Consciousness Studies

 

The Extended Mind – Mind Beyond the Brain 

Notes from this video:

In the closed circuit TV industry, many operatives know that you can affect people’s behavior by looking at them. One FBI trainer tells his security trainees, “If you see someone doing something they shouldn’t be doing, just stare at them hard on the screen, and they’ll probably stop it.” He says that this happens everyday.

Various experiments show that people’s skin conductance changes when they are being watched on CCTV by someone on a monitor in another room.

(see Marilyn Schlitz http://marilynschlitz.com/bio/)

Martial artists are trained to increase their sensitivity so that they can sense when someone is coming up from behind.

In the British Special Services, the SAS, when they train people how to stab someone in the back, they say, “Don’t stare at their back before you stab them, because they’re likely to feel it and turn around and shoot you.”

Security professionals are amazed that this is a controversial subject in science academia, because they have been taking it for granted for years.

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How Advertising Gets You – an interview with Clotaire Rappaille

An excerpt from the Frontline series The Persuaders – an in-depth look at advertising strategies and methods that work on the most primitive levels of our brain. As Rappaille says, “I don’t care what you think, because the reptilian always wins.” (File this under the category Know Thyself.)

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The Century of the Self

The Century of the Self is a British television documentary film that focuses its attention on Sigmund Freud’s family,  especially his daughter and nephew,  who exerted a surprising amount of influence on the way corporations and governments throughout the  20th century have thought about,  and dealt with,  people.

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The Trap

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom is a BBC documentary series by English filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Century of the Self and The Power of Nightmares. It began airing on BBC Two on 11 March 2007.

The series consists of three, one-hour programmes which explore the concept and definition of freedom, specifically “how a simplistic model of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today’s idea of freedom.”

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Moral Politics: George Lakoff

UC Berkeley professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics George Lakoff explores how successful political debates are framed by using language targeted to people’s values instead of their support for specific government programs in this public lecture sponsored by the Helen Edison Series at UC San Diego. Series: “Helen Edison Lecture Series” [11/2005] [Public Affairs] [Show ID: 11194]

It is not the purpose of this website to promote a particular political point of view. Lakoff is important in that he has a lot to say about how we think and what shapes our thoughts. It is important for us to know why we think the way we do.

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Interview with Joe Miller, an American Mystic

Joe Miller was an authentic American mystic who taught in many ways, the most famous being the Thursday morning walks through Golden Gate Park. Joe never charged for anything. On the contrary, he treated everyone to ice cream at the Ocean Safeway near the beach. Working together with his wife, Guin Miller, from the 1960s to the 1990s, they inspired thousands of people throughout the world. With their music, walks in the park, evenings at the SFTS and their deeply compassionate, one-on-one friendship, they touched many lives and offered a powerful example of the unconditional love and simple awareness that operates at the heart of all the world’s great mystical traditions.

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Ken Wilbur on Seeking Enlightenment

Ken Wilber discusses seeking enlightenment in the modern World in this clip from the new DVD “Spirituality in the Modern World: A dialogue with Ken Wilber and Traleg Rinpoche”

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Rev. Peter Gomes (Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University) speaks about spiritual authority and the misuse of power, the tendency toward the belief in personal infallibility in matters of spirit, and the lack of humility in those who profess to know the truth. He also addresses the problem of vicarious virtue, a kind of reverse scapegoatism where the student expects the teacher to be good for everyone else and how this robs a spiritual community of the opportunity to work in partnership towards salvation and transformation.

This video is one hour long. It is insightful, meaningful, and pertinent to the life of a Christian mystic.

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Class War by Noam Chomsky (Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political activist. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Government is the shadow cast by business over society. You cannot change society by working on the shadow; you have to address the substance. In these trying economic times, it is easy to blame the government for our declining standard of living. But there are much larger forces at work. Regardless of your political beliefs, a study of how and why big business is able to operate invisibly in its unprecedented control over the world will reveal much about your beliefs about yourself, your autonomy, and your consciousness.