Thanksgiving

Ecclesiastes 5:13-20

New International Version (NIV)

13 I have seen a grievous evil under the sun: wealth hoarded to the harm of its owners,

14 or wealth lost through some misfortune, so that when they have children there is nothing left for them to inherit.

15 Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb, and as everyone comes, so they depart. They take nothing from their toil that they can carry in their hands.

16 This too is a grievous evil: As everyone comes, so they depart, and what do they gain,
since they toil for the wind?

17 All their days they eat in darkness, with great frustration, affliction and anger.

18 This is what I have observed to be good: that it is appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them—for this is their lot.

19 Moreover, when God gives someone wealth and possessions, and the ability to enjoy them, to accept their lot and be happy in their toil—this is a gift of God.

20 They seldom reflect on the days of their life, because God keeps them occupied with gladness of heart.

Global Consciousness Project

I added a link to the Worthwhile Endeavors section for Global Consciousness Project because, although it’s somewhat nebulous and non-material and not a project that immediately provides for peoples material needs, I never the less feel it’s an extremely worthwhile and important project because it aims to understand the interaction between our consciousnesses and the physical world.

I have been aware since my early teens that the interaction between the world and my conscious self was not a one-way relationship.  It’s not just the world affecting me, and to the degree my consciousness affects the material world, it’s not completely limited to physical acts or even subtle interactions with other human beings.

There is a theory sometimes referred to as “Post Quantum” which basically states that not only is there an explicit and implicate order to things, but there is something underlying the implicate and that is the realm of consciousness.

On that level, I don’t think space and time are the barriers that they are on the explicit level, and many things that we consider mystical would be totally explainable if we only fully understood the super-implicate as it has been called.

The Global Consciousness Project is one such project that is collecting data that may help us understand the relationship between our collective consciousness and the physical world, and, if we were able to gain a more solid understanding of this, I think it would have huge implications for mankind.  I won’t explain all the details of the Global Consciousness Project here since they are explained on their site.  If you are interested in the nature of everything, and especially the mystery of consciousness, then this is a good site to explore.

For those of you who believe we already understand it, it’s explainable as an epiphenomena of neural activity, then I would suggest that you either haven’t paid sufficient attention to your own subjective experience or you are not conscious. The neural explanation can explain how the brain takes data from the external world and interprets it.  It can explain why this neuron fires when the color red is present, and that one when the color blue.

What it does not explain is why red is experienced the way we experience red and blue as we experience blue.  I am aware that even that experience may be vastly different from individual to individual.  For example, some women have not three but four different wavelengths their cone cells in their retina are sensitive to and for them color has to be a much deeper experience than for the rest of us.  Never the less, I think for the majority there is a commonality in the experience though I can’t really justify this belief empirically.  That is just a very minute sample of what I mean by the subjective experience.

There are people that argue there is no inner core or interpreter of all the neural activity but I would suggest otherwise, because without that we can’t “experience” things subjectively as we do.  I am aware that as I type this, there may be those who truly do not have that inner core, do not have that subjective experience, and to those of you for whom that is the case then perhaps what I am trying to express makes no sense at all.

I hope that perhaps this touches people who do have that subjective experience and that you will find this project interesting.  I am also aware that there are people who are far more conscious than myself, who have realized their capacity for self-awareness to a much greater degree than I and I’m always interested in conversing with such people because it is an area I am interesting in exploring and expanding on myself.