Humbly dropping a Truth bomb:

Consciousness is a cosmic force to be discovered by science within this century. A field of non-binary information. It is not in the brain.

Neuro-chemistry and neurophysiology work as complex and rare networks that operate as a physiological radio that allow us to tune in human cognition to the frequencies of what we correlate with, activating thoughts that create endless waves of karmic actions of cause and effect which creates the individual reality we live in and the collective reality we agree with. A magnificent social trance of self-control within laws of acceptable behaviours and agreed terminologies.

We manifest what we believe in, we believe in what we manifest.

Fear is a mental construction that emerges from the illusion of separation from the divine. The Samsara. It first takes place at birth when we separate from a higher entity than ourselves whereas, before conception, we all were one molecular structure from proteins that were formed with the core stellar ingredients of the cosmos. From birth, we believe in the separation as per the horrific physical pain the nervous system delivers in the human experience and the despair of the unknown that triggers psychological dissonance in the outer world. From there on we start seeking comfort and shelter, love and kindness in endless attempts to regain unity every single moment thereafter; Oneness.

This lifelong search can create attachment and attachment creates suffering as it is fundamentally built upon fear of separation, it controls and manipulates our life choices and it creates the cycles of karmic actions that can dictate our fate until the day we decide to acknowledge the mechanisms of our own minds and our own perceptions.

Your true power is truly you

Will power then creates and designs a life of curiosity and inquiry using uncertainty as motivation, the power from within shifts the focus of attention back to the divine, shaped as passions, arts, performances, achievements, experiences, meaningful moments, relationships and social bonding.

Generally disguised as awesomeness, love or pure beauty, as a smile or a tear, and bits by bits the journey fulfils the attentive mind and ultimately projects intellectual and spiritual realization of the illusion of separation, a simple hallucination we may all agree with due to the shared limited sensory abilities we develop throughout biological life, cultural and cognitive biases and of course, institutional power.

"You are gods; and all of you are children of the most High"

The only thing that exists is the present moment, the conception of the past and future is created in our minds as a self-defence mechanism. Millions of years of evolutionary effort to prepare the separated mind for the environment. We design the past and the future as we please in a subjective reality we don’t necessarily agree with. We do it to protect ourselves from suffering but it can turn into suffering itself, labelled as expectations or regret.

Rise people to a higher mind!

If God created everything it must’ve also created itself, including its absence, the darkness and evil. “Acknowledge thy shadow as one”. If everything is God, you and I and everything else is God, the cosmos, nature, the All, call it whatever you want. It is a mental idea of unification and togetherness, a sense of coexistence within all existence and non-existence.

It is not just a beautiful flower, the flower can’t exist without the soil and the bees and the honey and the air and atmosphere and everything else that is interconnected. There is no flower without YOU to conceive its beauty, there is no beauty in blossoming without a withered garden to compare to. Dirt is filled with bacteria and microorganisms that can facilitate the resurrection and rebirth of life.

Elate your thoughts to the highest, having faith and patience, giving time to time. You will find within yourself the power of the firmament and so everything will settle in profound peace.

Don’t try to look at the light or to understand its nature, that is impossible, like the sun, it is too strong to be conceived and it can blind you. Instead, be the light you want to shine, illuminating all creation so you can see its beauty, like the sun does every morning, shining light and gifting life to us all, be the light.

Rise to a higher frequency, to a triad or an octave above, creating musical harmony in conscious choice which will resonate positive flow in your life as per what you want and what makes you happy. Vibrate what makes you groove, dance and smile.

We may desire lust and may crave selfishness, greed and satisfaction but that all are constructions of our illusions and the belief of separation, the reckless egoistic narrative, built by the prefrontal cortex when idle, is never fulfilled and hardly ever pleased. However, it is only a story we tell ourselves.

Yes, we have the right to be humans, to want more and more, to winge and complain, and be bewildered, but once aware of the cosmic unity there is no turning back, no way to unknow it. The light is way beyond the insignificance of our cravings. The vibrational spectrum you resonate with designs who you are as per you are the truth of the All. You are the entire universe and multi-verse. You already are what you want and who you want to be.

You freely exist once a decision has been made and an intention has been set. It is not a walk in the park, mostly a hardship when stepping out of the masks and the characters we build through life, hiding ourselves behind our personalities and the roles of what we play.

The ego does not want to die, it protects itself creating a bubble of comfort and predictability, confusion and anxiety, but although painful death is, a new beginning and a new chance for mental emancipation is awaiting, reuniting to be reborn at a higher frequency without the veil of forgetfulness, at an upper realm or right here, right now.

Fly up high to safely land back home

Tomorrow is a new day, another chance to be happy. Rise, shine and enjoy the ride!

❤️

Part 2 (Barriers to CT) and Part 3 (Going inwards) coming soon…

Have you ever watched a horror movie that made you laugh? Perhaps the villain turns out to be a midget, or the victims split up when running away from the bad guy making it easier for him. Or even worse, when they actually manage to get him but never make sure they are safe, providing the audience with a final surprise that could be easily avoided in real life.

In Real life,

when we are under a threat, our limbic system pumps great doses of adrenaline and cortisol through the amygdalas. The heart races, bloodstream pulses and the cortex stays in full attention. No room for chatty thoughts, just pure awareness of the moment so we can analyse facts and make the right decisions in order to survive.

The human body is incredible and we should be proud every time we look at the mirror!

Our species is pretty good when it comes to threats. To the average person, there are no predators left (besides another human) or main biological concerns to worry about. Our opposable thumbs helped us developing our brains which we have been using to collaborate and innovate, designing technology and all the fantastic things we have in modern life, to the point that, in order to track back to our most basic instincts we now go to amusement parks to feel the adrenaline kicking in. It’s a fantastic world we live in! This is the most exciting period of time in human history.

However, evolution is all about fitness and survival, not about understanding.

We can lose track of our minds. The brain in idle (or not at focus), is not very helpful. Thoughts come and go like an endless stream of information which most of the times are useless and we simply can’t control. They put us in the past or in the future, hardly ever in the present moment. The first step to take control of your own mind is to think critically.

Whether if it was because we have opened the pandora box, or because we have eaten the forbidden fruit, throughout mythology we’ve try to explain the mental realm and our hunger for knowledge. The human history is basically a war within the human mind where our ignorance hurts and destroys but is part of a race to understand ourselves, our environment and our true nature.

Critical Thinking

You are about to cross the street, what do you do? Look to the right. There are no cars. Look to the left, there are no cars either. Ok, it’s now safe to cross. We look at evidence, analyse facts and make decisions based on them. If you don’t look when cars are coming you might not make it across the road. If you were run over by a car and luckily survived, you will know it’s time to review your thinking.

CT is the art of analysing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it.

It is a lifestyle. True self-awareness. A lifelong process of self-reflection, curiosity and inquiry, thus its benefits can be very satisfying and can ultimately provide intellectual freedom or, as Bob Marley would say, emancipation from mental slavery.

The Journal of Educational Development says that “Critical thinking is best understood as the ability of thinkers to take charge of their own thinking. This requires that they develop sound criteria and standards for analysing and assessing their own thinking and routinely use those criteria and standards to improve its quality”.

All good thinkers have the intrinsic ability to question. Like a 4year old, who in average asks 73 questions a day due to their brain exploding with billions of daily new synaptic connections, a Critical Thinker is never lazy to question. He/she lives in a creative ocean of curiosity and enchantment, where beauty guides their eyes and motivates their understanding.

Critical thinkers have the ability to observe their own point of view and are able to see how their personal worldview can influence their own thinking.

Traveling is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.

This richness can be defined as a physical experience that provides you with new information. When we travel we feel like a tourist because we know we don’t belong to the place we are visiting. It’s like a virtual reality, looks real but its not necessarily our reality. Their habits, food, language, architecture, etc are different from of we are used to so we think it’s interesting and fun. That’s a new point of view, literally the place from which we see things. If we decide to stay a little longer, maybe get a job, find a partner and settle we will get used to it and the feeling of being a tourist will disappear and we will be looking for a new point of view in the next travel agent or instagram post. Exploring different cultures allow us to question or own culture.

Being able to take yourself outside your own point of view with genuine intention of understanding another point of view is an incredible task that needs focus and attention; its called empathy.

Ahhh nah.

For things within our reach like crossing the road or buying fruits, we are really good critical thinkers, pretty good in analysis and decision making, we feel responsible for our actions and we are aware of the cost of bad decisions.

The real problem is when its not within our reach, like political issues or topics that need to be discussed in society, we tend to not feel so responsible anymore. Therefore we don’t put as much energy and thought. Most of the times, we take shortcuts in our thinking because it’s simply easier than deep thinking and unfortunately, that’s what the brain gets used to.

There are 3 types of shortcuts:

Barriers to CT: Cultural biases and behaviours we learn throughout life.

Fallacies: Logical mistakes in an argument.

Cognitive Biases: Embedded brain dysfunctions in logic and reasoning.

It's understandable when people don't want to spend too much time thinking about deeper questions. We all work very hard and want to spend our free time with quality and fun. We all want to be happy and thinking about things we can't control can be a waste of time and energy. However, the lack of these conversations and the inability to think critically are ripping the fabric of human civilisation.

Here's a quick reality check:

Environment:
150 species go extinct every day (read more).

Economy:
Most countries owe nearly half of their GDP to the financial system (read more).

Society:
AI and automation will make vast majority of humans useless in just a few decades (read more).

Our lack of responsibility towards our collective creates a system that is not capable of solving its own problems: Politics or demagoguery.

The solution? Functional thought.

Philosophy is nothing but a way of thinking. It works by asking very basic questions about the nature of human thought, the nature of the universe, and the connections between them. It attempts to deconstruct beliefs by asking simple questions. You can start understanding philosophy with Plato’s Allegory of the cave. The cave doesn’t not exist. The cave is an analogy to our relationship between our own beliefs and our actions. The one who attempts to exist the cave is the one who sees the beauty of the outside world. The world outside of one’s self or one’s mind.

The School of Life has a great series of short videos on Western and Eastern philosophers! 5 minutes videos explaining ideas of some of the great philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche in the west and Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu in the east.

The scientific mode is a great way of thinking. Rather than simply believing what one finds, we ask for peer review. Lots of other people do their best to prove one is wrong, in an attempt to validate one’s findings. If it’s wrong, one would humbly continue working on it. If one is right and no one can prove him/her wrong, we all learn together. We find an emergent truth which we can use to continuing learning and understanding our universe.

The Zeitgeist movement is a way of thinking that aims the root causes of problems, always looking beneath the consequences and superficiality of events, deconstructing foundations and frameworks in which we base our view points to design culture. The Zeitgeist mode has a series of films that illustrate important issues from widely opening minds around the globe. The first one was released in 2007, followed by Addendum in 2008 and moving forward in 2011. The director Peter Joseph has produced uncountable shows since then and the latest is InterReflections that is due for release, watch the trailer here.

Critical thinking does not stay locked in in the outer realm, under reasoning and logic only, it can also be applied to the mystical, and to what lies beneath our conscious mind. Critical thinking is generally related to skepticism and Atheism but this is a simple misconception. Humans have the freedom to believe in any story, whether its Alice in Wonderland or the Bible, as Yuval Harari says in his TED talk, stories get us together and help us to collaborate.

However, not questioning stories can shorten our freedom to believe, threat our objective reality and our mental health.

The Hermetics, also observes the root mechanisms of all. There are fundamental laws in the universe that are within every single thing. Some of these laws operate as 7 principles which only the attentive mind can see. Due to its amoralism (no morals, neither good or bad) this philosophical approach to understand the true nature of reality lost its regard against the power of religious institutions of the past two thousand years. The introduction can be found in the Kybalion. Like Nietzsche said, “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”.

Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is yet unknown. An agnostic is constantly curious about the non-physical phenomena and is never 100% sure in what to believe, always seeking more to further his/her understanding.

The seeker

Thinking is (obviously) incredibly important. That’s the only thing we are meant to be good at as a species. But there’s something way more important than thinking that sometimes we don’t really think about; will power.

The moment we decide we want something is a groundbreaking moment. If you don’t want to read this article, don’t read it. Don’t waste energy doing something you don’t want to do.

Instead, focus in what you want because the moment you do that the entire cosmos is with you. Energy flows naturally with no barriers. It feels fun, we enjoy it, we smile and we feel awesome! Awe… when will power changes thoughts that change our neurochemistry making the brain boost dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, norepinephrine and oxytocin. We feel in heavens. Where time seems to stop, providing us with those magic moments when we realise we are a vessel for information to come and go at the same time we are the medium that manifests this information in our worldly reality. If you feel that as you do something, you won’t want to stop.

The corny saying “do what you love, love what you do” is a simple representation of some of the mechanisms that lies in the subconscious level of the human mind. Above thought there is will power. Above will power there is love.

If you are curious or simply interested in improving your own thinking (and perhaps feel a little of heavens) here’s a little present for you:

Follow here to access a quick free course on Critical Thinking to test your knowledge.

Continue to Part 2 — Barriers to Critical Thinking.

Your account

You were born and your parents gave you a name, filled out a birth certificate and from that moment on you belong to a corporation called “your country” where there are laws to obey by and (most of the times) a constitution written a few centuries ago that highlights the core values and principles as well as some rights and responsibilities for being part of that institution. There is a song you may remember the lyrics. You grow up and at school you start learning and acquiring information on the terms and conditions of your account, you may go to university to fully comprehend it to the point of sometimes dedicating your entire life to it.

Being born on Earth is a lucky draw. Some places you will find good shelter and support, other places you will basically spend the rest of your life surviving the day after the other.

If you are really really lucky you get to make all your choices throughout your entire life, but there is a cost; the hard work of providing shelter and food to yourself and to your family. Working along with the environment where balance and respect to Nature is the constitution. You can give meaning to whatever you do in life but be prepared to go hunting or be hunted.

If you are not so lucky, all your choice will be made for you until you are old enough to be able to afford your own choices. It does come with some benefits such as access to important tools, information and facilities but even when you think you can make your own choices, chances are the choices you will make have been pre-selected for you, narrowing down possibilities in long run. You can be brave and face the burden of comfort and affordability in order to keep doing what you love every day of your life. Very few do it though and the ones who do it have very meaningful lives.

If you are reading this, you are probably like me; not so lucky. You could be a brave one and I will admire you but if you are not, I will still admire you as you have survived so far. Well done!

The point is, how many choices have you really made in your life?

As per 2018, people living in democracies around the world have elected unexpected figures. Trump is one example; Started as a poor candidate and slowly built his electorate with the popular speech of despair and urgency which the average citizen felt for. Without stereotyping the typical person who works the entire year and can hardly afford the bills let alone real satisfaction, diving in debt in an attempt to fill the gaps of his own existence of being trapped in a mediocre life. The person hears of a man who says will change everything and believing in the power of his vote the average citizen elects the saviour, the Messiah, the one… and nothing changes.

History repeats itself over and over. Kings remain kings and pawns continue doing all the hard work.

The corporation

The difference is that now, rather than filling out a birth certificate, we click little check boxes to accept terms and conditions we never read. We create accounts in numerous tech companies that transform our identity and information into corporate asset. Your privacy is the cost. There is no magic. Besides hugs, nothing is for free on planet Earth. It’s just how it works.

In a country, the account created by your parents makes you liable for the lifetime payment of taxes that would contribute to the institution, but there is no way around it, specially under coercion and law enforcement. Whereas in the digital realm your identity is the commodity that is traded and monetised through advertisement.

The business model

• Create a free account.
• Engage with what you like.
• Design a new habit.

It is so nice to see what your friends are up and to share images and videos about what you love. The intimacy of socialising with people you never see as well as connecting with like minded people and interests.

I have learnt a lot via social media and some of my most meaningful relationships started thanks to it but not because of it. It’s an amazing and accessible communication tool and it does help a lot of people, including me. There are plenty of excellent ways of using social media and one of them is creating your own feeds.

Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world close together

The above is Facebook’s mission statement. However, Mr. Zuckerberg never thought of the bomb he would be creating 2 decades later.

The fact that neuroscience is the main pillar of the business structure hides the true cost of maintaining a U$20 billion infrastructure for free accounts.

In order to maximize user input Facebook uses short-term feedback loop systems that encourages the brain to produce Dopamine, a feel good neurotransmitter that is triggered every time you see the red icon. First thing we look at, first thing we click on is the notification icon. That urge and excitement is the dopamine hitting your brain. Add that to smartphone notifications you have a continuous dopamine producer algorithm that chemically hooks people’s brains to the companies business models; showing you ads.

Algorithm: is an unambiguous specification of how to solve a class of problems. It can perform calculation, data processing and automated reasoning tasks.

Which ads? Whatever ad people are willing to pay for. Because of the amount of information users input about themselves the algorithm can precisely show ads that users are most likely to take in. It’s a perfect marketing tool with the downside of potential global disaster.

Ads can be from a small coffee shop from your neighbourhood or political and financial conglomerates. The ad will be shown to you.

Users tend to engage with biased content that favours their worldview providing more engagement that creates a vicious circle.

The true result of what would be a tool for people to build communities has become the ultimate bubble of confirmation bias and mental segregation the planet has ever seen.

Political ideology, among other subjects, uses the short-term attention spam of mere seconds during the scrolling obsession of a typical user, creating the culture of shallow understanding of topics and passive influence by, most of the time, sharing content that has not been validated neither verified by the scientific field or any professional verdict. People are mindlessly consuming information they don’t understand creating a thin bubble of illusion of knowledge that is bursting everyday in the ocean of misinformation. In long term perspective, Facebook is doing the very opposite of it’s mission statement and who says that is the former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya.

Not to mention the new additions to the DSM-5 every year and the lag in developing psychological treatment against technological growth.

Facebook Inc’s algorithms interact with their other products, Instagram and WhatsApp furthering the endless power of confirmation bias.

A case study: Carnaval madness

Brazil’s current political scenario is beyond madness.

PT (Workers Party) had its first president elected in 2002. Lula, an illiterate metal worker who became union representative a long time ago after loosing his finger. He won the first election bringing programs of social relief to that eradicated hunger and reduced poverty until 2013 when senate impeached Dilma Rousseff, also PTs, for being accused of breaking fiscal laws.

Unfortunately, corruption is core function of Brazil’s politics and probably any other developing country, and PT is not out of it. Breaking fiscal laws is also core procedure of the average business model in Brazil. Dilma saw the impeachment as a coup d’etat. Why? State protectionism.

Although the economic policy of PT was nowhere left-winged, in fact, in order to pay the IMF, Lula empowered private Banks like never before through the national debt mechanism. PT signed the alliance with the BRICs, acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. An international effort to fight the power of international trading agreements like NAFTA and the TPP in order to strengthen the countries economies. Along with that PT also protected national assets such as Petrobras, Brazil’s Oil company that provides 92% of the country’s massive consumption. That didn’t please Neo-liberal capitalists moguls and Wall Street gamblers.

The lack of regulation within social media allowed the creation of an online organisations like MBL, (Movimento Brasil Livre) a Facebook page headed by Kim Kataguri, a 22 year old ultra-liberal, son of Japanese migrant. The kid dedicated his time creating memes and content on Facebook that basically repeats ad-hominem fallacy. Blaming, mocking, judging, stereotyping, etc with superficial images that could be easily shared on Facebook Inc’s products, specially going viral on WhatsApp. No further reading, no source reference, no validation, only pure biased opinion.

Meanwhile, operation Car Wash pushed the attention of Brazilians towards corruption where many PT politicians were mentioned during the investigations, as well as many politicians for all other political parties. Corporations buying people out in order to pass laws and favours. An entire national system of corruption was revealed which even Netflix recently produced a show on it.

A couple of years later, MBL grew and became a leader power in Brazil’s digital political landscape. At that time MBL had a few sponsors such as the Koch’s Brothers who are linked to donations to the kid organisation and FIESP (Industry Federation of São Paulo). In 2014, the movement took thousands of Catholic middle classe tax payers (and yellow ducks - courtesy of FIESP) to protest in the streets, there was even an impeachment dance moves, it grabbed the full attention of Brazil’s oligarchic media conglomerate Globo, the message was loud and clear. It divided the country between Left vs Right or Communists vs Fascistz or Coxinhas e Petralhas… pure black and white thinking pushed by unregulated algorithms.

It was an spectacle that lead the senate to vote yes in a bizarre freak show in which from 77 members, 11 were being investigated by Operation Car Wash and 56% of deputies were connected to corruption court cases. Voting yes became a symbol of the traditional family, God and even military dictatorship. The impeachment passed.

In August 2016, Temer, Dilma’s vice-president, took tenure of a temporary government. Temer says on video during a seminar held by Americas Society that Dilma didn’t stick to “our” “Ponte para o Futuro” (Bridge to the Future — a document that highlights national strategies in alliance with businesses) therefore she was impeached. He even changed Brazil’s federal logo to a more corporate looking one. Temer reduced working rights and froze spending in education, public health and social welfare for 20 years, as though it was a punishment to the needy.

2 years later, Brazil would be facing the most bizarre election in the nation’s history. People’s dissatisfaction multiplied by years of confirmation bias and fallacy after fallacy created the meme educational culture pushed by algorithmic bubbles. In one side a PT representative and on the other side a South American version of Donald Trump; Jair Bolsonaro. 20 years career as federal deputy and never created an appealing work. Hate speech against minorities and a very minimalist strategy to manage the country, literally in bullet points, loves praising the military intervention and dictatorship that tortured hundreds in the 70s in Brazil, still, Jair received nearly 50% of the votes in the first shift of his election campaign. John Oliver’s witty last week tonight put simply, not him.

Brazil’s democracy is only 30 years old since going through 35 years of military dictatorship and 350 years of enslavement, now faces the rise of fascism. Truly, the nation has never seen freedom, people never had a chance to choose even though people still believe in the power of their vote. Instead, oligarchies continue maintaining power and control over people and wealth. Just like the past 2000 years. Kings remain Kings and pawns still bleed under the whip.

#elenao

Bolsonaro phenomena is the perfect example of unregulated tech companies abusing of the power of their dopamine machines and the disregard to human inability to self-reflect. Lack of understanding and respect from the vast majority of us towards our own privacy. Brazil’s socio-politic-economical future now relies on an algorithm that has not considered human rights neither decades of social fight towards equality and justice.

Facebook’s products, instead, continues to focus in building users profiles so they can be monetised, quantified and highlighted in their annual report and used as bait for prospective investors and stakeholders. Until algorithms don’t get regulated, the company’s mission statement will be just another marketing tool.

The Alphabet

If the body is the hardware, algorithms are the mind and the nervous system the network.

If Fakebook is dividing the world, what has Google been up to? Deep Mind.

Google also makes money showing you ads but this is a very obvious business model. Google is beyond that. Its almighty but also unregulated algorithm can now dream! The Deep Mind has the power to comprehend and process an enoumours amount of information which can definitely provide amazing benifits to the human civilization, building a fantastic future. However, Deep Mind’s mission statement goes:

Solve intelligence. Use it to make the world a better place.

Should we worry?

OM

In conclusion, there is only one way to fight unregulated algorithms that are already in your mind shaping your perception of reality.

Hack your own mind!

Nothing new, there are no choices.

The next part if this article is how to hack your own mind. Click here to read it.

There is an old myth that says that a long long time ago, the only thing that existed was a very big mirror. This mirror was floating away out in space until one day an enormous explosion shattered the glass and cracked the mirror into uncountable little pieces. From that moment on each and every little piece thought they were a mirror themselves, separated from the whole of the bigger one, without knowing that every time they saw another mirror they were actually seeing themselves.

Stardust

Before getting started it is no secret that “the atoms of our bodies are traceable to the stars that manufactured in their core and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy billion of years ago”, as per the famous quote of Neil deGrasse. We are stardust comprised in the human form.

The only other thing we inherited that allows us to identify ourselves as who we think we are in our minds. Consciousness is not made of atoms. It is mental. It uses matter to manifest but it is not matter itself. It is a reflection. A reflection of who?

Same same but different

If you travel across southeast Asia, around countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia or Sri Lanka and end up shopping around their busy streets will easily see or hear “Same Same”. Whether it is written on a T-shirt or people trying to sell you cheap sunglasses they will repeatedly say “same same”.

The origins of the saying are unsure but it may come from the proximity of same to “sama” which in Sanskrit means same. Some say that during the Vietnam War, western soldiers were called xêm xêm as the locals realised that besides the cultural differences, they were the same.

Another possible origin may come from Buddhism, deeply rooted in cultures of Southeast Asia, where there is the belief that we are all the same human body, and the same human mind, only with different cultural backgrounds, different languages, etc.

If there is any truth to this, why do I feel so different to others?

Identity

We believe in the idea of who we are. Fair enough! Everything I have experienced was only perceived by me, no one else.

I am the one who was named by my parents, I am the one who remembers my childhood, I am the one who fell in love with my partner, I am the one who studied to receive my qualifications and the understanding that I have of the world. I am the one who perceived all my experiences in life, as my eyes looked outside exploring the vast and unique opportunities of mere chance of cause and effect, allowing me to make choices that designed my life, therefore giving me the sense of being myself.

On the other hand, this obsession with looking outside made me forget to look inside. Out of all the uniqueness of my being, how much of it was my choice? How much of who I am was influenced by my home and family? How much of me was simply culture passed on mindlessly? How much of the person I think I am is the person others think of me?

We mirror each other. We have done it since we were born. It's called Mirror Neurons, our brains literally experience what others experience by simply looking at others, beautifully explained by neuroscientist Villayanur Ramachandran.

We learn to look when our parents call us by the name they’ve given us. We learn the words of the language we happen to natively speak. We praise the flag of the place where our mothers gave birth to us. We follow the beliefs we were told to believe while still young. We repeat the unacknowledged psychological patterns our parents unconsciously exposed us to. We repeat the culture we identify with so we feel embraced by our tribe. We want to be like others so there is a sense of belonging, so we feel at home and safe.

Watching my reflection

Who am I then if I am not myself? My. Self. The self belongs to someone else; The observer. The bit of me that observes my thoughts and my behaviour. The one that observes my Self. The one inside acknowledges the heart pounding in an attempt to communicate between right and wrong. The feeling of sadness makes me connect to others and the bliss of happiness that makes me care for others.

I am the one who perceives guilt and suffering, the one who enjoys my pride and joy. I am the one who is thankful for being alive, observing cosmic manifestations in front of my eyes.

I am the one who has hurt others and only I understand the burden that is. I am the one who forgives, freeing others from carrying the heaviness of resentment. I am the one who cried and who fully understands pain. So do you!

Any chance for cause and effect can tailor our identity and the particular story of our lives. The importance of knowing who they shall be depends on our ability to observe ourselves. On top of that, the story might be different but feelings that overtake my rational thoughts are the same feelings any other person feels.

We don’t have feelings, feelings have us.

My actions dictate my reflections on others and the idea of who I am. Actions that the conscious mind might not perceive but the observer does, resulting in reactions that create our reality.

Reflected actions

Newton’s third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

How often do we watch our actions and the results that they may lead to? Including how it reflects in others and ultimately in ourselves. I can only make my choices and I choose to not hurt myself, therefore I won’t be hurting others. A decision not made by me but by all of us as deep down I am you, and you are me, simply reflected in a different way. Same Same but different… especially when it comes to parenthood.

Having kids must be the ultimate human experience as parents have a chance to observe their children's development since birth, watching their minds being formed and the transformation of their human bodies.

One with an inquisitive eye would easily identify their own beliefs and patterns of behaviour in their children and the temptation it is to shape their worldview. We do it because we love them and we want them to be better versions of ourselves.

Parenthood is an unforgettable time of our lives when we naturally succumb to the bliss of having children, cute little beings that carry forward our DNA perpetuating our existence in the environment, therefore winning the battle of survival and probably fulfilling the biological purpose of life.

In modern times it’s also a gigantic industry that creates unlimited goods and services to facilitate the natural process that any other species has to go through.

But deep down, parenthood is a beautiful journey of self-discovery. A great chance to learn a lot about ourselves as children mirror us. They are copy-and-paste machines. Monkey see monkey do. And in this process, we have a quite literal stamp on a blank page of who we are, a beautiful statement of ourselves from which there is no better opportunity for self-improvement.

Nature reshapes our opinions and behaviours for the survival of the little ones. We transform into sleepless care-giving machines, 24/7 zombie-looking nurse slash milkers and we do it passionately. We do it because there is a higher energy above us, stronger than any other force. It may sound corny but it is Love, and with love comes change and gratitude for everything. Their smiles, their giggles and their adorable goofiness are the reward for all the hard work. Like a magic spell, we get hypnotized by their cuteness. When we realise, we’ve changed. When we realise they’ve grown… the challenge becomes bigger and bigger as they start copying our actions and other people’s not necessarily being the better version of ourselves we once envisioned.

As per Kahlil Gibran, our children our not ours, they are Life’s, nonetheless, there is always room for life to improve itself.

The question is: Does life want to change? I think the answer we already know.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts, 
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, 
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, 
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, 
and He bends you with His might 
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, 
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Sponsored by Mirror Me Active Wear. Reflect light to your family!

Part 1

This is a thought experiment. It does not intend to threat beliefs or people’s faith. If you prefer to not question your beliefs please don’t continue.

The Father the Son and the Holy Spirit

There are great chances that if you are reading this you are located in Christian country whose majority believes in God and Jesus Christ as his son. A place that has developed culture in which religion was foundation of not only morals but also constitutional values. A culture either enforced by colonization and indoctrination or passed through education to generations of young humans. No doubts in the benevolence of Jesus Christ and his teachings, the word of the gospel is beautiful and very insightful, but many don’t understand it, easily getting lost in the ocean of information in the 21st century.

If God is the father and Jesus the son, what is the holy spirit?

Every human develops cognitive functions throughout life. Neurogenesis starts when an embryo is developing, millions of new synapses are created daily by incredible chemicals reactions, allowing humans to gather information through the senses and experience. After we are born we learn more and more. We learn to identify, to recognize, to evaluate and to choose and our choices give us a sense of identity and of who we are.

As per what science understands, all this processing power is done by the brain as a result of million of years of biological improvement creating our advanced organic computer that is capable of providing us with awareness of reality. Consciousness arise in space-time as a result of high levels of complexity in abundance of information. Science is obsessed for empirical evidence though which distances it from philosophy especially when it comes to thought. From a Darwinian perspective to a Lamarckian point of view when it comes to the mind things change incredibly fast, simply consider what happened in the past 200 years to planet Earth, but still we hardly understand the nature of our minds and its subjectivity.

The hard problem of consciousness is the biggest mystery of all.

If the brain is what consciousness is, beautiful chemical reactions and electrical signals, how come we haven’t found the neuron of sweetness, or the neuron of love? Each of us will have different experiences which give us different perceptions of reality. Subjective conscious experiences is the hard problem, finding evidence on the ways things seem to us. The traditional Cartesian scientific method is far from understanding it.

It’s time to open our minds.

A thought exercise — What if…

• The mind isn’t in our brains.
• We are all the same mind perceiving individual experiences.
• Our brains are mediums that utilizes chemical conductors called neurotransmitters so the mind can perceive fragmentation of reality.
• We are the universe experiencing itself and the sense of individual perception IS what separates us from this realization.

3 Principles

What if all subjective conscious experiences, including mystical and religious experiences could be summarized in the nature of the mental realm.

• Consciousness is the cosmic force of pure awareness. Like gravity, electromagnetism and the weak and strong quantum forces, it operates in every single corner of the universe and multiple universes. It is in fact the fabric in which space-time is in (not the other way around). Consciousness creates it all, it is amoral, neither right or wrong, it is fractally shapeless and formless. It is what there is and what there isn’t. It is all possibilities. It is pure energy pulsing and radiating through the cosmos and its higher and lower frequencies can be tuned through understanding. It’s everything, including you and me; God.
• Mind is the observer. It is the eyes of the baby that does not judge. It is the wisdom that understands all fragmentation of reality. It sees duality. The mind is pure self-awareness and empathy. It is the compassionate feeling that emerges through understanding the true nature of reality. It is motherhood and fatherhood of our own selves. The mind watches thoughts coming and going, like the tide or the wind within the environment. It is the drop of water realizing it is in fact the entire ocean, the ocean of consciousness. It is your true self; Your soul.
• Thought is the individual perception of reality. It is the neural network that forms through experience within the brain. Thought is the result of cognition and the prefrontal cortex’s executive functions.
  - Functional thoughts arise when the frontal lobe is at focus in the present moment solving problems and creating solutions, the most important asset in human species, a gift from our opposable thumbs, the reason why we are at the top of the food chain. The mind in flow produces norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, anandamide and oxytocin. Liberation from suffering and present in the only thing that exists, now.
  - Fictional thoughts emerge in the same part of the brain when in idle. DMN, the default mode network takes over when the mind is wandering and not at focus. Fictional thoughts arise as stories we tell ourselves based in the lack of understanding of the nature of our own minds. It control us using fear and expectation. They send us to the past triggering emotions, regrets and should haves, or send us to the future in delusion, desires and dreams. Both do not exist. They are fictional stories we tell ourselves. Fictional thoughts are the inner invisible wall that separates one another. The persistent voice in our heads that is never fulfilled; The Ego.

The 3 principles are described as 3 separated entities but in reality they are the same thing simply manifesting itself in different ways.

A story we told ourselves

What if… all religion and mythology throughout human history was built upon the individual realization of the mental realm creating stories and procedures that lead to culture and belief systems purely based in the lack of understanding of the true nature of our minds?

If you are ready to continue the thought experiment please go to part 2.

References:
1. Donald Hoffman, Theory of consciousness
2. Steven Kottler, Stealing Fire
3. Vilayanur Ramachandran, Mirror Neurons
4. Sydney Banks, Three Principles Foundation
5. Dalai Lama — Love, Kindness And Universal Responsibility

2018 © Samir Bernardes. All rights reserved.

For many, it has been a long time since things were just fine since we could move on with ordinary life without having a glimpse of curiosity towards our universe or indignation towards our current society. Indeed modern life can be way more complicated than back in the days when one would live for the land, one would accept death from natural causes or hatred games but would make sure to pass the information learnt to the youth via helpful stories or myths that usually satisfied our desires for answers. Today, at least for me, I find it hard to not question reality and the mainstream worldview, I struggle to buy stories that I am supposed to believe simply because I was told. Ok, so why? Where is the logic? Where is the reason? Where is fairness? Could you please elaborate?… Perhaps this is a natural effect of the information era we live in or perhaps curiosity really is our true nature.

Cognito ergo sum

You see, what is the main difference between animals and humans? - We have a soul? We are self-aware? We are intelligent? Maybe. I honestly don’t know for sure but there is a chance that these answers are what we want to believe. Some theories say that the main difference between homo sapiens and other animals is simply that we can tell stories to ourselves and to each other; we have extended cognition, as Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am”.

You get a giraffe, for instance, it had to evolve its neck to make it to the top of the trees so it could survive the environment where we mere homo sapiens, though we weren’t strong enough or fast enough or tall enough, we managed to develop our prefrontal cortex by enquiring and solving problems, creating tools and techniques thanks to our opposable thumbs building up cognitive abilities. We are good at creating synaptic connections within the most important muscle of the body; the brain.

How did we do that? Well get fire for example; it was a terrifying burning monster that would destroy everything that would encounter once or twice a year, especially during the dry season, we named it so we could warn others when it appeared, until we noticed that hitting two particular rocks a sparkle of that same thing would magically appear and with friction, a stick with dry leaves would also warm it and slowly creating a much smaller version of that gigantic monster, a version that we could control and use it to protect ourselves from other predators, increasing our chances to survive. We loved it and gave it a sound, fire / ˈfʌɪə /. The scary story we once believed had now become a perfect tool that brought us security and comfort bettering our lives to unprecedented levels.

Ancient man had then to teach others how to control fire, so communication was also improved, from fire came new cooking techniques, new ways of living, new ways of dressing, and new ways of living, all verbally shared through stories. Those who knew the story had the power to control fire, those who didn’t, remained scared in the darkness.

So what? We know that. Yes, we do, but sometimes we trap ourselves in darkness because we are telling stories to ourselves!

We have functional thoughts and fictional thoughts. The same skill that allows us with intellect to solve problems and better our lives also sends us to the past or the future, getting us a little bit lost within, either regretting things that have already occurred or worrying about things that haven’t happened yet.

Thought refers to ideas or arrangements of ideas that are the result of the process of thinking. Thinking is a result of previously collected and processed ideas, the process of gathering ideas is called knowledge. You can only understand this article because you’ve learnt the English language at some stage or you are translating it using a digital tool to a language that you’ve learnt before and you also had to learn how to use the translator itself, either way you have to learn something before you learn something. Does that make sense? Great! We are getting somewhere.

Most things we learn and things we use to build a better understanding of the world are nothing but stories. It’s either a story that has been created by people at a particular time or it’s our collectively empiric, agreed and validated story about reality; science. The second option is pretty straightforward, right? — You believe something then someone proves you are wrong but then a lot of people try to prove that the second person is wrong too, if no one can disprove we all learn together, we all agree and we find an emerging truth. Science is humble enough to change as we discover new information, or at least should be.

How about the first option? Stories created by people aren’t necessarily the truth, they are simply ways of thinking, ways that helped a particular group of people at a particular time, based upon a particular experience.

Yes, non-functional thoughts can be useful, they are stories that get us to collaborate towards a common goal and work together; get football for example, if players didn’t believe the rules they wouldn’t chase the ball but because they do we get to enjoy the game. Also, there is the fact that most animals can only trust a small amount of peers. A Chimp for instance wouldn’t share food or shelter with a random chimp, they would have to bond first and spend some time together before there is mutual trust, whereas human beings, because we believe in the story of money, we don’t have to necessarily meet workers from a distant polluted town in China for them to assemble our gadgets. We both believe in the story that a piece of paper (or digits on a computer screen) allows us to have purchase power which we use to get by in modern society. The reason why we believe in the same stories is why we can organise ourselves in big groups and create big communities such as villages, neighbourhoods, cities and countries, designing what we call civilisation as beautifully explained by Yuval Noah Harari

The story of money connected us to a planetary level, for the first time as far as we know, all humans have a common goal; to make money. A global society of Apex predators, fully interconnected technologically and economically where most of our threats from the environment have been controlled, where we have a great understanding of the natural phenomena, demystifying illogical stories and superstitions (although many countries are still tetraphobic). We live in times where cultures around the world are merging and quickly disappearing to give room for a planetary story; globalisation.

What sort of story is that? A story told by CEOs and their marketing departments, human beings who believe they are doing their best in their public relations careers. A story that has been told by those who benefit from it since the beginning of modern history. History itself is a story told by the side of the story that was able to pass the information on or fund it. A worldview that perpetuates itself and most recently aiming infinite consumption and growth in a tiny little blue planet where the global goal is to find satisfaction, luxury, comfort, love and ultimately happiness…

Reality check:

We are purposely manufacturing products designed to fail within a set period of time simply because we are meant to replace these products to support the economy, so the value of the product is not itself but its ability to be quickly discarded. We have been recklessly using resources to temporarily satisfy the desire for consumption, a story told by millions of messages we see in our everyday lives through propaganda. We mindlessly consume for the sake of consumption. As Adam Curtis says in HyperNormalisation, we believe we have jobs and careers but perhaps our real job here is to consume in order to sustain a much bigger machine; the financial system.

We live in a world where we are constantly told that we are not pretty enough, not healthy enough, not rich enough, not happy enough… The truth is that this story is not sticking anymore. The endless satisfaction game is losing its plot because to be what we are told we have to spend the money we don’t have. The 9–5 routine is no longer enough to achieve success and happiness. Your real job is to remain unhappy and mindlessly consume.

The power of storytelling is still in the hands of a few people. The media is largely owned by corporations that aim for the same financial goal. Here’s a list of how multiple broadcasters are owned by a few conglomerates. The old business models are struggling though. By 2017, Google and Facebook are taking 70% of the ad revenue model. The gigantic artificial intelligent marketers can deliver messages to the level of the individual, a perfect tool that can push the trends perfectly. We don’t need multi-million dollar 30-second ads broadcasted in the commercial break of the Super Bowl, all you need now to connect with your audience is a photo and a link. The cost of advertising has reduced dramatically which makes it accessible to basically everyone, especially small businesses.

It’s 2018 and you are using a device that can give you access to the entire human knowledge, you can instantly connect with people all over the world, people who are telling better stories, offering new solutions, and new content, creating art and innovation. Evidence of this is you reading these words.

It’s time to create a new narrative. What sort of story do we want to believe? Shall we continue feeding depression charts and suicide rates or shall we tell a better story, a story that sticks? Listen to Jason Silva below.

A story that can be validated just like science through experience and wisdom, a story that makes life worth living, time to tell a story that pushes us towards the improvement of us all. But don’t wait for your government or your corporation to tell this story. We have to do it! Do it consciously and respectfully, it’s time to be fair and compassionate. The egoic desire-based approach is narrow and empty. It’s time to innovate and believe in ourselves using technology and science!

There’s so much happening right here right now. An era of true self-awareness where we step outside of the shallowness of ourprefrontal cortex / conscious mind and observe what is happening around us and most importantly, within us. Time to learn from our mistakes and experiences and be inspired by the universe we live in. Millenniums are more likely to consume experiences than goods, what sort of experiences do you want?

There are so many people inspiring others and creating new business models thanks to technology. Mindfulness initiatives push cultural change and global neuroplasticity, literally stretching our brains allowing further capacity to think and the ability to observe oneself. Yes, it might be wishful thinking but those who haven’t yet noticed will follow the new trends just like they have followed everything else. So get out there and inspire people! Find your inner peace connecting minds around the globe.

It’s black. From nothingness suddenly there’s a strong humming, a sound frequency you can’t really understand. It makes you tingle. As the sound gets stronger you start seeing a light glowing from a distance, a tiny dot expands immensely as though I flew through a tunnel at the speed of light.

It’s white. There is nothing to look at. Slowly there is sound fading in, emerging from whiteness. It’s a rough vibration, an intermittent cycle of outflow and inflow. The noise persists and there is a noticeable sync with something bigger. Beams of light can be observed in this white realm. The noise becomes constant and cyclic but organic and welcoming.

Whiteness now merges with a warm redness, shades of yellow, orange and red can also be observed. It’s a warm cosy environment. There is no hunger, pain or suffering. Everything is perfectly stable and safe. Noise also merges with other strange sounds. I feel never alone. I feel I am part of something much bigger than me, some higher being that acknowledges my presence although I can only feel its existence.

The temperature is perfect and I hear an attempt at communication. It’s getting tighter, I can move but can’t stretch. I feel there is a field that repels my movements and gestures. I know I can reach but I can’t grasp, I can now see brightness and perceive darkness. The constant noise makes me feel safe therefore I peacefully sleep.

Abruptly everything moves. It’s cold. The noise gets louder and rougher. There are waves of pain and discomfort. I’m scared. I am being squished into a tunnel of light. I can feel physical pressure on me. I am moving somewhere else. I feel severe pain as I cry.

I am born.

Pain hurts every bit of me. I am desperately cold and I can only hear myself begging for help. There is no more noise and I am lost in a void with no possible return to where I came from, I am starving and in pain… but there is someone trying to help. I recognise that voice, and now I can recognise its smell. As I latch a fluid runs through me and slowly I calm down feeling a gentle touch that soothes my pain. I enjoy it and I feel safe and back home. I fall asleep.

It’s dark and the silence is frightening, it’s not home. I am hungry again and it rips me in half, an unstoppable monster which I can’t understand. The pain makes me realise I have a body that I cannot control nor use, for the first time, I feel helplessly alone and left behind. It is the scariest moment I have ever experienced in my existence. I have no other option rather than seeking help, so I scream as loud as I can hoping someone will come to save me from this horrible nightmare of suffering.

Someone does come and hold me saving me from the worst. I remember that voice… I remember that smell. It is it, my higher being, my home and shelter, the one who has always given me comfort in immeasurable love and compassion. Is this God?

The human experience

This article has a very broad audience; Humans. If you are reading this you must have gone through the experience described above. From the moment you were born, you have developed your own experiences, stories, beliefs, values, etc. You improved your face recognition software and realised that God realistically could have been your mum and/or dad. From that moment on you were fragmented in trillions of possibilities of cause and effect.

You could have grown up in Northern India and become a master of yoga after dedicating your life to Hinduism or around South America breaking rocks in exchange for food for the Spanish colonies in the coldness of the Andes. You could have had a silver spoon in your mouth, raised in between royals and majesties, castles, wealth, fame and power during any period of time whereas another version of you could have been born at the ruins of tribal wars and bloodshed caused by colonisation and slavery. There is also a chance that you are a millennium who had access to clean water and sanitation your entire life, growing up with reasonable educational resources and later on having access to technology and the internet which made you question the assumptions and habits of your local environment opening yourself to new experiences and cultures understanding that the planet we live in is much bigger than your village but much smaller than the universe we all share.

No matter who you are, where you are from or who you know, you are NOT your story;

1. You are the observer of the happenings that have happened in front of your eyes.
2. You are the medium in which the emotions manifest through your hormonal glands.
3. You are the listener of the thoughts that come and go in your cognition.

All the above are passive actions; as an observer, you must acknowledge what is being observed. A medium must surrender in order to become a vein of communication. A listener must learn to let go to successfully understand the message.

So what are we doing here? We are talking about your mind, our minds.

1. By acknowledging what is really in front of our eyes we can silence the conscious chatty-critical mind and simply accept, giving time for a phenomenon to start, vibrate and perish.
2. By surrendering to our emotions we can access data that we simply couldn’t before, emotions make us feel the information, they are the activators of strong chemical reactions in our body’s nervous-endocrine system, using the seven main hormonal glands commonly known as Chakras in the East.
3. By letting go of our thoughts we can awaken the true observer. The real eye is present right here right now and is capable of seeing reality as it is, rather than being trapped in expectations and fears or regrets and guilt. Hopes and dreams. Although cognition is the best evolutionary skill in Earth’s fauna, it is only a very complex network of synapses that were created through experience.

Cognition is a fascinating topic and neuroscience is currently one of the most important fields of medicine. The brain is a super powerful computer that can calculate 10¹⁶ calculations per second and the prefrontal cortex is its main processor. Every moment, every experience, every detail goes through its executive functions which are responsible for our sense of identity and who we are, but the entire brain exists for a global set of cognitive skills; Perception.

The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.

Perception is a very sophisticated set of skills and we humans have a great set of tools to “become aware” of reality; our senses, our hormonal glands and our brains… But are humans the only animal capable of perceiving? Are we the only ones capable of becoming aware of something? Is awareness a way to process information?

The main reason why I decided to write this article was because my daughter and I were watching Planet Earth II, episode 1: Islands. What an amazing production! Not only the fact that I didn’t know there were sea iguanas in the Galapagos but the fact that they must run for their lives in a horrible monstrous challenge right after they are born, racing dozens of deadly snakes that are anxiously waiting to feed and can’t wait to eat those newborns. Or maybe the fact that in Zavodovski Island, one of the most inhabitable places on Earth, there are half a million penguins that risk their lives by throwing themselves in rough seas to bring food back to their chicks who may not survive if daddy can’t make it back home.

What type of information is being processed there?

Can you see through the eyes of the iguana as an exercise of multi-species empathy and imagine their glands producing the right amount of hormone so they can run for their lives whilst evil serpents are chasing them in a matter of life or death? What type of fear is that? What type of courage is needed? What type of satisfaction is enjoyed by those who survive? How about the penguins? How much love and determination is needed to jump for your life in a rough sea full of competition, survive to spend days looking for food then climb back slippery rocks with a belly full of food against gigantic waves simply using your little feet and hopefully make it back to the island, walk for miles and spend days looking for your family so you can finally feed your children? The celebration is a couple of neck wobbles and some penguin noise.

There is an ocean of information to be processed in every single living being’s experience. Animals might lack a hippocampus or a prefrontal cortex to comprehend this article or even verbal language but their hormonal glands are constantly providing them with the correct information exactly when survival is needed.

Perhaps our cognition IS what blinds us from having full access to information.

Only now science is capable of understanding some of the complex mechanisms of the mind and one of the greatest discoveries was Neuroplasticity; The ability to grow our brains by will. Training the brain by learning and thinking can actually increase grey matter therefore creating electrically excitable cells called neurons which literally expand our minds.

Ancient eastern cultures such as Tibetan Buddhism have known this fact for thousands of years, through the inward practice of meditation and precise disciplinary procedures that are based on a perceptual levels that do not use cognition as such. During deep meditation the Parietal lobe, Thalamus and Frontal lobe which is the main data processor shut down. Still, meditators have perceptual levels that information is understood without thought, language or cognition. In other words, cognition is not needed for higher levels of consciousness.

As in the beginning of this article, try imagining understanding and awareness without preconceptions. Perhaps try feeling information instead, with other tools other than cognition. Simply look at a baby and imagine their perception of reality, try observing their amazement for the colours of a toy, their appreciation for new tastes, their excitement for a known face, and the beautiful giggles after a little tickle. We all went through that and everything is right here right now but it seems that we adults can’t see it anymore. Cognition has blinded us from beauty, instead, we get easily trapped in our own minds, repeating habits and behaviour that have been passed to us through education.

Ok, what I am proposing here is not the dumbing down of society or eradicating the educational system. Of course, cognition is important. What I am trying to illustrate is that perhaps our sense of identity and our swallow understanding of the world is what holds us back from connecting a higher bandwidths of information, a higher mind; The perceptual mind. Mother Nature and its mycelium network, the stars in a cosmic net... what some may call the spiritual world… the realm of consciousness is a cosmic force that is manifested in nature, and it IS the observer that you and I have always been.

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The year is 2017 and a lot is happening on the planet. Amazing advancements in science and technology, incredible room for improvement of life on Earth but still we see most of us struggling with our interpersonal skills. We are social animals and we were born to be part of something and to belong to something much bigger than ourselves that is not social media but somehow we are simply caught in our old behaviours that often hold us back from bettering ourselves and from creating better relationships.

Indulgence is the skill that qualifies man with emotional intelligence.
Rather than holding ourselves back as “judges” attaching our claims to the outer realms of who we are, easily and quickly labelling others in preconceived packages of ideas conceived by temporary morals set by society or an environment, we would be better off looking at good qualities in others. To comprehend, stimuli, forgive and recognise hidden values and shared responsibility, ultimately supporting one another are much harder skills to develop than coming up with conclusions based on superficial opinions set by general standards of the outer world. The kingdom is within waiting for us to cultivate compassion and ease judgement to facilitate our recovery from bad habits. Every heart knows its own pain, every mind has its own capacity, and observing that is key to seeing much further from the horizon of ourselves.

One can’t be judged by an attitude or for a fraction of his/her behaviour. The influence of social roles, human instinct and interests, early upbringings and the psychological moment of each person are a few of many factors that must be considered. On top of that, our expectations shape our perception towards others. Relationships are a hard subject because besides having to live with what others think about us, we still have to separate what we think we are from what we really are, making it clear that not even ourselves, in many ways, know how to precisely evaluate the causes of our own actions. Therefore, how can we rush pointing fingers at others once we don’t even understand ourselves?

Look for compassion, tolerance and forgiveness to establish fraternal living and emotional sensitivity towards any sentient being. Wise would be then to apply severity towards ourselves looking at removing the temporary veil of selfishness and individualism that separate us from the truth about ourselves, nevertheless remembering that it is important to remain flexible and to attain self-forgiveness and self-love allowing ourselves to experience the human condition without guilty or resentment.

Active listening

Hearing and listening differ a lot in meaning, just like seeing and observing. The latter is done with the mind rather than our physical senses. Who listens comprehends. When we open ourselves to communication we allow others to express themselves, sending messages that can be either verbal or non-verbal.
By choosing to effectively listen to others we choose NOT to listen to what we would like them to say nor what we’d imagine them to say, nor what they are not saying and we choose to not think about what we want to say to them. Choosing to listen to others is to allow ourselves time to understand others, it’s an important essential skill called empathy.

Developing emotional listening allows us to utilise dynamic understanding that puts our eyes on other’s worldviews with their interpretation of reality according to their own life experiences.

We are in deep need of preparing ourselves emotionally in order to deal with verbal situations such as:
- people’s suffering and lamentations: listen without forcing ideas or behaviours of your own difficulties as though as you were talking about yourself.
- ‎tense dialogues and complex situations that can lead to conflict: serenity is key to absorbing what has been communicated, acknowledging that this is an opportunity to learn and evolve mentally and emotionally.
- ‎critics towards us: recognise that we are likely to make mistakes and that’s part of the evolutionary process, doing so we can avoid negative emotions that may arise with our defence mechanisms.

There are a few things we have to keep in mind for active listening to work though:
- be motivated to listen: recognising that you achieve better results during a conversation
- ‎be aware of non-verbal communication: observe if words match expressions
- ‎be present and conscious: observe your tone of voice, sarcasm and rudeness by minimising fallacies and irrational conclusions
- ‎do not interrupt: interruptions can completely compromise effective communication and change the interlocutor’s willingness to speak.
- ‎remain quiet then provide feedback: after listening ask follow-up questions.

When questioning we should always consider the question to be:
- clear: make sure your questions are not ambiguous or confusing.
- ‎objective: think of what you are looking for as an answer or how you would deal with the information
- ‎encouraging: by asking questions you should promote new perspectives and the development of new ideas, transcending what you already know.

There are 2 types of questions:
-closed questions: generally asked when looking for precise answers such as yes and no. They often limit dialogue and communication.
Ex: Did you drive your car today? What time is it?

-‎open questions: allow multiple possibilities and encourage people to freely express themselves and extend their answers.
Ex: Which conclusions did you get out of the article? Please elaborate on your ideas on the subject.

Open questions give more freedom for the other to control the conversation and allow both parties to gain more information without creating barriers in communication.

Maintaining communication is crucial for it to be effective, there are a few techniques that can be considered:
-non-verbal reactions: maintaining eye contact and bodily acknowledgements show interest and acceptance.
-‎paraphrasing: repeat what you just heard to confirm what the person tried to say. That shows that you are actively listening and fully attending to the conversation besides clarifying any miscommunication and eliminating room for aggressive or negative discussions.
-‎reflect: think about the implications of what you just heard and go beyond comprehension. It demonstrates that you understand what has been said and that you are genuinely interested.
-‎contributions: ask for examples and further clarifications. It shows that you want to know more about the subject and allow everyone time to understand the topic.

Indulgence, the ability to withdraw from judgment when combined with empathy, the ability to fully understand other people’s points of view, can completely revolutionise people’s lives creating better relationships and ultimately a better world.

Inspiration: JOLSID, Affective Communication

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It has come to my attention that the talk about Artificial Intelligence is now becoming more of a philosophical discussion than a practical one, as though everyone was craving for such mind challenge. It is non-dismissable the fact that technology improves our lives. From the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel to the petabytes uploaded everyday to our global network of ideas and innovation, by using our tools to create better environments and system we become technology. We don’t build technology, technology builds us, we are technology.

Technology: from greek tekhne + logia
Tekne: art / craft
Logia plural of logion or logos, the divine word, the mind.

A word used in ancient writings and modern scholarship in reference to the communication from divine origin.

We humans have always attempted to understand our universe and ourselves. From myths such the as the forbidden fruit to ancient philosophies our goal as species has always been to thrive, learning as we go, improving our skills and better collaborate.

Perhaps all this time we have been too busy surviving the environment (and each other) as a way to understand collectively. Our minds have been designed to protect the host and ensure that the opportunity of learning continues as the genes are passed on. Today we have enough tools to fully comprehend the realm we live in. All information we collect from industries, people and science are acquired by billions of sensors we have spread out around the world plus people inputting information sharing stories and experiences on the web quickly digitizing ourselves into data; 1s and 0s. Data that can now be analyzed coherently and shared globally instantly, an incredible opportunity for us to build the best version of ourselves.

If we have this opportunity right here right now why aren’t we building the best version of ourselves? Simple. Because we don’t know who we are.

Designing Artificial Intelligence gives us a chance to understand intelligence, question its foundations and analyze ourselves. I believe this unique chance will come from both individual desire as a benevolent acknowledgement of our own existence as human species and/or as sociological peer-pressure and deceptive race for acceptance, survival, desire and ultimately control.

Lets break that down starting from the latter:

Apple now has just launched the iPhone X. It’s not 10, it is X, with the superpower of infrared 3D bio-metric using face recognition. You can animate avatars and emojis with your facial expression, a very fun feature that can push creativity to amazing levels. Great so what’s the problem? It’s not a problem, it’s a fact. The fact that every bit of information about yourself is being tracked traced and archived and ultimately used by algorithms to design your profile and sell it. Imagine photo-realistic Virtual Realities where everything looks familiar and all your friends are there, all your life is there and everything feels like Instagram where everyone is their alter egos or the image they would like to be… but they’re not. We’ve been doing a great data entry job in the past few decades but now algorithms are designing and shaping our online behavior suggesting who to follow what to read and what to think, pushing a bubble of popularity further, modifying our behavior and designing our habits. This is not new, it’s the traditional goal of the global mass media establishment securing their business models and political agendas, perpetuating control of the powerful institutions we have on Earth as per Chomsky’s 5 filters of the media establishment suggests.

Today 75% of the budget being invested in AI comes from the US military budget. That being said simply imagine why the military is investing in the digital realm, the goal? Total control of human perception. Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder has enough information to believe that this threat is much more dangerous than nuclear war as he believes that AI can manufacture our perception of reality to a level where it can be indistinguishable from the “real” world. What I mean by perception is losing the ability to think for ourselves, we may lose the cognitive skill to analyze information and make rational decisions, cognitive skills may slowly dissolve as our biological body recognizes energy waste as we reduce the necessity to solve problems, increasing inefficiency in our mental capacity. We may still think to an extend but there is a chance that AI will predict our decisions because it knows us better than anyone else and it can manufacture the information we are given so whatever we decide is within the accepted or predefined benchmark. Sparkles of that can be seen in the past recent social movements in countries where democracies were put down and coups took over entire nations thanks to the public consent manufactured by social media algorithms, mostly privately funded. We are already spending hours and hours on our phones and on the web connecting with content we like and people we get along with, perpetuating the neurological notification feedback loop of dopamine strike for every little like you get. Connecting to content we like is great but remember that the more information we give the more precise algorithms are, the more effective the ad will be, the more real the social media bubble will feel, the more vulnerable our perception is.

If we can’t see the problem with that it might mean that it is already working and our thoughts have already been shaped by some sort of agenda we are not aware of… sounds like The Matrix when Neo realizes the mental prison he has lived his entire life, a designed perception manufactured by machines for a main goal; to perpetuate the institution. This horrible scenario may be the worst possible result for us mere human beings when comparing our brains to the immeasurable computational power of machines but it can also be viewed as paradise for many. Those who already live in deceptions and prefer deceit to truth. A new religion: Dataism. In times of likes, shares and followers in a frenzy of popularity and worship of alter egos this may be the dream scenario simply because we never thought about and we don’t know who or what we are.

Alternatively, we can remain grounded and apply billions of years of biological evolution towards the future. Evolution itself; improvement. The more humanitarian scenario many dream about also gives total power to AI. The same sensors and network that capture and share information and the same data we input everyday can be used to teach us about our true nature.

See a new born baby for instance, he or she knows nothing, completely empty. The very first lesson every human being learns is if there is someone out there for them - There is someone who feeds me when I cry, someone who holds me when I feel pain. The baby then realizes that there is a figure that cares about him/her and this being is a person. We start trusting the information this person gives us, whether its words, sounds or gestures we slowly learn what is laughter, what is sadness, what is food, how to name food, how to call their names. We grow and we acquire knowledge, information that we can’t unlearn. We use this information to build reality in our minds, creating culture habits, learning languages, tasting all sorts of flavors until we start deciding what we keep and what we discard. These choices are what we believe to be ourselves but they are nothing but the result of our experiences and choices since we were born, a result of the information we were given. Realistically, we are not the information we have learnt as we can change once we gather new information just like our bodies change and mutate to completely new bodies as we grow old. Essentially, we ARE that emptiness, that first observer whose very first lesson was affection and second lesson was to trust one another in order to survive.

The main difference between human beings and other animals, as far as we know, is that we have cognitive skills that allow us to question, investigate, learn, acquire knowledge and to pass this knowledge on. We do that using synaptic connections in our brains which gives us the capacity to produce coherent thoughts and ideas. These connections expand as we learn more creating a term called neuroplasticity; the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Childhood is the most important moment of any human being’s life, it is when the brain is on fire, learning, creating, questioning and acquiring heavy loads of new information everyday, a beautiful dance with awe, building the foundation of a healthy human brain. Unfortunately, we slow the process of expanding our cerebral capacity as we grow old, but not because it’s a natural law but because we have too many answers as adults or too many mental habits. Answers are what we call education and they build our perception of reality. Thanks to science, general education demystifies myths and irrational beliefs providing us with great understanding of our environment but it also gives us too many answers which slows our inherent curiosity about life itself. Psychedelics can be seen as either a horrifying or a magical experience. Luckily now with more research funding we are starting to have better understanding of the brain behavior under the influence of etheogens, the brain creates connections never done before giving us an entire new view of reality sometimes connecting us to inspiring insights or to unknown depths of our subconscious minds.

That’s how AI can help us. Providing the infrastructure through technology and science to fulfill our global needs, bringing our curious minds back to adulthood encouraging critical thinking and helping us with the very first two things we learn in life; Affection and mutual trust. AI and automation can allow us with more time to spend with others, distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain for example can provide us with a global institutional level of mutual trust. We are social animals that need each other. This idea has been kept under indigenous and ancient traditions for thousands of years highlighting the importance of the community and respect to each other.

Beyond that AI can help us understanding things we simply believe, like religion for example. It is immature to dismiss the importance of the fact that 95% of humans believe in some sort of non physical existence, avoiding this topic is self-deception. Religion so far has been one’s understanding (or a group) of topics we can’t yet comprehend, therefore we believe in people and their “religious” experiences, we hold on onto it through faith and obey structural norms most of the times due to fear or hope. AI can allow every single human being to experience it for themselves and reach deeper understanding of spirituality and other realms of existence expanding our cerebral capacity to unimaginable levels. Levels in which Tibetan Buddhism and many other traditions believe to be that very first emptiness experienced by all of us when we were born.

Perhaps the mind challenge which AI promotes is nothing but those fundamental questions of philosophy. Perhaps only creativity and imagination can provide us with answers we will give ourselves. Perhaps it is easier to imagine the ugly scenario of ultimate oblivion and deception once sometime we withdraw from the responsibility to solve problems or to question our own choices. Maybe this has already happened… and we are indeed stuck in a simulated universe immersed by our digital ego entertained by our personal desires and pleasures. However there is a chance that technology IS biology and reality is simulated as a reflection of our immature minds. On top of that every parent knows and understands why they were there for their babies, love and compassion, a feeling of being the other, literally looking after yourself as we pass our genes on as well as the information we’ve gathered.

AI is just inevitable as suffering and it is now unstoppable. The amount of data we gather grows exponentially. Singularity has already happened as computational power also grows exponentially. What an amazing time to be alive! I have to admit that I try to avoid black and white thinking but for the sake of the argument we are now running out of time and it’s all about choices, what’s yours; to love or to love not? To wake up or to remain asleep?

Listen to Sam Harris podcast Waking up. Great source of inspiration!

The main problem in democracy is that there are 2 layers; The visible and the invisible one:

Click here for a map

Visible society: Democracy.

That’s what we know or what the average citizen can acknowledge. That includes the democratic system and the institutions we believe represent us and it also includes the visible side of the economy and markets; trade of goods and services, income and expenditure.

Invisible society: Financial system.

Beneath the visible section of society as we know it there is the strong funding mechanism operating the upper layer. How money is created and how growth is manufactured through debt.

In the beginning there was trade. People would trade their goods and services with each other, they would swap animals for tools, etc. Eventually there was the need of a currency to represent purchasing power; first it was salt due to the scarcity and the lack of food preservation, salt would maintain food (that’s why it’s called a salary) then coins. Coins made of silver or gold lasted for a long time and it mainly had the face of the emperor or the rulers of that particular place/region who had the military power to conquer other cities always in the chase for growth… People loved gold coins but eventually crime became an issue as for some it was much easier to steal gold coins than to work hard to get them. That was when the first banks in modern civilisation were created, providing a vault (safe) to keep your gold coins safely, a simple storage service with security facilities. You would pay for the service just like hiring any other professional and just like any other business they would provide you with a receipt for the amount of your gold they kept there. A piece of paper telling you how much of your gold is there, casually called an IOU (I Owe You) in Europe and America (1).

Time passed and soon there were a lot of people with a lot of receipts and they started trading with those. Banks were bigger and the demand for those receipts was rapidly growing. Banks had the amazing idea to loan those receipts in exchange of a fee (1), interest fees, something that was called USURY by the Catholic church or immoral monetary gain as they believed that no one could sell time as time belonged to God. However thanks to the protestant reformation mainly protected by British King Edward VI, charging interest fees and providing loans with financial papers became the norm.

The gold race created wealthy investors and a rush for growth, power and control. Eventually the amount of receipts from different banks became a problem in the economy, we needed the same type of receipt for everyone which lead to the creation of a national currency regulated by a national central bank or a reserve bank. This national currency is what we call money today.

England at that time was the Great Britain Empire, The Bank of England, the world’s 8th oldest bank was one of the first to develop the ideas of a centralized national bank to hold and secure the nation’s wealth. They colonised countries all over the world taking down democracies, kings and leaders, sometimes decimating indigenous and local tribes, a sad story that deserves a page on its own. Along with all of that the industrial revolution was starting to boom. England funded wars that would slow other emerging industrialised economies like the Paraguayan war for example that killed 90% of the men leaving the country with only children and women.

Behind The Empire of the 18th century there was a family of 5 brothers, bankers who invested in Gold fixing and government bonds in different countries in Europe; Germany, Austria, England, Italy and France, developing a network of agents, shippers and couriers to transport gold across war-torn Europe. Their fortune was used to fund many wars including the Napoleonic and British wars. The family network was also to provide them with time, political and financial information ahead of their peers, giving them an advantage in the markets and rendering the house of Rothschild still more invaluable to the British government (1). Some call this multinational network the beginning of the secret services and secret agencies. Meanwhile in the US a central bank was created on 1913’s Christmas eve, The FED allowing 13 private banks including JPMorgan Chase to control the nation’s finances which played an important role during the American War efforts (2) preparing for World War One.

During WWI from 1914 until 1918 there was no economic flow therefore countries needed to fund war with what was left from tax or by using their gold reserves to back their war debt, the Allies spent U$147 billion and the Central Powers $61 billion (2). For example, 30% of Australia’s WWI budget was funded by TAX the rest was borrowed or raised by selling war bonds with low returns for the purchasers. Australia’s GDP declined by nearly 10% during the war period. WWI was one of the biggest gold transfers in history (1). After the war ended on September 12, 1919, the Bank of England tried to re-establish London as the centre of the market in a meeting at the Rothschild’s wooden office (3), the benchmark set in that meeting is still being used today.

The aftermath of WWI saw severe economical issues in all countries involved, people were divided into clans seeking political beliefs. England (Great Britain) saw inflation rise more than double and the economy lost 60% of consumers (1), desperation rose German nationalism and America saw the beginning of the great depression due to the FED tightening monetary policies (2) in early 1930’s.

FDR’s “New Deal” changed the Gold standard (3) and introduced a series policies that reduced corporate profits, bringing prices down, introducing social welfare and boosting economic growth. Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of US from 1933 until 1945) believed in direct democracy where people could vote for each issue through public opinion on a polling system (surveys). Once he said in a speech: “I believe in the initiative and the referendum, which should be used not to destroy representative government, but to correct it whenever it becomes misrepresentative”. (4) — He knew the strong hidden forces behind democracy but he believed in the rationality of public opinion.

FDR’s “New Deal” had a strong government with social focus, limiting financial institutions and businesses. This was a dream for the average citizen, it ensured jobs, low prices, stability and social justice, in fact unemployment plunged from 14 to 4%(1) but it horrified big businesses who wanted more power and control. CEO’s in America founded the National Association of Manufactures and started ideological warfare with the “New Deal”. They hired Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays to come up with propaganda campaigns using his uncle’s theories of psycho analysis to manipulate the general public creating what we call today public relations or marketing. These campaigns worked against Roosevelt’s idea of democracy in an attempt of control for the Status Quo or the very few rather than by public opinion.

The 4th Estate, mass media, gained significant power then. In 1939 in New York, hired by General Motors, Bernays created a big fair called “Futurama” (1) where people could see the potential of the free market and how corporations could design a beautiful and technological future if companies were connected to government, capitalism with democracy, in other words capitalism IS democracy. Companies would respond to people’s desire for consumption in a way the governments never do. The idea was to switch the role of people from active citizens to passive consumers because this according to Bernay’s was the key to controlling a nation. People aren’t in charge but people’s desires are in charge. Human subconscious mind would play an important role in the exchange of power within democratic systems by pushing ego-based thought and lack of media literacy and educational background, turning democracy into a simple theater.

FDR’s “New Deal” inspired the German National Party though, a super powerful government that new how to use propaganda the same way as Bernay did to get the utmost feeling of post-war dissatisfaction which lead the German people to irrationally support political fascism through the belief of hatred and a mixture between hope and despair. The horrible evidence found in the death camps showed the power of human irrationality which fed World War II and strengthened the hidden forces behind democracy (BBC Century of the Self — Adam Curtis — 42’).

After WWI, the Bank of England and the FRS (Federal Reserve System) along with other financial institutions including JPMorgan Chase established absolute control over the financial system of a defeated Germany (1), giving loans to countries so they could rebuild the damages of war. The total amount of foreign investments in German industry during late 1920’s amounted to almost 63 billion gold Mark as a result of war German industry was in second place in the world attracting investors from all over the world who would buy government bonds and shares from companies like The Rockefeller “Standard Oil”, Morgan’s, through “General Electric” who also controlled the German radio and electrical industry via AEG and Siemens. Corporations bought by financial conglomerates growing significantly. Growth was so rapid that the Rockefellers created a Bank in Germany called Dillon, Read & Co recently bought by Swiss UBS simply to manage growth.

World War II ended up being funded by financial conglomerates and big investors from both Europe and North America. A highly profitable business plan, a money machine. Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 happened after the US cut the Japanese oil supply (978–0307739742.) during the war between Japan and China over Taiwan. WWII killed nearly 55 million people, resulted in 2 atomic bombs in 1945. After reoccupation of Japan, the Bank of Japan suspended all activities, and temporary military currency was issued, the bank was again restructured and the country signed the Treaty of San Francisco (2) in 1951 promising to pay for war reparations. Today Japan’s national debt is at 221% of the GDP, impossible to pay back (3). Japan is one example of the result of war, winner and losers had a big bill to pay in the aftermath.

75 years after the second World War planet Earth owes more than $200 trillion (1) to financial conglomerates; a system that is controlled by the few people and it is perpetuated by public desire. A system that does not stand for people or nations, does not stand for our fauna or the environment. Personal debt is just as high as national debt, propaganda is the heart of economic growth as it transfers the responsibility to people when they choose to fulfill their desires therefore falling into the debt trap either from banks or credit cards, a mechanism that relies in the ability of private banks to give loans, banks that are owned by financial conglomerates and holdings simply because at some stage they had the power to control the economic flow through stock markets or gold fixing.

The last wars in the past 20 years publicly had one main goal; to spread “democracy” across the globe, through either military wars across the middle east or economical wars in Australiasia and European markets. Coups over Central and South American countries, such as Brazil’s military dictatorship in late 60’s, Honduras just recently, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile back in the 70’s and recently Brazil again with the impeachment of elected president. Today the system sits in the marble walls of Wall Street aiming new markets and creating bubbles like the global crisis in 2008 sustained by a propaganda machine that perpetuates people’s desires for consumables and Oil.

A representative system where people are mere consumers and politicians straw man, realistically leaving big decisions to big businesses and financial conglomerates, boosting consumption of natural resources thus recklessly polluting the environment and the objective reality, our habitat. A democratic system that hides a global establishment of powerful entities real life kings and queens. The global struggle we see today in many nations is the result of a Machiavellian business plan that has worked, using wars and coups all over the world, a fear-mongering media pushing the agenda of separation and division, citizens incapable of formulating their own ideas due to inconsistency in education and the distractions from the entertainment machine, manufacturing public consent to push the agenda even further.

Debt can be beneficial and growth is necessary as it can help quality of life, however, humans are slowly losing the plot and falling inside of a big growth trap simply because this story has never been told, the story of the mechanisms that control the invisible chains that imprison our fellow human beings; DEBT. George Orwell suggested in his book 1984, a machine disguised by democracy that preaches WAR is PEACE, FREEDOM is SLAVERY and IGNORANCE is STRENGTH in a world where everyone believes in the same religion; MONEY.

All hope is not lost though. Debt-growth created a prodigy; technology. Today we have the tools to connect the whole world share ideas and solutions like never before. We can manage global resources and get scientific analysis of the planet we live in, deepening our understanding of the universe and of ourselves avoiding self-extinction by capitalist consumerism. Breaking through the plots of big industry and enlightening the masses to use technology to return to true democracy by informing and surveying the masses through social media for example. The next step in human history will be to go through the 4th industrial revolution which has already started digitizing human knowledge and culture. A new system now operates in data centers as the core of human collaboration, collecting information from the masses soon generating complete automation of our global society under a self-managed Artificial Intelligence which will slightly change the purpose of human civilization. The question then will be; Who will be in charge?

Thank you Taras Voevodin for proofreading.