How Meditation Helped Me

Overcome the Fear of Being Alone

and Find Myself
BY GUEST AUTHORJUNE 2, 2015FOOD FOR THOUGHT, SELF-IMPROVEMENT, SELF-KNOWLEDGE &
PERSONALITY TESTS

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a
monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146 (1886)

I hope youll forgive me for rolling out the beloved of goths syphilitic nihilist poet as an
opening quote, but when were talking about the depths of the human soul there are
few who can yet match Nietzsche. Especially if we ignore that he was completely off his
head for most of his life and hated almost everything and everyone.
Nietzsche strikes me as the kind of chap who might have benefited from taking a few
minutes here and there to be with himself and be ok. Nietzsches touch of genius came
from the same dark place that lives inside all humans. We all have the internal voice
that in benign moods counsels caution and in dark times encourages us to throw
ourselves in front of a bus. In a certain sense, it could be said that a lot of our activities,
art, procrastination and self-destruction comes from a desire to occupy our minds, to
quiet the nagging internal voice.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, people try all sorts of things to silence
their inner voice; alcohol, casual sex, cannabis, various other substances, ranging
from amphetamines and MDMA to LSD and Valium, and avoiding being alone as
much as possible.
If I can be allowed for a moment to condense the entirety of Eckhart Tolles teachings
to a couple of sentences, we run away from the present moment, for fear of being
left alone with our own head. When we are inactive, that is, not mentally engaged in
a task or activity, we quickly veer off into unconscious thought. Its not our present
mind doing the thinking, as we are in essence merely the spark of consciousness. We
are our attention. This is the necessary leap of understanding to glean. The voice in
your head, the internal monologue, is not you.
How could this be? Who are we, if we are not the sum of all that goes into making up
the self? Tolle defines the internal monologue as the ego, and I find it hard to disagree.
The mental pushes and prods we receive from our egos are incessant. While to my
mind (my conscious mind, that is) it is clear that at some point in our evolutionary
history this vocalised subconscious served some purpose.
Perhaps it was this internal monologue that enable Gogg and Mogg to conceptualise
new ways of defeating the sabre toothed tiger. We all know the occasional pleasure of
a creative daydream. The problem I see with the modern human is that for the most

part we no longer have the day to day struggle for survival at least, in the existential
sense of being eaten or murdered. While this removal of threats is undoubtedly a
benefit, we still have the OH MY GOD A TIGER mechanism.
Left unchecked this preservation mechanism we all possess feeds on all of the stimuli
that we experience during our day to day lives. With the elimination of existential
threats, our egos become existential. Oh, sweet irony. This leads us to self-destruction,
self-criticism and to being separated from the present moment while we indulge the
fears conjured by our minds. See the above list of techniques we apply to ourselves to
avoid the crushing weight of the imaginary self.
Its probably not a great surprise that the adoption of a better diet, exercise and
meditation have been far more successful for most than any amount of selfmedication. What we must all learn is the simple truth that the ego will not be quelled
by the simple application of sex, drugs, alcohol, overeating and escapism from oneself
in general.
This is where meditation comes in. I, like you perhaps, spent a lot of time looking for
things without finding them. Looking external to myself for solutions to problems that
lie within naturally led to no correct answers at all, and the continuation of the
dominance of my ego.
Meditation feels weird. When I stopped what I was doing, sat down in my quiet room
and closed my eyes, there was a tidal assault of thoughts and ideas. Mainly they told
me that I was surely a fool for trying to meditate in the first place, and a pint would
surely be better. This proceeded for some time.
Fortunately for me that I had for once taken a pro-active approach and read up a little
on what to expect from meditation. This assault from within was thus one I for which I
was prepared. While still feeling like a bit of an arse, I acknowledged the thoughts
telling me I was a fool and let them pass on. After a time, my mind became quieter.
And after some more time, quieter still, until I was, for the first sober time, quite
alone in my mind. I found that it was this tranquil loneliness that had been driving me
for my entire adult life. As it happens, the company of my attention and presence was
quite pleasant.

The fear of being alone with ourselves drives us to mindlessness, instead of

mindfulness. Once we stop looking into the abyss and take a few tentative steps into
it, we can find that the abyss is not so bad at all. Trust me, youre going to feel like a
massive idiot when you try it. Thats totally fine, it is kind of funny, sitting there and
thinking about nothing. I would suggest though, that it beats letting the television or a
drink occupy our minds as if we are infants who need constant entertaining.
When trying to fill the abyss, we should remember that no amount of stimulation or
distraction will suffice. We are the abyss, and the abyss is kind of beautiful once you get
to know it.

Quantum Theory Explains What

Consciousness Is
BY NICK HARDINGMAY 25, 2015FOOD FOR THOUGHT, HUMAN BRAIN, PHYSICS & NATURAL
SCIENCES, UNCOMMON SCIENCE

For a very long time mankind has questioned what consciousness is whether our
ability to think, our free will, is tied directly to our soul or if its a component of the
complexity of our brains. I intend to shed some light on a few theories as conceived
bySusan Pocket and John McFadden. While these theories have had some criticism
from the scientific community, McFadden had his article presented to an editorial
board after peer review before it was published on these topics, and is considered a
viable scientific theory to be taken into consideration.

OUR BRAINS THE BIOMECHANICAL GOVERNER

The basis of the theory, the very cornerstone which it is built on, is the fact that our
brains function on firing neurons and chemical reaction. The action of a neuron
firing is an electrical occurrence and results in some of the same things we see in
electricity during the course of a common day. When our brain fires a neuron, it builds
up the postsynaptic potential in an adjacent neuron, which then fires in rapid sequence
until the signal reaches its destination. The timing, quantity, position, and specific
millivolt assignment for these communications are dictated by ribonucleic acids and
various chemicals transferring across pathways through our nervous system. Our DNA
dictates these transactions and influences the generation electricity and the paths it
takes. McFaddon found that it is very evident that
McFaddon found that it is very evident that each neuron firing triggers a disturbance
in the surrounding electromagnetic field. It has been witnessed that this field is
abundantly more prominent with synchronous firing of the neurons that when the
neurons trigger the electromagnetic field builds exponentially if the firing is
synchronous. This synchrony is affected and affects our free will; our choice of actions
is argued to be our subjective experience of the field acting on our neurons. In other
words, our thoughts build synchrony and it compounds to generate the
electromagnetic field which then feeds energy back to the neurons which initially fired,
influencing them. This is referred to as the CEMI theory, Conscious ElectroMagnetic
Information.

CEMI THEORY
The synchrony of the neurons inherently generates patterns in the EM field.
These patterns modulate the firing of particular neurons, in turn; so, the processes of
the brain are driven by deterministic electromagnetic interactions between the
field and the neurons. Due to this, and the recognition of patterns we are all so vastly
equipped for, it allows for the integration of parts into a whole. For example, a persons
face is not seen as a collection of features, but rather a face. This is due to the
integration of the patterns into the electromagnetic field, according to the CEMI theory
as McFaddon and Pocket believe.

In 2013, McFaddon published an update to the theory which explained experiments in

Christopher Kochs lab, demonstrating effects concurrent with the prediction that EM
fields influence brain function. This theory suggests that our consciousness, thought
patterns and DNA-based instincts are actually manifested physically as EM fields,
picked up as brain waves.

QUANTUM BRAIN DYNAMICS (QBD)

The human brain is comprised of 70% water. The QBD theory proposes that the water
molecule dipoles constitute a quantum field, referred to as the cortical field. In
the 1960s, two physicists, Hiroomi Umezawa and Herbert Frhlich, did substantial
research and composed a published thesis on the notion of QBD. This theory
compliments the CEMI theory as conceived by McFadden and Pocket. The thought that
the cortical field governs brain dynamics suggests that the energy between the
cortical field and the biomolecular EM waves from the neural network produce
consciousness.

UNIFIED PERSPECTIVE
The notion that the consciousness is governed, stored, and maintained in an
electromagnetic field as generated and fed back to our neurons poses explanation to
age old questions pertaining to the structure of thought itself. One such question is
regarding the capability of conceiving thousands of details regarding a singular topic
upon the mere mention of said topic. This is, based on CEMI and QBD, because the
electromagnetic field around our neurons is storing the data concurrent with our
beliefs and experiences, helping to define our consciousness and persona. It
makes sense considering the proven reaction between the chemicals and electrical
reactions happening across our brain, in conjunction with the developed fields which
are associated with sections, and the slices of our brain which are known to manage
different aspects of our thought process.
For a very long time, we have all wondered what are we, what is this form of
consciousness, and how can our conscious mind maintain stability through our lives? Is
consciousness granted by a higher power? And as a question posed by many science
fiction authors, including the creator of Star Trek, would a synthetic life form have its

own consciousness, thoughts, and feelings? The aforementioned theories suggest

that they, in spite of origin, would support consciousness. In order for artificial
intelligence to be able to exist, at the very least, the pattern recognition capability that
CEMI offers would be necessary. Branching out further, yet, would it not pertain to
other life forms which operate based on firing neurons? Our pets, our wild animals in
the forest and ocean, and, maybe even our plants? How far does the influence of this
recent theorizing bring our understanding of consciousness?

Wheeler's delayed-choice gedanken experiment with a

single atom
The waveparticle dual nature of light and matter and the fact that the choice of measurement
determines which one of these two seemingly incompatible behaviours we observe are examples
of the counterintuitive features of quantum mechanics. They are illustrated by Wheelers famous
delayed-choice experiment1, recently demonstrated in a single-photon experiment2. Here, we
use a single ultracold metastable helium atom in a MachZehnder interferometer to create an
atomic analogue of Wheelers original proposal. Our experiment confirms Bohrs view that it
does not make sense to ascribe the wave or particle behaviour to a massive particle before the
measurement takes place1. This result is encouraging for current work towards entanglement and
Bells theorem tests in macroscopic systems of massive particles3.

At a glance