them slap stick instead. both died laughing.
anyways he drives past again, looking for a car space. i jump inside his car, to bring him parking prosperity, (if only i could bottle it) we park up almost immediately and he asks me what I'm doing. its the melbourne cup apparently this is some kind of big horse race. tim says, i should come with him for lunch.
being somewhat in the moment of things i agree.
we go and have a coffee together, on the way we meet the local butcher who has always been a total jerk to me when i have gone in for bones for pan. however in tim's company everyone has a new found respect for me, including the Butcher of Babylon. He offers us a tip, put your money on 'Viewed' he says.
An hour later i'm driving Tim into the city, we are both dressed up with our hats on chatting about laws, police, girls, the amazon, wealth creation and belief patterns.
We park in a car park with valet parking, this means some one drives your car away and you don't have to worry about it at all, they even keep the keys. I've never had valet parking before so its a bit of a novelty, tim finds it highly amusing.
Then we walk to the restaurant across the road, only this is not a restaurant, its some sort of exclusive strip club.
okay now normal reality melts away, in fact its stripped away and the clocks melt, the lights low, the exotic mysterious half naked women start to drift towards us. female flesh is coming outta the shadows, the smell is almost overwhelming, it's like an opium narcotic that smothers and drowns you silently with its terminal kiss. these girls are gorgeous perfect creatures who are super friendly to tim and by proxy me. they must think i'm some sort of playboy millionaire. the place is not packed there's a handful of men in there, the rest are just women, dressed in exotic costumes if anything, some of these girls have plastic perfection some imperfect perfection, they are all very beautiful. i imagine that this is where the assassins where shown the afterlife that awaits them. to live like this is pure bliss but as the strippers began tim said to me in his very certain way, 'this is all an illusion' to which i replied, 'yes but given the choice of illusions, this is one that works for me.'
it was a decedent moment, and a decedent afternoon and a decedent evening. we watched the girls do their dances and then were lured away by three feline creatures who offered us pleasure and tantalizing treats of the flesh while we chatted quite normal conversational matter. tim's getting increasingly wasted as these amazonian women slithered all over us like snakes, honestly, i had no idea where to put my hands. they were like on remote control, spiraling around in circles, but never committing to anywhere specific. we were in there for hours, it took me back to the days of the airport strip club in toronto where i basically lived.
when i did emerge tim and the girls went one way i went another. the bill came to $5000 an obscene amount of money. but tim has an interesting relationship to money, its one that works and its something i want to learn.
he rang me 48 hours later and told me he was still in the city.
we will debreif later in the week.

interesting interview on the abc radio national, here's the transcript.
Note: Her tendency to not consider getting out of her brain, and elevating her consciousness to actually study consciousness. She is trapped by her own beliefs. Greenfield bless her thinks that drugs can damage your brain but she's failed into the narrow belief that drugs are bad. there are good and bad drugs, and the idea of any discipline is to change the brain not damage it. she has seen the results of people who took dumb drugs, she should investigate the ones that have used it as a medicine, our plant friends will educate her on the ideas of consciousness and what can be perceived with it's expansion.

Enjoy....

Today a feature interview with ‘brain woman’ Susan Greenfield. She’s Professor of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford but she’s become a pop star of sorts amongst scientists.

Harpers and Queen ranked her No.14 on its list of the 50 Most Inspirational Women in the World. She’s a member of the House of Lord and is Director of the Royal Institution in Britain, the first woman in that role. And if that wasn’t enough Susan Greenfield continues to do her science and leads a research team looking at the neurodegenerative disorders Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease. She’s also managed to write a handful of extremely popular science books amongst them The Private Life of the Brain.

Susan Greenfield has done a lot of thinking about what makes me, me and you, you, about how each of us comes to have a unique sense of self. And today we’re exploring her ideas about the basis of human consciousness. “There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain” – those are the words of philosopher David Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind. Words to which, I’m sure, Susan Greenfield would respond – well let’s give it our best shot.

Music

Natasha Mitchell: Few of us would ever really get to see a human brain dead or alive so I wanted to start by asking you what was the first experience like of actually getting your hands on a human brain? This role I imagine obviously struck a cord.

Susan Greenfield: Well exactly, that’s exactly why I decided to do brain research because until that time I’d been much more preoccupied with the arts subjects, literature and history but primarily with philosophy, I was interested as the ancient Greeks were in the concepts of mind and the issue of accountability and responsibility. But in order to do that certainly the course I was doing at Oxford entailed doing some practical work and this entailed dissection of a human brain and I do remember it, actually getting this plastic pot put in front of my partner and I and then getting this thing out. You have these gloves on and you put your hand in and you pull out this pickled essence of a person and I remember thinking if I get a piece under my fingernail would that be the bit that somebody loved with or would that be a memory, what would it be. And it does bring it home to you this absolute normality of what it is and what it looks like. It’s far less exotic and glamorous looking than the heart or the lungs. It does bring home to you the absolute stunning miracle of how the water if you like is converted into wine, how the physical bump and grind and sluggy thing can actually translate into that inner world that we call our consciousness.

Natasha Mitchell: Because it very much is like porridge isn’t it?

Susan Greenfield: It is, in its normal state, I’ve seen a brain operation, it is a very quivery, quakery unstable looking mass indeed.

Natasha Mitchell: Brain operations occur while the person is actually alert and conscious.

Susan Greenfield: Well certainly my friend and colleague Henry Marsh has pioneered that approach and I don’t know if people saw when I recorded my TV series of talking to a very, very nice lady who’d been volunteering to undergo brain surgery in front of the cameras and talking to her face and she was talking on about her honeymoon and her recipes and then you’d go round the other side and look at this six inch hole with this red splotchy stuff which had been talking at me and then it was almost Monty Python-esque you know of me talking to her as my friend Henry was aspirating the tumour which had a sort of sucking noise it’s a bit like a little vacuum cleaner. She said oh, don’t take out too much you know, she had a fabulous sense of humour, don’t suck too much, that was the brain saying that and had she wished, although she didn’t want to, Henry allows them to look at their own operation on closed circuit television. But she didn’t want this because she thought she might freak at it. But if you think about it had she’d agreed to do it that would be the brain looking at itself. It’s the sort of thing makes your mind really whirl and it’s those kind of questions, those kind of issues that I think put centre stage the issues of mind and brain.

Natasha Mitchell: Now the mind, the brain, the consciousness, we often use those terms as if they are interchangeable and traditionally philosophers have been the ones over the centuries that have dappled with the world of the mind and what it might mean, and what is it, and where does it fit and scientists have been a little bit more comfortable in more recent times with actually getting in and looking at the physical mess that is the brain. Why do you think scientists have been reluctant to grapple with this nebulous notion of the human mind?

Susan Greenfield: Someone once said that any scientist studying consciousness and the mind was undergoing a CLM – a career limiting move. And I think perhaps that it was quite telling but the pioneer scientists who are exploring consciousness and the mind such as Gerry Adelman, Brian Josephson and Francis Crick, what they have in common is they’ve all won the Nobel Prize and perhaps after that it’s something you can do otherwise people don’t take you seriously. I think the problem has been why mainstream science is very wary of the study of consciousness is that it is utterly subjective. It is the first person world, as it seems to you. Now science is all about impartial access, third person, clear measurements and here we have something that’s insubstantial and ineffable, some kind of magic and no wonder that is not very practical to scientific method and therefore most scientist would rather be preoccupied with some smaller problem. But as the philosopher John Saul said that’s a bit like saying you’re studying stomach but you’re not interested in digestion.

Natasha Mitchell: I do want to look at the ebb and flow of people thinking about consciousness because it has gone in and out of flavour hasn’t it and it’s certainly had a real revival now. Why are people obsessing about it now?

Susan Greenfield: Well of course philosophers have always been interested in philosophy of the mind but things do go into fashion and there is a mood of the time. In the 80s, 1980s there was a mood suddenly for philosophers, the more adventurous ones to actually start to talk to some scientists and the scientists to actually look up from the parapet. This also coincided with about ten or twenty years of brain research and we tend to take brain research for granted nowadays but until the early 1970s it didn’t really exist. The concept of neuroscience didn’t exist as a concept at all, people were either biochemists, or anatomists, or engineers, or physicists who may tangentially study the brain but it was considered far too mysterious really for anyone to take very seriously. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that people started to have these real exciting multi-disciplinary meetings where because no one knew very much everyone could understand what everyone was saying. So you’d go to a talk on vision, and then one on memory, and then one on language and there was a feeling of real excitement and exuberance and discovery as gradually this fledging science was given birth to, neuroscience.

Having said all that I think nonetheless we do have a confidence now that we know a little about how the brain works. Nowhere near enough but we have a grasp of some of the basic principles, sufficient enough I think to make some of us either the very brave or the very stupid I don’t know what we are, competent enough to start to think about these problems and I get rather angry when people say oh, we don’t know enough yet to understand consciousness because life is too short and we only have now, we might as well start now even if we are scorned by the next generation.

Natasha Mitchell: Well let’s consider some of your ideas about how we come to be subjective, feeling, conscious creatures. I wanted to ask Rene Descarte originally decided that there was a dualism, that the mind and the body operated as separate entities, they were something different, there was something materially different as well. Do you have any sense of what he said?

Susan Greenfield: Yes, he was a very great philosopher but one has to put them in the context of the times, and the context of the times to have denied the spiritual would have been heresy. It was something that nobody did. Sometimes people do say to me what about the soul and my answer back to that is that I’m not a theologian but I do know that the concept of a soul is something that entails immortality. But what is for sure is that the brain is perishable and that dies when you die so if you believe in a soul, if, and you therefore believe in something that’s immortal, that’s nothing to do with the physical brain so the issue of spirituality in the sense of surviving death is something that does not help us understand consciousness or the mind. It might help people understand the afterlife but that’s a separate issue.

Natasha Mitchell: Well the philosopher David Chalmers who actually originates from Adelaide in Australia but is now in Arizona heading up a great consciousness studies team over there, he decided that possibly consciousness might actually be a fundamental property of nature, you know something unique like time, like space.

Susan Greenfield: Yes, I’m familiar with that view, that’s almost what we used to call pan psychicism that is to say that consciousness is out there somewhere in some irreducible way. Obviously one can’t disprove what he says but at the same time it’s not overly helpful, it’s the kind of idea you’d come to once you’d exhausted absolutely everything else because what can you do with something like that. That is not going to help me explain why Prozac makes people less depressed or morphine gives people a dreamlike state and as a neurochemist you can see where I’m coming from.

Natasha Mitchell: Well of course then you consider that consciousness somehow resides in our brain. The temptation has been amongst many neuro-scientists has been to look for a centre of consciousness, a little bit in the brain and there it is, that’s where consciousness comes from. I mean how do you view that quest?

Susan Greenfield: I think it’s a rather pointless quest, it does echo the phrenology of course of the 19th Century when people thought the bumps on their head would be autonomous mini brains concerned with very specific functions like banality or love of children, and love of country being another bump. Nowadays that we have brain imaging it has tempted some people into thinking that because a certain bit of the brain lights up during a certain task that that is the centre for this and the centre for that. We know that is not the case, there’s two problems with that – one is multiple brain regions will often light up and also imaging, as it stands at the moment is over a second in duration which sounds pretty good but on the other hand we know consciousness can vary on a sub-second level. So if you think about it, it makes no logical sense because you’re talking then about a brain within a brain, you’ve miniaturised a problem you haven’t solved it. You’re no further down the line in understanding what consciousness is.

Natasha Mitchell: OK, so how do you think consciousness is working in our minds, in our brains, oh there you go, you see I’m swapping the two too.

Susan Greenfield: Shall we start off then by drawing a distinction between consciousness and mind? Because having dismissed the soul we might as well now romp on and look at the mind. Many scientists when they write their books on consciousness and there have been a huge rash of them most notably in the 1990s, conflated mind and consciousness, I think consciousness was such an ugly word that mind sat much better on the front cover. But my own view is that that’s wrong because if you think about it, just think in everyday language, we talk about blowing our mind, and losing our mind, and being out of our mind but you are still conscious and ditto when you go to sleep and you’re going to lose your consciousness you don’t think you’re going to lose your mind as such. So let’s think about mind as opposed to brain. It usually emphasises a personal element, some particular way we see the world broadminded, narrow minded, develop your mind and I think that’s just what happens actually that your brain gets personalised, we know that even though you’re born with pretty much all the brain cells you’ll have, it’s the connections between the brain cells that accounts for the growth of the brain after birth and these we are learning more and more reflect the kind of experiences you have. So that even if you’re a clone, that’s its own identical twin, you’ll have a unique configuration of brain cell connections and I think it’s this ever changing constellation of brain cell connections that carries on right up until we die that will determine the kind of person we are, even when we’re asleep even when we’re not conscious.

Natasha Mitchell: This is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National and Radio Australia, with me, Natasha Mitchell. And I’m talking consciousness with neuro-scientist, Baroness, TV star and author, Professor Susan Greenfield. So Greenfield considers that our brains become personalised with our unique memories and experiences over time through local constellations of neurons being activated or hardwired together. But what about that general sort of global consciousness that we all experience, what generates that feeling of a sense of self, connections between neurons suggests Susan Greenfield but on a much larger and more transient scale.

Susan Greenfield: This is the big problem because at first blush it is qualitative and scientists hate qualitative things so if only we could turn it into something we could measure. The one thing that we could measure would be the intermediate level of these connections but not just the hardwired ones but the ones that can change perhaps, that can coral up very quickly and disband we know that the brain can do that, that if you flash lights for example at the brain we know that in a quarter of a second ten million neurons can start working together and then by half a second they are disbanded again.

Natasha Mitchell: So here we’re looking for some physical explanation for a moment of consciousness, the very moment that a thought passes somehow into our brain and out again.

Susan Greenfield: Well I think a big assumption that we all make that’s wrong is that you’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. I glibly said just now consciousness is when you go to sleep you’re going to lose it. Now I think that dichotomy has bedevilled the concept of consciousness and indeed its study of the brain. Let’s question that. What if instead of consciousness being you have it or you don’t have it, what if consciousness grows as brains grow, because it certainly explains the riddle of a rat being conscious but not as conscious as a dog or cat, and a dog or cat being conscious but not as conscious as a baby and even, controversially a foetus being conscious but not as conscious as a child.

Natasha Mitchell: Levels of consciousness whether we have a deeper consciousness or a more shallow consciousness.

Susan Greenfield: Now we talk in our adult lives about raising our consciousness, people go to raising their consciousness sessions or deepening your consciousness and I think that’s also helpful not just because it does start to make sense of these riddles but as a scientist now converted something that was completely elusive now we’ve converted it into something that we measure. And what I think happens is that you’ll have a trigger or a stimulus, a bit like a stone being thrown in a puddle, and that stone could be the hard wired hub of brain cells that by the normal systems I was taught in Oxford when I was teaching visual systems for example, we know all the pathways that would activate a hard wired hub that’s easy, but then what happens this will coral up, very transiently, a large scale assembly of brain cells a little bit like the stone being thrown into a puddle, the ripples that will emanate will be highly transient but their excursion will vastly exceed the diameter of the stone. So what will happen is in the brain I think that you’ll have a trigger from a hard wired hub when you see something or someone that means a lot to you, the meaning being of course proportional to the number of connections and then that will coral up a very large population of brain cells.

Natasha Mitchell: It’s a bigger network of neurons firing in that moment.

Susan Greenfield: Yes, that’s right. The way you can get lots of ripples going in a big assembly of a deep consciousness is either to have a big stone that is to say a lot of associations built up over your life and that person will mean something to you or the stone thrown with great force, the alarm clock going, and I think that every moment of our life that’s what’s happening.

Natasha Mitchell: Are you really saying that the subjective world that we experience and live in is but a constellation of neurons firing on and off?

Susan Greenfield: No, it’s not that, what the assembly is, is an index of consciousness and that’s very different from being consciousness any more than if you look at your light going on in your iron you’re not going to say that the iron is all about that little flashing red light it’s an index that is sufficient as well as being necessary to signify degrees of consciousness but that if you put an assembly of brain cells in a jam jar thats not going to be conscious, of course not, it’s more what it is indicating and referring not just in the brain but in the whole body. And many scientists as indeed the philosophers tend to think of the brain as some isolated organ, very few of us, myself included, no much about immunology, or intra-chronology or below the eyebrows of the body very much but my own firm belief is that factors influencing the formation of that assembly and hence the depth of your consciousness don’t just include things within the brain but there’s feedback from not just your autonomic nervous system but also from your hormones and your immune system. Because if there wasn’t you’d have biological anarchy and we know that’s not the case, we know that when you are depressed you get ill and I think this is a new area again one requiring a multi-disciplinary scope and perspective. Having said that we know there are certain classes of chemicals that can, if you like, be tri-lingual that can work as neurotransmitters as chemical messengers in the brain that can talk to the hormone system and they can also talk to the immune system and I think that by studying these cocktails of peptides which is what they’re called then one could perhaps start to match that up with the size of the brain cell assembly. Now I think that would be the way to go but we mustn’t lose sight of the brain being part of the body.

Natasha Mitchell: Because it is intuitive that when if you think of say an emotion as being a fundamental unit of consciousness and experience of consciousness it’s intuitive that emotions are very much felt in the body. You feel sick, our heart beats or whatever, consciousness it seems is very much a full body experience.

Susan Greenfield: Yeah, we talk about gut reaction for example and indeed lots of these peptides were first discovered in the gut so I think it’s very important to not lose sight that it is a brain in the body and it’s this traffic in the peptides between the three great control systems that from my view is consciousness. Now that’s not to say you can reduce consciousness to the brain cell assembly but what we can’t do as yet is know how the one causes the other and I’ll be the first person to admit that we don’t know how that happens. But I can’t see what else there is because I certainly don’t believe it’s beamed in from anywhere else.

Natasha Mitchell: This is All in the Mind on ABC Radio National and Radio Australia and I’m talking to Professor Susan Greenfield. What about the notion of the collective consciousness? Very interesting concept.

Susan Greenfield: There are several things there I think. One is the ecstasy taker who says they feel and I’m told you feel that one with everyone else. Now one idea there would be that you have stripped the world of some much cognitive content that you put yourself back into being a baby again. There you are with a beat going something like techno, techno, techno, like this I gather, (duff, duff duff) well OK very good because obviously you’re more of an expert that me. But it has no meaning as far as I gather the music you know, It’s there, you’re putting a premium on the beat and you’re putting a premium on the heat and possibly the smell and certainly lights and it’s arguable therefore you’re back to being like a small infant again where you would feel the same as everyone else cause you’re not differentiating one for another. The idea of what a very ancient monk called anosaphere, that is to say we are perhaps the future of human beings will be that we will hook up with each other is another thought and a very different type of thought but some people in the future predict that with the web being as pervasive as it is that what might eventually happen is we’ll all be plugged into the web and we’ll be so interfaced with the web, and using it so much, we won’t be able to draw boundaries anymore between our individual minds as such and that we’ll be a great collective consciousness across the world.

Natasha Mitchell: Well I mean the cyborgian reality is a fascinating one, this notion that we might be able to one, hook ourselves up to a matrix, a data base a piece of machinery and become one with it and there’s also this notion that we might be able to download our brain and its essence so that we exist in virtual reality. That we exist without our body, I mean it’s all fantasy but the closer we get to these things the more freaky and real they become.

Susan Greenfield: Well I certain think that the downloading is harder to conceptualise because any memory you have is predicated on a host of other memories, feelings and emotions so it would be hard to actually isolate a single memory so for that reason I would say that that was impossible. But we don’t even have to think about implants. If you and I were talking let’s say in 10 or 20 years time when computers will be ubiquitous and invisible, they’ll be in a jewellery and our ear rings and they’ll be voice activated, they’ll speak back to you in the voice that you choose, so that if we were talking we wouldn’t have to remember anything, we could just keep referencing as we were talking this joint cyber space. So where would you end and I begin? And ditto with these highly interactive personalised computers embedded everywhere in us they will be interactive with our environment all the time, changing the colour of the walls, changing the temperature according to how our body is sensing. I think we’re going to question the future, the very boundaries of our bodies and the very boundaries of our minds and that is both frightening and exciting in equal measure. But I want to talk about it and think about it and explore it because I think the more it’s out there in a forum the more we can harness it for good and minimise the threats it poses. What we can’t do is pretend it doesn’t exist, it’s a question I think that concerns and fascinates everyone and we should be in on the party.

Natasha Mitchell: Do you think we may ever cultivate a conscious machine? It’s the sexiest question of the 21st Century and I’m intrigued by the possibility of what it would mean to live and coincide with a conscious machine. I mean Terrance Deakin who I spoke to recently nominated that we will do evil things to the first conscious machine, it will be a moral engagement.

Susan Greenwood: Talking of sexiness, Stewart Sutherland, psychologist said he believed a computer was conscious when it ran off with his wife and I don’t know whether you or I would fancy a philandering computer and then someone might decide to bash it up anyway. More seriously the problem I have with that question is several. One is when people talk about modelling consciousness, artificial intelligence, then you immediately have a problem because if you model something you are taking the salient features and leaving behind the baggage you don’t need. So if you or I were modelling flight say then we would put at a premium something that could defy the laws of gravity but it wouldn’t have to have feathers or webbed feet or a beak or anything like this, aeroplanes do not have these things but they fly. Now in consciousness we don’t know what the salient feature I, so therefore if you were designing it you wouldn’t know what to leave in and what to leave out if you’re modelling it within the body. The other problem I have is that people designing machines at the moment put a premium on learning a memory and that’s easy because it’s something that delivers a response whereas you can have someone just there with the sun on their face at the end of a hard day absolutely conscious but emitting no response at all. If a computer could do that you’d chuck it out. As yet, and I’m sure I’ll have a flood of people telling me I’m wrong, the AI models have not really addressed the issue of emotions and feelings but on the whole, people I come across are still very proudly pointing to robots which are wonderful, I’m not denying robots and I think robotics is a very, very important aspect of 21st Century life, especially if it does the housework and if they will do dangerous or boring things and free up time for us to think about how the brain generates consciousness.

Natasha Mitchell: And of course we wouldn’t want those robots then if we get them to do all our dirty work to have any sense of consciousness cause that of course throws up all those moral questions of exploitation.

Susan Greenfield: Absolutely, and moreover if the robot was conscious then you couldn’t find out how it was working anymore than you could with a human being cause it would cause it pain. I think it’s very useful to have machines that are the , as to say they operate on a this and that basis yeah, but I don’t see the point anyway of having them conscious unless Stewart Sutherland’s right and you get these hunky ones that run off with wives that might be a quite interesting scenario but apart from that I can’t see any use.

Natasha Mitchell: Well it’s a brave new world, one that you’re definitely exploring Susan Greenfield, thank you very much for joining me on the program today.

Susan Greenfield: My pleasure, thank you very much.