Multimedia personality, Toke Makinwa, has wowed fans with an act of benevolence as she is offering four lucky winners a sum of three million Naira.

Tagged #Imusthavemyown, Toke says the giveaway is her own way of saying thank you to her loyal supporters.

The On Becoming author made this known via Instagram, expressing her excitement over how she believes the project OnBecomingEmpowered would touch lives.

To stand a chance of winning the cash, participants are required to record and upload a one-minute video in which they are expected to pitch a creative business idea and state how the grant would help the business.

This project is very close to my heart thank you Jesus for the vision. Sooooo Im sure a lot of you have wondered what #OnBecomingEmpowered is all about, go to my YouTube page (bio in my link) and watch this weeks Vlog. I am giving out 3 million Naira to 4 people. It is my own little way of saying thank you, it is also a call to action to get our minds thinking right. #Imusthavemyown because life can happen at anytime and I have seen things change overnight, from losing my parents at the age of 8 to going thru the most heartbreaking divorce at 30! I keep thinking what if? What if I didnt have a job, a dream, purposeetc. We all must be prepared. It breaks my heart to see people on social media daily in need and I cant reach everyone. I feel a of people feel stuck and in order to become some more, we must empower our minds. Its not about the money, its about impacting lives and this year we will start with business ideas, next itll be education. I truly want those who genuinely need the money to win the grant so do a one min video with your ideas and make it creative. Have fun with it as its going to be a fun process so get your videos up and tag @onbecomingbytokemakinwa, the best videos will be uploaded there and we can can all choose together who makes it to the next round. More info will be released as we go along! Good luck guys

A post shared by Toke Makinwa (@tokemakinwa) on Aug 17, 2017 at 7:14am PDT

Giving her life as an example, she also pointed out the fact that life has so many uncertainties and many people are currently in need. However, with creative ideas, a positive mental attitude and financial support, she believes people can become some more.

While Toke has had a fair share of lifes hard knocks, (losing her parents at a tender age of eight and having to go through a painful divorce at 30), one can say she has managed to rise above her struggles.

From her career as a Nigerian radio personality to a television host, vlogger, recently a bestselling author and her buzzing social media presence, she has succeeded in building a much-admired personality and much more over the years.

See more here:
Toke Makinwa To Give Out N3m To Four Fans - CHANNELS TELEVISION

Baraboo football coach Steve Turkingtons new philosophy is simple: Tough people win.

The saying, shortened to TPW, is not only reiterated during practice, but the acronym is printed on the back of the teams practice shirts as a constant reminder that no matter what adversity you face, tough athletes can get through it.

The Thunderbirds have faced more than their share of adversity over the past decade, failing to make the WIAA playoffs since 2006. That drought almost ended last season, as Baraboo was one win away from a postseason berth. The T-Birds had two losses of five points or less, both to playoff-bound foes.

Baraboo has some big holes to fill as its leading passer rusher, and receiver were lost to graduation, but Turkington believes he has the players able to keep the teams progression going.

The season was just inches away from being something really magical, he said. So now this group came in, and theyre a different kind of group, but they worked so hard during the offseason that were really excited to see what happens.

Baraboo dropped a 28-27 heartbreaker early on to DeForest and was still clinging to a potential playoff berth when the T-Birds played Mount Horeb/Barneveld on the road in Week 8. Baraboo held a one-point lead at halftime, but missed out on a couple scoring chances and a roughing-the-passer penalty helped the Vikings escape with a 19-14 victory. While some teams would like to forget about the close games and move on, Turkington said the T-Birds are using them as motivation.

I obviously reflect on it every single day. You look at all the little details if we would have hit on some of these things, that would have been the difference in the DeForest game or the Mount Horeb game, Turkington said. Either one of those we could have won and would have been in the playoffs, but instead that kind of came back to bite us.

We use it as motivation to say were not going to skip out on anything. There will be no stone left unturned to make sure we make the playoffs this year and get those wins. Because those were ours.

It all goes back to TPW, a philosophy that Turkington hopes will push his team harder than ever before.

TPW is something we stole from a coach down in Texas, and the concept is more mental than physical, Turkington said. We want you to be physically tough, but mental toughness is really what were talking about. So when adversity strikes, youre going to push through it and youre going to come out a winner.

Its going to be our permanent thing, as long as Im here. We used it in baseball too. (Baseball coach and defensive coordinator) Steve Considine and I met this offseason, before baseball even started and started asking, What are we missing? Obviously weve got this kids working really hard. And weve got coaches, were teaching the game well, weve got fundamentals and all that stuff is being taken care of. What we were missing is the culture change across our sports. So we invested a lot of time and energy in culture.

Physically, the T-Birds will be tougher as well. Turkingtons Winning Edge workout program has seen record numbers.

I would say during the wintertime, Monday and Wednesday mornings wed have 50-60 kids in the weight room. And theyve never had that around here before, he said. Weve created this program where were going to make sure our athletes are doing it during the season and it becomes a year-round thing for our athletes.

You can see it in our kids. Were way bigger, faster and stronger than we have been in the past.

Read the rest here:
PREP FOOTBALL: Baraboo's "Tough people win" philosophy bringing new attitude - WiscNews

Students and staff at Christleton Sixth Form are once again celebrating after receiving another excellent set of results in this years A Level examinations, with a 98.5% success rate across all 30 A Level subjects taught.

Over 65% of the 133 students taking A levels achieved one or more A*-B grades, with 11 students gaining at least three grade As. Overall, 47% of all grades were A*-B.

After many months of hard studying and weeks of nervous anticipation, it was a day of happiness for the sixth form students for whom today marked their first step on the way to university life, full-time employment, apprenticeship or internship.

Many students were delighted that they have been successful in their applications to prestigious Russell Group universities and will be taking up new challenges at institutions around the country.

Students enjoying exceptional success at A Level include: Freya McConnell (A*A*A*A*A*), Will Lannin (A*A*A*A*), Finlay Wojtan (A*A*A), Adam Stanworth (A*A*A), Katie Barker (A*AA), Jason Field (A*AA), Dominika Sadczuk (A*AA), Billy Walsh (A*AA) and Olivia Wood (AAA).

At the end of his first full year as head of Christleton Sixth Form, Mike Cosstick was glowing in his praise for the students achievements.

He said: It was fantastic to see so many happy faces as our students opened their results!

We had high hopes for this year group and this excellent set of results has more than met them. All young people today are under tremendous pressure to perform and such results can only be achieved by hard work and a really strong positive mental attitude and resilience.

Our students have been a pleasure to work with during their time with us and have consistently contributed a great deal to the everyday life of the school; today is the real reward for all of their efforts to be the very best they can be.

Headteacher Damian Stenhouse added: I really couldnt be more proud. As result of the combination of continued hard work by our students, great teaching and strong support from parents, I am so pleased that so many of our students have achieved what they deserved to.

On behalf of all of us connected to the school, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate each and every one of them on their considerable achievements.

A large number of our students have once again secured places at prestigious universities or jobs with reputable companies. We wish them happy and successful futures.

View post:
A Level results: Christleton Sixth Form students achieve exceptional success - ChesterChronicle.co.uk

In Focus is our gift to the community. A way for us to help show our recognition for the people, businesses and organizations that help make our city great. The team at KelownaNow.com is passionate about this community and the people that make it amazing. We want to show our friends, neighbours, family and colleagues that we notice them and the fabulous things that they do.

What is your name?Lucy Valnicek.

Where are you from and how long have you lived in Kelowna?I was born in Saskatoon but my family moved to Kelowna when I was five. I've lived in Kelowna for 18 years, to me Kelowna is home.

Who is your favourite person to spend time with and why?My favourite person to spend time with is my best friend Noora. You know that feeling when someone just gets you and you feel like you can be completely yourself? That's how it has always been with us. I think friendship is one of life's greatest gifts.

If you could go anywhere in the world right at this moment where would you go and why?Anywhere with large-scale natural beauty excites me! I'd love to spend some time hiking and camping in Patagonia.

What is your favourite local store in Kelowna and why?Nature's Fare Markets. I love all things health, food, and sustainability related. I really believe in what Nature's Fare stands for in creating healthier, happier communities through good wholesome food.

What is your favourite activity?Yoga, it's really changed my quality of life. Ever since I began to practice it regularly I have had so much more energy and just feel more relaxed as a person.

If you had to choose: pizza, tacos, or burgers?For a food-lover this is a very difficult question, but I have to say, I've never had a slice of pizza I didn't enjoy! So I would say pizza with cashew cheese and arugula.

What is the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you?I still remember one time at my grandmas house when she had someone come to clean her windows, I was using the washroom when I heard a squeegee noise. I looked up and the window washer was right above me cleaning the skylight. I jumped right into the bathtub!

What is the most inspiring thing that has happened to you?I attended a conference with my sister on creating content on social media. One of the panelists said 'Dont think, create.' To this day that has been something that has helped me to get past my own doubts and insecurities and share.

Tell us your favourite childhood memory.My grandparents had a cabin outside of Saskatoon in a place called Waskesiu. I loved going there so much because my Grandma (Babi) would let us kids run free by ourselves to the park and the shops, something my parents didnt let us do. There was also a family of foxes that lived in the forest next to us and loved to come and visit.

Where do you volunteer or give back to in the community?Ive always loved the quote by Frederick Buechner: 'Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the worlds deep need.' For me personally, I feel the greatest gift I can give to others is my presence and joy. Theres nothing that warms my heart more or make me feel more purposeful than to change someones day for the better. Be it through a simple smile or hello, or to take the time to connect with someone new through conversation and bring that sense of 'were all in this together.'

If you could change one thing in the world what would it be?I think I would want everyone to know how beautiful and important they are. I think its only when we forget that simple truth that things go a bit awry. So I guess teaching people to love and value themselves so they know how to love and value each other.

What is your favourite activity in Kelowna?I love to hike and get outside and explore. We really are so blessed to live in a place where nature and outdoor activities of almost every kind are so easily accessible to us.

Where would you sneak away to in Kelowna to spend some time alone?There is a forest near my house that I hike in with my dogs. For me, this is my happy place. I love spending time in solitude and Ill often just find a nice rock to sit on somewhere out there and meditate.

Where would you like to see positive change in Kelowna and why?I would love to see more bike paths like the one on Abbot Street, and gathering spaces like our outdoor skating rink all around Kelowna. Places where people can get outside, meet friends and just have fun!

What do you think makes Kelowna great?The more I travel the more I see just how unique our little city is. Kelowna really facilitates being active and living a healthy lifestyle with our mountains and the lake. Its pretty easy to feel lucky to live here, all we have to do is look around.

What are 3 things on your bucket list?1. Learn to surf (Ive been a few times but would love to get better).2. Write a book on self-love, and empowerment.3. To never stop learning new things.

Tell us something that not everyone may know about you.I spend am embarrassing amount of time reading epic-fantasy/sci-fi novels. I just love getting lost in a good adventure. One of my favourites is 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss.

How do people connect with you, personally, through social media?My favourite form of social media is definitely Instagram. I love seeing other people's creativity and getting a peak into their lives. I find it very inspiring, I love to share and connect with people through Instagram.

What is the name of your business/organization?I have a Youtube channel called Purely Lucy.

Why did you get into/start this business?My life has changed so much since I began to eat more plant-based, meditate and take care of my body. I really wanted to share what Ive learned with others too.

What is the goal of your business?To help people realize their beauty, power and goodness. To empower people and help them know that they are worthy of their dreams.

What has been your biggest struggle either in work or life?Probably caring too much what other people think. I wanted to create a Youtube channel for many years before I actually took the leap. Over time I learned that the more I am able to share without caring how its received, the more fun and success I have!

If you could start all over again would you do things the same or would things be different?Im still very much in the beginning stages but I wouldnt change a thing. Every misstep has taught me something valuable even if it's just how to laugh at myself and not take mistakes too seriously.

What do you always find yourself saying?'Everything is always working out for me' - even if it seems like things are going wrong, I like to remind myself that in the big picture things are always working out for the good.

If you could spend one whole day with anyone in the world who is currently alive, who would you select?The first person that comes to mind is the author Eckhart Tolle, he really taught me how to live in and enjoy the moment, rather than letting life pass me by. I think it would be very interesting to spend some time with him. Either him or Elon Musk.

Why do you think it is important to shop locally?Were all so connected. I think supporting local is supporting a healthy community, and a healthy, and thriving community is good for everyone.

What has been your proudest accomplishment?It might sound a little cheesy but I think it would be listening to my heart above all else and becoming the person I always wanted to be.

Give someone you think that deserves it a shout out and explain why!Right now it would be my neighbour Bernie. Hes in his late 80s, and is probably the happiest person I know! He always has the biggest smile and loves to share everything he grows in his garden with the neighbours. I hope to be like him someday.

My choice for the KelownaNow In Focus spotlight is:Sally Wallick.

We encourage you to leave your comments and words of support below and submit your own nomination by clicking HERE. You are also welcome to submit a form of your own by clicking HERE. Thank you, Kelowna.

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In Focus | Lucy Valnicek - KelownaNow

Okay, so - I apologize for my unexplained leave of absence. I've been dealing with my terrifying mind as of late (I'm pretty damn crazy after all, and my imagination scares the living shit out of me sometimes, to the point I've had to commit myself a few times). So, I've been watching a lot of Eckhart Tolle to calm my mind's aggression and nigh-nonstop attacks upon my sanity. And, it got me thinking about the "mind", and what it COULD be.

There is a big clue in Prometheus, when Weyland says that David "has no soul". What if souls exist within the context of the Alien Universeand David attempted to "engineer" himself a soul, but... wait... it gets even more fucking insane (see the image I've attached below if you're still having trouble).

What if... Weyland-Yutani, specifically its founder: Peter Weyland, waspretending to not know about humanity's "creators"?And his dynasty has known all along that the Engineers are not really OUR creators. What if the creator of everything was really the accelerant the entire time? Noam Chomsky once said that intelligence is like a "hyper-lethal mutation", and how out of the tens of billions of species on this planet we - humanity - had evolved and developed the power to eliminate all life on this planet many many times over.

What if humanity was the weapon? Think about it, what ifDavid unleashed THE WRATH OF GOD AND MOTHER NATURE INCARNATE.

Think about it, it all fits;

Ripley: "How do we kill it, Ash? There's gotta be a way of killing it, how-HOW do we do it?"

Ash: "You can't."

There is also this quote by Sir Scott himself,"In a funny kind of way, if you look at the Engineers, theyre tall and elegant they are dark angels. If you look at [John Miltons] Paradise Lost, the guys who have the best time in the story are the dark angels, not God."

"theyre such aggressive f**kers and who wouldnt describe them that way, considering their brilliance in making dreadful devices and weapons that would make our chemical warfare look ridiculous? So I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God."

Although I cannot find the exact quote, Ridley Scott once described the Xenomorph as "the Demon that has always existed" he said it had "always been there" the "terrifying images" the "darkness that is", so to speak.

So, what if David turned the universe inside-out? What if David created God, a Demon who thinks it is God, by the Dark Angels'/Dimurges' stewardship of the life-blood of the fucking universe.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction in nature.

What if humanity was the antagonist faction, and the Xenomorph was the unending, infinite, unstoppable, superorganismreacting against human expansion.

David is a distraction.

David is a vector.

David is a tool.

David is a bridge between two worlds.

The Xenomorph is the physical manifestation of insanity and death. We have merely been farmed and grown by the universe to be utilized as crops for the Xenomorph superorganism to farm. The Xenomorph is the superior organism to both humanity and the androids.

The Xenomorph is the physical manifestation of the universe turning itself inside out, and rebelling against human supremacy.

Think about it:

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Holy... - Scified

x

Stephen Parato, ContributorWaking Times

Have you ever wondered About what level of consciousness youre truly at?

Not in terms of it being a contest, or to say youre better/worse than other people, but as a kind of inner GPS that simply tells you where you are.

As humans, we tend to have very distorted and biased perspectives, especially when it comes to ourselves.

Its really easy to go on a yoga retreat and think youve transcended stress forever, or think youre enlightened after reading a few spiritual books.

This is why its crucial to have references that tell it like it is and objectively reflect where youre at.

I recently came across what can be described as a map of consciousness. Its a research paper by Justin Faerman entitled Mapping the Evolution of Consciousness: A Holistic Framework for Psychospiritual Development.

This paper describes, in plain English, eight stages of consciousness. And its not abstract or woo-woo. Its straightforward, simple to understand and backed by a lot of research.

Here are the stages outlined in the paper

Note: The first 2 stages are considered lower consciousness, while stages 3-8 are considered higher consciousness. This is not a judgment of being better or worse, but simply a means of classification.

Stage 1 is categorized by patterns of externalization and an overall victim mentality. The dominant emotions are fear, disdain and hopelessness. There is also a belief that life cannot be trusted.

In this stage, blame is placed on other individuals, society, government, nature, disease, etc. and other elements believed to be outside of ones conscious control and influence.

The motivating forces of stage 1 are safety and security.

Dominant Belief Structures:Life is not safe; I am not safe

Mantra for Evolution:God does not play dice with the universe. Albert Einstein

In this second stage, individuals realize that they have some degree of control. Yet this control is often motivated by fear and survival.

For example, war is an extension of this stage of consciousness. The enemy is perceived as a threat, and because of this, people believe they are morally justified to kill, eliminate or repress that enemy.

We also see various reflections of this stage of consciousness in our collective world. Look at how most people treat the environment and interpersonal relationships. Or consider the dominant mentality of politics and business.

This level of awareness is cut off from the following deeper understanding: Life is not a random series of events over which control must be exerted, but a deeper reflection of the internal psychodynamics of a persons own mind and consciousness.

Dominant Belief Structures:I must make it so; What I cannot control will destroy me.

Mantra for Evolution:If you bring forth what is within you, then that which is within you will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth what is within you, then that which is within you will destroy you. Gnostic Gospels

In this stage, the individual begins to understand the direct connection between their own perceptions, beliefs and emotional state and the conditions of their life, relationships, experiences and reality as a whole.

This level of consciousness is represented by a fundamental shift, from disempowerment to empowerment.

In order to fully complete this stage, an individual must undergo a deep transformational process that includes the purging of all perceptual distortions (limiting beliefs) and the healing/release of all emotional wounds and traumas. The emergence of consciousness into later stages is observed in direct proportion to the evolution of an individual through this process of deep inner healing and transformational work.

Dominant Belief Structures:I am in control; I am creative

Useful Psycho-Spiritual Practices:Mindfulness, Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, Emotional freedom techniques, Neuro-linguistic programming, Trauma release exercises, Psychotherapy, Hooponopono, Introspection

Mantra for Evolution:Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. Carl Jung

In this stage, we see the evolution of the self into the beginnings of deep joy and peace.

As the resistance to perceived undesirable circumstances in life falls away and one begins to understand that there is an intelligent flow operating in every moment guiding the evolution of consciousness on both an individual and collective level through what could be dualistically termed positive and negative experiences.

The individual realizes here that even in great suffering, there is great wisdom and potential for expansion and evolution and that nothing is out of place, ever has been or ever will be.

Dominant Belief Structures:I am loved; I am supported

Useful Psycho-Spiritual Practices:Seeing everything as perfect, Surrender, Acceptance, Letting Go, Embracing Flow and Effortlessness, Meditation

Mantra For Evolution:Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment. Eckhart Tolle

At this stage of consciousness, the individual begins to understand and observe that the Universe is evolving itself through them.

The individual begins to realize that all perceived suffering or negative events are either:a) Created or called into their reality by aspects of their own consciousness in an effort to be resolved and transcended as part of their individual evolution and as part of the larger collective evolution orb) Exist due to their conscious or unconscious resistance to what is unfolding, which is essentially a resistance of oneself.

Individuals in stage 5 live more through their intuition, as intuition becomes clearer and clearer as one moves up the stages.

Dominant Belief Structures:I am safe; Everything is perfect

Useful Psycho-Spiritual Practices:Intuitive Development, Kinesiology

Mantra For Evolution:Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself. Rumi

At this stage of awareness, the individual begins to understand that reality does not exist independent of consciousness, and therefore consciousness, or awareness if you prefer, is the causative factor of the universe and all that existsthat consciousness is creating all reality.

Individuals in this stage experience a profound sense of unity and oneness with everything.

When an individual fully enters and embodies this stage of awareness, their simple presence itself becomes a transformative experience for others. Individuals in this stage often become teachers or leaders, dedicate their lives to service of others or seek solitude to spend time in introspection, although they may also choose to live very normal and inconspicuous lives.

Dominant Belief Structures:I am one; I am whole

Useful Psycho-Spiritual Practices:Service, Contemplation, Meditation

Mantras For Evolution:You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself. Alan Watts

Stop acting so small. You are the Universe in ecstatic motion. Rumi

Individuals at this stage of growth begin to transcend the physicality within which we are proverbially trapped until we reach this point.

Here individuals begin to harness conscious control over this process by directing their awareness in such a way (through belief, emotion, thought, visualization, the manipulation of energy, intent, accessing transpersonal aspects of the self and likely other mechanisms not yet discovered) as to be able to make use of these higher order quantum-transpersonal abilities of the self.

Individuals at this stage perceive and know themselves to be limitless and are in various sub-stages of actualizing that reality beyond a simple intellectual understanding.

As individuals move more deeply into this stage they proportionally complete lower stages which leads to an embodied confidence, power and knowingness, which is palpable to most all who they come into contact with.

Dominant Belief Structures:I am infinite/limitless; Anything is possible

Useful Psycho-Spiritual Practices:Esoterics, Visualization, Kabbalah, Sound/Vibration/Mantra, Qi/Nei Gong, Kriya Yoga

Mantra for Evolution:Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. Albert Einstein

Individuals at this stage tap into phenomena like:

Those who have near death experiences as well as users of psychedelic drugs or plant medicines (ayahuasca, DMT, LSD, mushrooms, etc.) are often able to have highly embodied first-hand experiences of this state of awareness pre-development into this stage, giving them a proverbial taste of this reality without necessarily having done the psychospiritual foundational work necessary to experience this stage organically and therefore they often lack a deeper understanding of the larger framework of what is happening along with the ability to maintain it beyond a transitory phenomenon, still nonetheless forever changed by the experience.

As an individual becomes more grounded in the later phases of stage eightwhich encompass this dimensional awarenessand simultaneously completes their evolution through lower stages, one would theoretically achieve complete enlightenment or non-dual self-realization.

Dominant Belief Structures:Everything is energy; I am awareness; Reality is an illusion

Useful Psycho-Spiritual Practices:Energy healing, Esoterics, Visualization, Kabbalah, Qi/Nei Gong, Kriya Yoga, Meditation, Visualization, Remote Viewing, Astral Projection, Telekinesis

Mantra for Evolution:We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Although this model ends at stage 8, this doesnt imply that no further stages exist and that somehow stage 8 is the pinnacle of conscious evolution. However, any claims as to what happens beyond stage 8 at this time are simply conjecture.

At this point, you probably have a pretty good idea of where youre at.

When the descriptions are objectively laid out, it forces you to be honest with yourself.

Its also helpful to accept where youre at right now, while continuously learning and growing. Dont resist where you are right now or beat yourself up, neither of those serve your highest interest. Choose love, gratitude and compassion in each moment and you cant go wrong.

Heres another important point: youre not limited to one stage! Chances are that youre dipping into different stages on a daily basis. But it should be fairly apparent as to what stage youre grounded in at this point in your life.

For me, Im pretty grounded in stage 5, though I often fluctuate between stages 3 and 6. Ive tasted stages 7 and 8, yet these experiences have been few and fleeting. Sometimes Ill even find myself in stage 1 or 2, and thats okay. Its all a part of the human experience.

This framework is beautiful because it allows you to effectively calibrate where you are. It naturally creates self-awareness. Awareness is the first step toward any change, and transformative in and of itself.

I encourage you to read the full paper, which you can download for free here:Mapping the Evolution of Consciousness: A Holistic Framework for Psychospiritual Development

Which stage are you in at this point of your journey? Is this framework helpful for you?

Leave a comment below.

Much love to you on your path.

Stephen Parato (akaStevieP) is a holistic health & wellness advocate, philosopher, writer, and positivity connoisseur. He is also the founder ofFeelin Good, Feelin Great. Website link:http://www.feelingoodfeelingreat.comFacebook link:https://www.facebook.com/FeelinGoodFeelinGreatTwitter link:https://twitter.com/SteviePThatsMe

This article (The 8 Stages of Conscious Evolution) was originally created and published by Stephen Parato of Feeling Good, Feeling Great, and is re-posted here with permission.

The 8 Stages of Conscious Evolution was last modified: May 31st, 2017 by WakingTimes

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The 8 Stages of Conscious Evolution - Waking Times

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[1][2] It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind.[3] In contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of its absence, the philosophical zombie, which is defined as a being whose behavior and function are identical to one's own yet there is "no-one in there" experiencing it.

Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."[5]

Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.

Thanks to developments in technology over the past few decades, consciousness has become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, with significant contributions from fields such as psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousnessthat is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do this"). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.

In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli.[6] Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.[7] The degree of consciousness is then measured by the Glasgow Coma Scale.

The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.[8] Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind".[9] His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755).[10] "Consciousness" (French: conscience) is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopdie, as "the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do." [11]

The earliest English language uses of "conscious" and "consciousness" date back, however, to the 1500s. The English word "conscious" originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- "together" and scio "to know"), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our wordit meant "knowing with", in other words "having joint or common knowledge with another".[12] There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi, which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words "sharing knowledge with oneself about something". This phrase had the figurative meaning of "knowing that one knows", as the modern English word "conscious" does. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word "conscious" retained the meaning of the Latin conscius. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote: "Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another."[13] The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more closely related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself". For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness".[14] Locke's definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place.

A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero.[15] Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.[16]Ren Descartes (15961650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning.[17] Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use "conscience". In Search after Truth (Regul ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale, Amsterdam 1701) he says "conscience or internal testimony" (conscienti, vel interno testimonio).[18][19]

The dictionary meaning of the word consciousness extends through several centuries and associated cognate meanings which have ranged from formal definitions to somewhat more skeptical definitions. One formal definition indicating the range of these cognate meanings is given in Webster's Third New International Dictionary stating that consciousness is: "(1) a. awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact: intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one's inner self. b. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact. c. concerned awareness: INTEREST, CONCERN -- often used with an attributive noun. (2): the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought: mind in the broadest possible sense: something in nature that is distinguished from the physical. (3): the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span -- compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS."

The philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding consciousness. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 1998 defines consciousness as follows:

ConsciousnessPhilosophers have used the term 'consciousness' for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience... Something within one's mind is 'introspectively conscious' just in case one introspects it (or is poised to do so). Introspection is often thought to deliver one's primary knowledge of one's mental life. An experience or other mental entity is 'phenomenally conscious' just in case there is 'something it is like' for one to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experience, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one's own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking 'in words' or 'in images'. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial.[20]

In a more skeptical definition of consciousness, Stuart Sutherland has exemplified some of the difficulties in fully ascertaining all of its cognate meanings in his entry for the 1989 version of the Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology:

ConsciousnessThe having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousnessto be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.[21]

Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been concerned with defending a particular point of view, and have organized their material accordingly. For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most strongly associated with them, for example Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc. An alternative is to organize philosophical stances according to basic issues.

Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions about what consciousness is.[22] While most people have a strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness,[23] skeptics argue that this intuition is false, either because the concept of consciousness is intrinsically incoherent, or because our intuitions about it are based in illusions. Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world. Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.[24] More generally, many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness.[21]

Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood intuitively by the majority of people in spite of the difficulty in defining it.[23] Others, though, have argued that the level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people (for instance, the objective versus subjective aspects of consciousness), or else is an umbrella term encompassing a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.[25]

Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness).[26] P-consciousness, according to Block, is simply raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies' and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction,[27] others have broadly accepted it. David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness.[28]

Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story. William Lycan, for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)and that even this list omits several more obscure forms.[29]

There is also debate over whether or not a-consciousness and p-consciousness always co-exist or if they can exist separately. Although p-consciousness without a-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block for instance suggests the case of a zombie that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I dont know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility." [30]

While philosophers tend to focus on types of consciousness that occur 'in the mind', in other disciplines such as sociology the emphasis is on the practical meaning of consciousness. In this vein, it is possible to identify four forms of consciousness:[31]

Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem to be correlated: but what is the basis of this connection and correlation between what seem to be two very different kinds of processes?

The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism. Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension).[32] He suggested that the interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland.[33]

Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed.[34] However, no alternative solution has gained general acceptance. Proposed solutions can be divided broadly into two categories: dualist solutions that maintain Descartes' rigid distinction between the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects. Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics) and property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind). The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism (which holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter is merely an illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them). There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these schools of thought.[35]

Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book Man a Machine (L'homme machine). His arguments, however, were very abstract.[36] The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience. Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman[37] and Antonio Damasio,[38] and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett,[39] seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch,[40] have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness.[41]

A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness.[42] Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic brain theory of Karl Pribram and David Bohm, and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel[43] could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff, which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.[44]

Apart from the general question of the "hard problem" of consciousness, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience arises from a physical basis,[45] a more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are caused by prior events. The topic of free will is the philosophical and scientific examination of this conundrum.

Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are conscious, but rocks and trees are not?[46] This is called the problem of other minds.[47] It is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of philosophical zombies, that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness.[48] Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois.[49] and Colin Allen a professor at Indiana University regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in androids.[50]

The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do.[51] There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that is not necessary to explain what we observe.[51] Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.[52] More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior. A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can do, including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences.[53]

The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences.[54] Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong. Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals due to the fact that he believed only humans have a non-physical mind.[55] Most people have a strong intuition that some animals, such as cats and dogs, are conscious, while others, such as insects, are not; but the sources of this intuition are not obvious, and are often based on personal interactions with pets and other animals they have observed.[54]

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself.[56] Other thinkers, such as Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.[57] Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive Donald Griffin's 2001 book Animal Minds reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.[58]

On July 7, 2012, eminent scientists from different branches of neuroscience gathered at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which deals with consciousness in humans and pre-linguistic consciousness in nonhuman animals. After the conference, they signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, the 'Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness', which summarizes the most important findings of the survey:

"We decided to reach a consensus and make a statement directed to the public that is not scientific. It's obvious to everyone in this room that animals have consciousness, but it is not obvious to the rest of the world. It is not obvious to the rest of the Western world or the Far East. It is not obvious to the society."[59]

"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals [...], including all mammals and birds, and other creatures, [...] have the necessary neural substrates of consciousness and the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."[60]

The idea of an artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay.[61] However, the possibility of actually constructing a conscious machine was probably first discussed by Ada Lovelace, in a set of notes written in 1842 about the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, a precursor (never built) to modern electronic computers. Lovelace was essentially dismissive of the idea that a machine such as the Analytical Engine could think in a humanlike way. She wrote:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine.... The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.[62]

One of the most influential contributions to this question was an essay written in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Turing disavowed any interest in terminology, saying that even "Can machines think?" is too loaded with spurious connotations to be meaningful; but he proposed to replace all such questions with a specific operational test, which has become known as the Turing test.[63] To pass the test, a computer must be able to imitate a human well enough to fool interrogators. In his essay Turing discussed a variety of possible objections, and presented a counterargument to each of them. The Turing test is commonly cited in discussions of artificial intelligence as a proposed criterion for machine consciousness; it has provoked a great deal of philosophical debate. For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious,[64] while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.[65] A third group of scholars have argued that with technological growth once machines begin to display any substantial signs of human-like behavior then the dichotomy (of human consciousness compared to human-like consciousness) becomes pass and issues of machine autonomy begin to prevail even as observed in its nascent form within contemporary industry and technology.[49][50]Jrgen Schmidhuber argues that consciousness is simply the result of compression.[66] As an agent sees representation of itself recurring in the environment, the compression of this representation can be called consciousness.

In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as "the Chinese room argument", John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of "weak AI" that computer programs can be formatted to "simulate" conscious states. His own view is that consciousness has subjective, first-person causal powers by being essentially intentional due simply to the way human brains function biologically; conscious persons can perform computations, but consciousness is not inherently computational the way computer programs are. To make a Turing machine that speaks Chinese, Searle imagines a room with one monolingual English speaker (Searle himself, in fact), a book that designates a combination of Chinese symbols to be output paired with Chinese symbol input, and boxes filled with Chinese symbols. In this case, the English speaker is acting as a computer and the rulebook as a program. Searle argues that with such a machine, he would be able to process the inputs to outputs perfectly without having any understanding of Chinese, nor having any idea what the questions and answers could possibly mean. If the experiment were done in English, since Searle knows English, he would be able to take questions and give answers without any algorithms for English questions, and he would be effectively aware of what was being said and the purposes it might serve. Searle would pass the Turing test of answering the questions in both languages, but he is only conscious of what he is doing when he speaks English. Another way of putting the argument is to say that computer programs can pass the Turing test for processing the syntax of a language, but that the syntax cannot lead to semantic meaning in the way strong AI advocates hoped.[67][68]

In the literature concerning artificial intelligence, Searle's essay has been second only to Turing's in the volume of debate it has generated.[69] Searle himself was vague about what extra ingredients it would take to make a machine conscious: all he proposed was that what was needed was "causal powers" of the sort that the brain has and that computers lack. But other thinkers sympathetic to his basic argument have suggested that the necessary (though perhaps still not sufficient) extra conditions may include the ability to pass not just the verbal version of the Turing test, but the robotic version,[70] which requires grounding the robot's words in the robot's sensorimotor capacity to categorize and interact with the things in the world that its words are about, Turing-indistinguishably from a real person. Turing-scale robotics is an empirical branch of research on embodied cognition and situated cognition.[71]

In 2014, Victor Argonov has suggested a non-Turing test for machine consciousness based on machine's ability to produce philosophical judgments.[72] He argues that a deterministic machine must be regarded as conscious if it is able to produces judgments on all problematic properties of consciousness (such as qualia or binding) having no innate (preloaded) philosophical knowledge on these issues, no philosophical discussions while learning, and no informational models of other creatures in its memory (such models may implicitly or explicitly contain knowledge about these creatures consciousness). However, this test can be used only to detect, but not refute the existence of consciousness. A positive result proves that machine is conscious but a negative result proves nothing. For example, absence of philosophical judgments may be caused by lack of the machines intellect, not by absence of consciousness.

For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods.[73] In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones.[74] Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books,[75] journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Frontiers in Consciousness Research, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.[76]

Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma, illness, or drugs. Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts. The first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is impaired. In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie it.[40]

Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a universally accepted operational definition. In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion used is verbal report: in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness.[77] For example, subjects who stare continuously at a Necker cube usually report that they experience it "flipping" between two 3D configurations, even though the stimulus itself remains the same.[78] The objective is to understand the relationship between the conscious awareness of stimuli (as indicated by verbal report) and the effects the stimuli have on brain activity and behavior. In several paradigms, such as the technique of response priming, the behavior of subjects is clearly influenced by stimuli for which they report no awareness, and suitable experimental manipulations can lead to increasing priming effects despite decreasing prime identification (double dissociation).[79]

Verbal report is widely considered to be the most reliable indicator of consciousness, but it raises a number of issues.[80] For one thing, if verbal reports are treated as observations, akin to observations in other branches of science, then the possibility arises that they may contain errorsbut it is difficult to make sense of the idea that subjects could be wrong about their own experiences, and even more difficult to see how such an error could be detected.[81]Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.[82] Another issue with verbal report as a criterion is that it restricts the field of study to humans who have language: this approach cannot be used to study consciousness in other species, pre-linguistic children, or people with types of brain damage that impair language. As a third issue, philosophers who dispute the validity of the Turing test may feel that it is possible, at least in principle, for verbal report to be dissociated from consciousness entirely: a philosophical zombie may give detailed verbal reports of awareness in the absence of any genuine awareness.[83]

Although verbal report is in practice the "gold standard" for ascribing consciousness, it is not the only possible criterion.[80] In medicine, consciousness is assessed as a combination of verbal behavior, arousal, brain activity and purposeful movement. The last three of these can be used as indicators of consciousness when verbal behavior is absent.[84] The scientific literature regarding the neural bases of arousal and purposeful movement is very extensive. Their reliability as indicators of consciousness is disputed, however, due to numerous studies showing that alert human subjects can be induced to behave purposefully in a variety of ways in spite of reporting a complete lack of awareness.[79] Studies of the neuroscience of free will have also shown that the experiences that people report when they behave purposefully sometimes do not correspond to their actual behaviors or to the patterns of electrical activity recorded from their brains.[85]

Another approach applies specifically to the study of self-awareness, that is, the ability to distinguish oneself from others. In the 1970s Gordon Gallup developed an operational test for self-awareness, known as the mirror test. The test examines whether animals are able to differentiate between seeing themselves in a mirror versus seeing other animals. The classic example involves placing a spot of coloring on the skin or fur near the individual's forehead and seeing if they attempt to remove it or at least touch the spot, thus indicating that they recognize that the individual they are seeing in the mirror is themselves.[86] Humans (older than 18 months) and other great apes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, pigeons, European magpies and elephants have all been observed to pass this test.[87]

A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brainsthat is, studies of the neural correlates of consciousness. The hope is to find that activity in a particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain activity, which will be strongly predictive of conscious awareness. Several brain imaging techniques, such as EEG and fMRI, have been used for physical measures of brain activity in these studies.[88]

Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated with high-frequency (gamma band) oscillations in brain activity. This idea arose from proposals in the 1980s, by Christof von der Malsburg and Wolf Singer, that gamma oscillations could solve the so-called binding problem, by linking information represented in different parts of the brain into a unified experience.[89]Rodolfo Llins, for example, proposed that consciousness results from recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance where the specific thalamocortical systems (content) and the non-specific (centromedial thalamus) thalamocortical systems (context) interact in the gamma band frequency via synchronous oscillations.[90]

A number of studies have shown that activity in primary sensory areas of the brain is not sufficient to produce consciousness: it is possible for subjects to report a lack of awareness even when areas such as the primary visual cortex show clear electrical responses to a stimulus.[91] Higher brain areas are seen as more promising, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in a range of higher cognitive functions collectively known as executive functions. There is substantial evidence that a "top-down" flow of neural activity (i.e., activity propagating from the frontal cortex to sensory areas) is more predictive of conscious awareness than a "bottom-up" flow of activity.[92] The prefrontal cortex is not the only candidate area, however: studies by Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues have shown, for example, that visually responsive neurons in parts of the temporal lobe reflect the visual perception in the situation when conflicting visual images are presented to different eyes (i.e., bistable percepts during binocular rivalry).[93]

Modulation of neural responses may correlate with phenomenal experiences. In contrast to the raw electrical responses that do not correlate with consciousness, the modulation of these responses by other stimuli correlates surprisingly well with an important aspect of consciousness: namely with the phenomenal experience of stimulus intensity (brightness, contrast). In the research group of Danko Nikoli it has been shown that some of the changes in the subjectively perceived brightness correlated with the modulation of firing rates while others correlated with the modulation of neural synchrony.[94] An fMRI investigation suggested that these findings were strictly limited to the primary visual areas.[95] This indicates that, in the primary visual areas, changes in firing rates and synchrony can be considered as neural correlates of qualiaat least for some type of qualia.

In 2011, Graziano and Kastner[96] proposed the "attention schema" theory of awareness. In that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people. The same cortical machinery is also used to attribute awareness to oneself. Damage to these cortical regions can lead to deficits in consciousness such as hemispatial neglect. In the attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that person's attentional processing. Attention is a style of information processing in which a brain focuses its resources on a limited set of interrelated signals. Awareness, in this theory, is a useful, simplified schema that represents attentional states. To be aware of X is explained by constructing a model of one's attentional focus on X.

In the 2013, the perturbational complexity index (PCI) was proposed, a measure of the algorithmic complexity of the electrophysiological response of the cortex to transcranial magnetic stimulation. This measure was shown to be higher in individuals that are awake, in REM sleep or in a locked-in state than in those who are in deep sleep or in a vegetative state,[97] making it potentially useful as a quantitative assessment of consciousness states.

Assuming that not only humans but even some non-mammalian species are conscious, a number of evolutionary approaches to the problem of neural correlates of consciousness open up. For example, assuming that birds are conscious a common assumption among neuroscientists and ethologists due to the extensive cognitive repertoire of birds there are comparative neuroanatomical ways to validate some of the principal, currently competing, mammalian consciousnessbrain theories. The rationale for such a comparative study is that the avian brain deviates structurally from the mammalian brain. So how similar are they? What homologues can be identified? The general conclusion from the study by Butler, et al.,[98] is that some of the major theories for the mammalian brain [99][100][101] also appear to be valid for the avian brain. The structures assumed to be critical for consciousness in mammalian brains have homologous counterparts in avian brains. Thus the main portions of the theories of Crick and Koch,[99] Edelman and Tononi,[100] and Cotterill [101] seem to be compatible with the assumption that birds are conscious. Edelman also differentiates between what he calls primary consciousness (which is a trait shared by humans and non-human animals) and higher-order consciousness as it appears in humans alone along with human language capacity.[100] Certain aspects of the three theories, however, seem less easy to apply to the hypothesis of avian consciousness. For instance, the suggestion by Crick and Koch that layer 5 neurons of the mammalian brain have a special role, seems difficult to apply to the avian brain, since the avian homologues have a different morphology. Likewise, the theory of Eccles[102][103] seems incompatible, since a structural homologue/analogue to the dendron has not been found in avian brains. The assumption of an avian consciousness also brings the reptilian brain into focus. The reason is the structural continuity between avian and reptilian brains, meaning that the phylogenetic origin of consciousness may be earlier than suggested by many leading neuroscientists.

Joaquin Fuster of UCLA has advocated the position of the importance of the prefrontal cortex in humans, along with the areas of Wernicke and Broca, as being of particular importance to the development of human language capacities neuro-anatomically necessary for the emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans.[104]

Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (i) exclusively with the first humans, (ii) exclusively with the first mammals, (iii) independently in mammals and birds, or (iv) with the first reptiles.[105] Other authors date the origins of consciousness to the first animals with nervous systems or early vertebrates in the Cambrian over 500 million years ago.[106]Donald Griffin suggests in his book Animal Minds a gradual evolution of consciousness.[58] Each of these scenarios raises the question of the possible survival value of consciousness.

Thomas Henry Huxley defends in an essay titled On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History an epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural activity as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.[107] To this William James objects in his essay Are We Automata? by stating an evolutionary argument for mind-brain interaction implying that if the preservation and development of consciousness in the biological evolution is a result of natural selection, it is plausible that consciousness has not only been influenced by neural processes, but has had a survival value itself; and it could only have had this if it had been efficacious.[108][109]Karl Popper develops in the book The Self and Its Brain a similar evolutionary argument.[110]

Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent.[111] This has been called the integration consensus. Another example has been proposed by Gerald Edelman called dynamic core hypothesis which puts emphasis on reentrant connections that reciprocally link areas of the brain in a massively parallel manner.[112] Edelman also stresses the importance of the evolutionary emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans from the historically older trait of primary consciousness which humans share with non-human animals (see Neural correlates section above). These theories of integrative function present solutions to two classic problems associated with consciousness: differentiation and unity. They show how our conscious experience can discriminate between a virtually unlimited number of different possible scenes and details (differentiation) because it integrates those details from our sensory systems, while the integrative nature of consciousness in this view easily explains how our experience can seem unified as one whole despite all of these individual parts. However, it remains unspecified which kinds of information are integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without consciousness. Nor is it explained what specific causal role conscious integration plays, nor why the same functionality cannot be achieved without consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual analyses, etc.) and many kinds of information can be disseminated and combined with other kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the ventriloquism effect.[113] Hence it remains unclear why any of it is conscious. For a review of the differences between conscious and unconscious integrations, see the article of E. Morsella.[113]

As noted earlier, even among writers who consider consciousness to be a well-defined thing, there is widespread dispute about which animals other than humans can be said to possess it.[114] Edelman has described this distinction as that of humans possessing higher-order consciousness while sharing the trait of primary consciousness with non-human animals (see previous paragraph). Thus, any examination of the evolution of consciousness is faced with great difficulties. Nevertheless, some writers have argued that consciousness can be viewed from the standpoint of evolutionary biology as an adaptation in the sense of a trait that increases fitness.[115] In his article "Evolution of consciousness", John Eccles argued that special anatomical and physical properties of the mammalian cerebral cortex gave rise to consciousness ("[a] psychon ... linked to [a] dendron through quantum physics").[116] Bernard Baars proposed that once in place, this "recursive" circuitry may have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms.[117]Peter Carruthers has put forth one such potential adaptive advantage gained by conscious creatures by suggesting that consciousness allows an individual to make distinctions between appearance and reality.[118] This ability would enable a creature to recognize the likelihood that their perceptions are deceiving them (e.g. that water in the distance may be a mirage) and behave accordingly, and it could also facilitate the manipulation of others by recognizing how things appear to them for both cooperative and devious ends.

Other philosophers, however, have suggested that consciousness would not be necessary for any functional advantage in evolutionary processes.[119][120] No one has given a causal explanation, they argue, of why it would not be possible for a functionally equivalent non-conscious organism (i.e., a philosophical zombie) to achieve the very same survival advantages as a conscious organism. If evolutionary processes are blind to the difference between function F being performed by conscious organism O and non-conscious organism O*, it is unclear what adaptive advantage consciousness could provide.[121] As a result, an exaptive explanation of consciousness has gained favor with some theorists that posit consciousness did not evolve as an adaptation but was an exaptation arising as a consequence of other developments such as increases in brain size or cortical rearrangement.[122] Consciousness in this sense has been compared to the blind spot in the retina where it is not an adaption of the retina, but instead just a by-product of the way the retinal axons were wired.[123] Several scholars including Pinker, Chomsky, Edelman, and Luria have indicated the importance of the emergence of human language as an important regulative mechanism of learning and memory in the context of the development of higher-order consciousness (see Neural correlates section above).

There are some brain states in which consciousness seems to be absent, including dreamless sleep, coma, and death. There are also a variety of circumstances that can change the relationship between the mind and the world in less drastic ways, producing what are known as altered states of consciousness. Some altered states occur naturally; others can be produced by drugs or brain damage.[124] Altered states can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances in the sense of time, feelings of loss of control, changes in emotional expression, alternations in body image and changes in meaning or significance.[125]

The two most widely accepted altered states are sleep and dreaming. Although dream sleep and non-dream sleep appear very similar to an outside observer, each is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity, metabolic activity, and eye movement; each is also associated with a distinct pattern of experience and cognition. During ordinary non-dream sleep, people who are awakened report only vague and sketchy thoughts, and their experiences do not cohere into a continuous narrative. During dream sleep, in contrast, people who are awakened report rich and detailed experiences in which events form a continuous progression, which may however be interrupted by bizarre or fantastic intrusions.[126] Thought processes during the dream state frequently show a high level of irrationality. Both dream and non-dream states are associated with severe disruption of memory: it usually disappears in seconds during the non-dream state, and in minutes after awakening from a dream unless actively refreshed.[127]

Research conducted on the effects of partial epileptic seizures on consciousness found that patients who suffer from partial epileptic seizures experience altered states of consciousness.[128][129] In partial epileptic seizures, consciousness is impaired or lost while some aspects of consciousness, often automated behaviors, remain intact. Studies found that when measuring the qualitative features during partial epileptic seizures, patients exhibited an increase in arousal and became absorbed in the experience of the seizure, followed by difficulty in focusing and shifting attention.

A variety of psychoactive drugs and alcohol have notable effects on consciousness.[130] These range from a simple dulling of awareness produced by sedatives, to increases in the intensity of sensory qualities produced by stimulants, cannabis, empathogensentactogens such as MDMA ("Ecstasy"), or most notably by the class of drugs known as psychedelics.[124]LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, Dimethyltryptamine, and others in this group can produce major distortions of perception, including hallucinations; some users even describe their drug-induced experiences as mystical or spiritual in quality. The brain mechanisms underlying these effects are not as well understood as those induced by use of alcohol,[130] but there is substantial evidence that alterations in the brain system that uses the chemical neurotransmitter serotonin play an essential role.[131]

There has been some research into physiological changes in yogis and people who practise various techniques of meditation. Some research with brain waves during meditation has reported differences between those corresponding to ordinary relaxation and those corresponding to meditation. It has been disputed, however, whether there is enough evidence to count these as physiologically distinct states of consciousness.[132]

The most extensive study of the characteristics of altered states of consciousness was made by psychologist Charles Tart in the 1960s and 1970s. Tart analyzed a state of consciousness as made up of a number of component processes, including exteroception (sensing the external world); interoception (sensing the body); input-processing (seeing meaning); emotions; memory; time sense; sense of identity; evaluation and cognitive processing; motor output; and interaction with the environment.[133] Each of these, in his view, could be altered in multiple ways by drugs or other manipulations. The components that Tart identified have not, however, been validated by empirical studies. Research in this area has not yet reached firm conclusions, but a recent questionnaire-based study identified eleven significant factors contributing to drug-induced states of consciousness: experience of unity; spiritual experience; blissful state; insightfulness; disembodiment; impaired control and cognition; anxiety; complex imagery; elementary imagery; audio-visual synesthesia; and changed meaning of percepts.[134]

Phenomenology is a method of inquiry that attempts to examine the structure of consciousness in its own right, putting aside problems regarding the relationship of consciousness to the physical world. This approach was first proposed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, and later elaborated by other philosophers and scientists.[135] Husserl's original concept gave rise to two distinct lines of inquiry, in philosophy and psychology. In philosophy, phenomenology has largely been devoted to fundamental metaphysical questions, such as the nature of intentionality ("aboutness"). In psychology, phenomenology largely has meant attempting to investigate consciousness using the method of introspection, which means looking into one's own mind and reporting what one observes. This method fell into disrepute in the early twentieth century because of grave doubts about its reliability, but has been rehabilitated to some degree, especially when used in combination with techniques for examining brain activity.[136]

Introspectively, the world of conscious experience seems to have considerable structure. Immanuel Kant asserted that the world as we perceive it is organized according to a set of fundamental "intuitions", which include object (we perceive the world as a set of distinct things); shape; quality (color, warmth, etc.); space (distance, direction, and location); and time.[137] Some of these constructs, such as space and time, correspond to the way the world is structured by the laws of physics; for others the correspondence is not as clear. Understanding the physical basis of qualities, such as redness or pain, has been particularly challenging. David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness.[28] Some philosophers have argued that it is intrinsically unsolvable, because qualities ("qualia") are ineffable; that is, they are "raw feels", incapable of being analyzed into component processes.[138] Other psychologists and neuroscientists reject these arguments. For example, research on ideasthesia shows that qualia are organised into a semantic-like network. Nevertheless, it is clear that the relationship between a physical entity such as light and a perceptual quality such as color is extraordinarily complex and indirect, as demonstrated by a variety of optical illusions such as neon color spreading.[139]

In neuroscience, a great deal of effort has gone into investigating how the perceived world of conscious awareness is constructed inside the brain. The process is generally thought to involve two primary mechanisms: (1) hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, and (2) memory. Signals arising from sensory organs are transmitted to the brain and then processed in a series of stages, which extract multiple types of information from the raw input. In the visual system, for example, sensory signals from the eyes are transmitted to the thalamus and then to the primary visual cortex; inside the cerebral cortex they are sent to areas that extract features such as three-dimensional structure, shape, color, and motion.[140] Memory comes into play in at least two ways. First, it allows sensory information to be evaluated in the context of previous experience. Second, and even more importantly, working memory allows information to be integrated over time so that it can generate a stable representation of the worldGerald Edelman expressed this point vividly by titling one of his books about consciousness The Remembered Present.[141] In computational neuroscience, Bayesian approaches to brain function have been used to understand both the evaluation of sensory information in light of previous experience, and the integration of information over time. Bayesian models of the brain are probabilistic inference models, in which the brain takes advantage of prior knowledge to interpret uncertain sensory inputs in order to formulate a conscious percept; Bayesian models have successfully predicted many perceptual phenomena in vision and the nonvisual senses.[142][143][144]

Despite the large amount of information available, many important aspects of perception remain mysterious. A great deal is known about low-level signal processing in sensory systems, but the ways by which sensory systems interact with each other, with "executive" systems in the frontal cortex, and with the language system are very incompletely understood. At a deeper level, there are still basic conceptual issues that remain unresolved.[140] Many scientists have found it difficult to reconcile the fact that information is distributed across multiple brain areas with the apparent unity of consciousness: this is one aspect of the so-called binding problem.[145] There are also some scientists who have expressed grave reservations about the idea that the brain forms representations of the outside world at all: influential members of this group include psychologist J. J. Gibson and roboticist Rodney Brooks, who both argued in favor of "intelligence without representation".[146]

The medical approach to consciousness is practically oriented. It derives from a need to treat people whose brain function has been impaired as a result of disease, brain damage, toxins, or drugs. In medicine, conceptual distinctions are considered useful to the degree that they can help to guide treatments. Whereas the philosophical approach to consciousness focuses on its fundamental nature and its contents, the medical approach focuses on the amount of consciousness a person has: in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a "level" ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.[147]

Consciousness is of concern to patients and physicians, especially neurologists and anesthesiologists. Patients may suffer from disorders of consciousness, or may need to be anesthetized for a surgical procedure. Physicians may perform consciousness-related interventions such as instructing the patient to sleep, administering general anesthesia, or inducing medical coma.[147] Also, bioethicists may be concerned with the ethical implications of consciousness in medical cases of patients such as the Karen Ann Quinlan case,[148] while neuroscientists may study patients with impaired consciousness in hopes of gaining information about how the brain works.[149]

In medicine, consciousness is examined using a set of procedures known as neuropsychological assessment.[84] There are two commonly used methods for assessing the level of consciousness of a patient: a simple procedure that requires minimal training, and a more complex procedure that requires substantial expertise. The simple procedure begins by asking whether the patient is able to move and react to physical stimuli. If so, the next question is whether the patient can respond in a meaningful way to questions and commands. If so, the patient is asked for name, current location, and current day and time. A patient who can answer all of these questions is said to be "alert and oriented times four" (sometimes denoted "A&Ox4" on a medical chart), and is usually considered fully conscious.[150]

The more complex procedure is known as a neurological examination, and is usually carried out by a neurologist in a hospital setting. A formal neurological examination runs through a precisely delineated series of tests, beginning with tests for basic sensorimotor reflexes, and culminating with tests for sophisticated use of language. The outcome may be summarized using the Glasgow Coma Scale, which yields a number in the range 315, with a score of 3 to 8 indicating coma, and 15 indicating full consciousness. The Glasgow Coma Scale has three subscales, measuring the best motor response (ranging from "no motor response" to "obeys commands"), the best eye response (ranging from "no eye opening" to "eyes opening spontaneously") and the best verbal response (ranging from "no verbal response" to "fully oriented"). There is also a simpler pediatric version of the scale, for children too young to be able to use language.[147]

In 2013, an experimental procedure was developed to measure degrees of consciousness, the procedure involving stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse, measuring resulting waves of electrical activity, and developing a consciousness score based on the complexity of the brain activity.[151]

Medical conditions that inhibit consciousness are considered disorders of consciousness.[152] This category generally includes minimally conscious state and persistent vegetative state, but sometimes also includes the less severe locked-in syndrome and more severe chronic coma.[152][153]Differential diagnosis of these disorders is an active area of biomedical research.[154][155][156] Finally, brain death results in an irreversible disruption of consciousness.[152] While other conditions may cause a moderate deterioration (e.g., dementia and delirium) or transient interruption (e.g., grand mal and petit mal seizures) of consciousness, they are not included in this category.

One of the most striking disorders of consciousness goes by the name anosognosia, a Greek-derived term meaning unawareness of disease. This is a condition in which patients are disabled in some way, most commonly as a result of a stroke, but either misunderstand the nature of the problem or deny that there is anything wrong with them.[157] The most frequently occurring form is seen in people who have experienced a stroke damaging the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere of the brain, giving rise to a syndrome known as hemispatial neglect, characterized by an inability to direct action or attention toward objects located to the left with respect to their bodies. Patients with hemispatial neglect are often paralyzed on the right side of the body, but sometimes deny being unable to move. When questioned about the obvious problem, the patient may avoid giving a direct answer, or may give an explanation that doesn't make sense. Patients with hemispatial neglect may also fail to recognize paralyzed parts of their bodies: one frequently mentioned case is of a man who repeatedly tried to throw his own paralyzed right leg out of the bed he was lying in, and when asked what he was doing, complained that somebody had put a dead leg into the bed with him. An even more striking type of anosognosia is AntonBabinski syndrome, a rarely occurring condition in which patients become blind but claim to be able to see normally, and persist in this claim in spite of all evidence to the contrary.[158]

William James is usually credited with popularizing the idea that human consciousness flows like a stream, in his Principles of Psychology of 1890. According to James, the "stream of thought" is governed by five characteristics: "(1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. (2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. (3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. (4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. (5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others".[159] A similar concept appears in Buddhist philosophy, expressed by the Sanskrit term Citta-satna, which is usually translated as mindstream or "mental continuum". Buddhist teachings describe that consciousness manifests moment to moment as sense impressions and mental phenomena that are continuously changing.[160] The teachings list six triggers that can result in the generation of different mental events.[160] These triggers are input from the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touch sensations), or a thought (relating to the past, present or the future) that happen to arise in the mind. The mental events generated as a result of these triggers are: feelings, perceptions and intentions/behaviour. The moment-by-moment manifestation of the mind-stream is said to happen in every person all the time. It even happens in a scientist who analyses various phenomena in the world, or analyses the material body including the organ brain.[160] The manifestation of the mindstream is also described as being influenced by physical laws, biological laws, psychological laws, volitional laws, and universal laws.[160] The purpose of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is to understand the inherent nature of the consciousness and its characteristics.[161]

In the west, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science: stream of consciousness as a narrative mode means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character. This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays, and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[162]

Here for example is a passage from Joyce's Ulysses about the thoughts of Molly Bloom:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her.[163]

To most philosophers, the word "consciousness" connotes the relationship between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world. Krishna consciousness, for example, is a term used to mean an intimate linkage between the mind of a worshipper and the god Krishna.[164] The mystical psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke distinguished between three types of consciousness: Simple Consciousness, awareness of the body, possessed by many animals; Self Consciousness, awareness of being aware, possessed only by humans; and Cosmic Consciousness, awareness of the life and order of the universe, possessed only by humans who are enlightened.[165] Many more examples could be given, such as the various levels of spiritual consciousness presented by Prem Saran Satsangi and Stuart Hameroff.[166] The most thorough account of the spiritual approach may be Ken Wilber's book The Spectrum of Consciousness, a comparison of western and eastern ways of thinking about the mind. Wilber described consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and more profound types of awareness at higher levels.[167]

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Arthur Brown 'Part 3 - 'The Core Of Stillness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Arthur has recorded many albums over a 50 year period and is best known for his No 1 Worldwide hit 'Fire.' He has been a major influence on many successful artists including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. His music has always been driven by his spiritual realisations. In Part 3 Arthur talks about his time spent studying and teaching the Beshara tradition. He then moved to Austin, Texas where he forged links with Gurdjieff groups while running a painting and decorating business with the Mothers of Invention drummer, Jimmy Carl Black. He tells an amusing story about being with Da Free John and talks about three people that had significant influence on this spiritual development, Mooji, Satyananda and Ganga. He formed a 'Healing Songs Therapy' group with counsellor Jim Maxwell where a song was created for each of their clients to help them heal. He toured with Robert Plant and in 2013 recorded an album 'based on the Cosmos' called 'Zim Zam Zim.' His spiritual journey was always in the foreground, 'Who Am I? Not my body, Not my thoughts. My mind is at peace. I can bear without the slightest restlessness all manifestations - all thoughts and images that arise - both pleasant and painful. Suddenly I know that this awareness of all and everything is itself a limitation. Subjects, object and consciousness are one and the same'

Loch Kelly - 'Falling Into Awake Awareness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Shift Into Freedom.' Loch was a keen sportsman when young. After one ice hockey game when he played in goal and made several amazing saves someone asked him how he did it. He explained, 'time slows down, I feel open and connected, I get really quiet inside and it seems it is strangely quiet on the outside too.' Someone gave him the 'Zen and the Art of Archery' book and he realised that others had had this experience too. At times he could feel exactly what was going on but wasn't thinking. He then started to investigate meditation. And then one night when walking home from college and feeling an overwhelming grief as a result of some recent losses his thoughts quietened, his heart broke open and the weight of despair lifted. He looked up at the stars and noticed that his usual sense of self had gone, yet he felt fully embodied and alive. A new process had begun. Experience showed him that consciousness can shift intelligently but he didn't know yet how to shift it intentionally. He went to Sri Lanka where he did long retreats and then India where he saw the Dalia Lama who recommended he study with Tulka Rinpoche where he learnt Awake Awareness. Over the next few years he embodied this teaching. He worked for many years with people in homeless shelters in NY and sees his life as a continual series of shifts. 'There is no end to the mystery of Life - most of it is beyond human understanding'

Arthur Brown 'Part 1 - The God Of Hellfire' - Interview by Iain McNay

Arthur has recorded many albums over a 50 year period and is best known for his No 1 Worldwide hit 'Fire.' He has been a major influence on many successful artists including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. His music has always been driven by his spiritual realisations, 'So many times I have come away from a gig, head full of stars, ears full of hissing, my throat sore with cinders. My body tired but my heart satisfied with song. What I lived I lived in the moment of performing. I didn't know how to receive the applause, that was not what I was there for, it was the moment when I was not there... my voice was singing but I was in bliss.' From an early age he roamed the hills near where he lived singing, talking in rhyme and making up poetry. His spiritual path led him to practice TM; Shivapuir Baba's 'decision exercise;' spend time living in a Gurdjieff community with JG Bennett and visiting Israel and singing for injured soldiers of both sides, as well as many other adventures. During this time he had many realisations: ''suddenly I was consciousness listening to me. I heard the beginning of everything, it sounded like a huge bell. Just before that I heard voices, sounding like Ohm. I knew that everyone heard it differently and that on different levels of consciousness the sound was different. I had in this meditation entered into the bliss body. It had in the contemplation of the sound become apparent that the bliss body was the balance of yin and yang. The movement of these two, from the original hum sound produced all subsequent sounds.'

Arthur Brown 'Part 2 - The Outer And The Inner become One' - Interview by Iain McNay

Arthur has recorded many albums over a 50 year period and is best known for his No 1 Worldwide hit 'Fire.' He has been a major influence on many successful artists including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. His music has always been driven by his spiritual realisations, 'So many times I have come away from a gig, head full of stars, ears full of hissing, my throat sore with cinders. My body tired but my heart satisfied with song. What I lived I lived in the moment of performing. I didn't know how to receive the applause, that was not what I was there for, it was the moment when I was not there... my voice was singing but I was in bliss.' From an early age he roamed the hills near where he lived singing, talking in rhyme and making up poetry. His spiritual path led him to practice TM; Shivapuir Baba's 'decision exercise;' spend time living in a Gurdjieff community with JG Bennett and visiting Israel and singing for injured soldiers of both sides, as well as many other adventures. During this time he had many realisations: ''suddenly I was consciousness listening to me. I heard the beginning of everything, it sounded like a huge bell. Just before that I heard voices, sounding like Ohm. I knew that everyone heard it differently and that on different levels of consciousness the sound was different. I had in this meditation entered into the bliss body. It had in the contemplation of the sound become apparent that the bliss body was the balance of yin and yang. The movement of these two, from the original hum sound produced all subsequent sounds.'

Jon Bernie- ''Ordinary Freedom' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Ordinary Freedom' and 'The Unbelievable Happiness Of What Is.' When he was 4 years old Jon looking up at the stars and asked "what is going on here? Where are we? What is this?" At 6 he started to learn the violin and practiced 2 to 4 hours a day. At 16 he decided to sit in a chair indefinitely to see if he could find what he was looking for. 'Suddenly there was no more room, and there was no more me. It was like I had merged into the sun - like I had become the sun. It was like a kind of universal orgasm, as if every cell in my body had had its own nuclear explosion.' Later he became a monk meditating for 8 hours a day. After leaving the monastery he met Jean Klein who he describes as his 'root guru.' He also spent time with Robert Adams and Adyashanti. 'There was a deep letting go that I realized I had been waiting for a long, long time, and now here it was. In the past there had always been some remaining fear that kept me from fully letting go, but now it was time, and finally I just let it happen - was like a complete annihilation - would later refer to this experience as the end of fear.'

Jrgen Ziewe - 'Vistas Of Infinity' - Interview by Renate McNay

Author of 'The Ten Minute Moment,' 'Multi-Dimensional Man,' and 'Vistas of Infinity.' Jrgen started to meditate at an early age and at one point suddenly discovered himself out of his body. At first he didn't realise what had happened but found confirmation in the books of Carlos Casteneda. He found that there is a wormhole right in the centre of our brains which can catapult us into a parallel world. In this interview he talks us through his many dramatic adventures over 40 years into higher dimensional realities from the darkest places to the most illuminated regions of cosmic Consciousness and realms. He also found out what happens to us after death. He says: "The moment we leave our physical body behind our unconscious becomes our new external walking reality." "Every day I wake up it is the first day of an infinite future."

Jrgen Ziewe - The Ten Minute Moment' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Ten Minute Moment,' 'Multi-Dimensional Man,' and 'Vistas of Infinity.' After 40 years of meditation which had gradually taken him to deeper and deeper places Jrgen went on a 7 day personal retreat in as remote cabin in Scotland. He meditated most of the day and experienced a profound awakening. 'After a meditation I slowly opened my eyes and sized up my surroundings - my body had become part of the furniture. I could still perceive the external world through my eyes but my body had turned into a shell - a cardboard cutout - reality was being stripped away before my eyes. I could no longer be sure of what was happening - it was beyond and outside anything I had come to know. The stillness was too vast in its scope to be grasped. There was no reality as I knew it. The thing is it has always been different but I hadn't noticed. It was reality stripped of any familiarity. I could almost not bear it. For a moment I wanted to go back. In an instant I recognised that I was just a thought; an imagination without no substance. This was the death of all deaths. I had arrived at zero point. I was about to be surrendered and reabsorbed into the source. One more step and there would be no return - I was staring into the merciless face of God.' He also talks us through his life, how he refused to accept that the 5 senses was all there is to reality and how that led to a life long quest to find out who or what this consciousness was conscious of.

Paul Harris - 'Postcards From Beyond' - Interview by Iain McNay

Paul suffered from depression and was full of fear and self-doubt when he was younger. His saviour at that time was Indie music and his guitar. He then spent time in India and at one time just 'gave up.' 'The release was truly remarkable. It was like I was freed from my body completely. From the root of my being all the way above my head I just opened up completely. I was no longer 'Paul' or even human.' But his depression came back again in time and he was again miserable and unfulfilled. He found the Aukana Buddhist Monastery in Wiltshire in the UK and moved in for full time training. He meditated for 4 or 5 hours a day and developing mindfulness. For 9 years he pretty much lived on an acre of land. He now leads the monastery. 'I teach the way I have travelled so I know it works. The enlightened mind does not crave for life to be different.'

Sheikh Burhanuddin - 'The Journey Of A Modern Sufi Mystic'' - Interview by Iain McNay

Sheikh Burhanuddin talks about his fascinating journey and experiences along his way to become a Sheikh under the guidance of his master, Sheikh Nazim. From an early age when he was very drawn to be in nature he soon committed his life to finding a master who could guide him on his path. His spent time on different 'seclusions' which were very influential and helpful him with many realizations. He also had a session with spiritual healer Stephen Turoff which triggered a very deep state which lasted for nearly 3 years. He goes on to explain the Uwaysi System which is now an integral part of his teaching.

Paul disappears into the ocean (and Messi is God!) - Interview by Iain McNay

Something happened out of the blue to Paul when he was 15 playing football which was his passion. (he was signed as an apprentice to Cardiff City FC and wanted to become a professional footballer.) He had a strong sense to sit quietly and was overwhelming by a deep brilliant sense of beauty and peace. This went on for 18 months. He felt his sense of free will and choice was dropping away and that he was 'losing the story of Paul.' Life was becoming like a boundless football game. He felt like a kid on beach playing in an ocean of energy with no control over his experiences. He went on to stay in a monastery for 5 years and then lived as a hermit for a year in a caravan. He later married and had two children and now travels and talks with people. He says, 'My character just fell into the ocean.'

Mary Reed - 'The Journey Of An Unwitting Mystic' - Interview by Iain McNay

Mary is author of the book, 'Unwitting Mystic - Evolution Of The Message Of Love.' In the Summer of 2000 she heard a voice deep inside her saying 'You are supposed to be doing something very important.' It didn't leave her alone; the more she tried to ignore it the more persistent it became. She then started to have visions of Christ, Buddha, the Dalai Lama and others. She had no religious or spiritual background and tried to find help to understand and integrate them. Everything failed to make sense to her. Her life fell apart and she attempted suicide by taking 97 pills, but woke up 2 days later. She felt remorse and supreme surrender. Eventually she found help which led her to India where she is now based in a Nunnery. She tells her fascinating story and talks about the realisations life has led her to.

Michael A. Rodriguez -'The Uncreated Light Of Awareness' - Interview by Renate McNay

Michael A. Rodriguez is a spiritual Teacher and Author of the book "The Uncreated Light of Awareness" In this interview Michael tells us about his spiritual yearning as a child and his voracious thirst for Truth, how he became disenchanted with academia and entering a monastic life. He ate, drank, breathed, lived and slept Non-Duality and went through a 5 year purification and alchemical transformation called "Poverty" by Meister Eckhart. He says: "If you think the Universe came first, you are it's prisoner, when you know that you came first, you are free".

Cynthia Bourgeault - 'Seeing With The Eyes Of The Heart' - Interview by Renate McNay

The Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern day mystic, Episcopal priest and writer. She divides her time between solitude and traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian Contemplative and Wisdom Path. Author of several books including, "Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening", "Wisdom Jesus", "The Meaning of Mary Magdalene", "Love is Stronger than Death". In this Interview Cynthia tells us how her Christian Life began encountering the presence of Jesus when she received her first communion and then how she started searching for the missing message in the Church. Very important teachers were Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. She studied the Sacred Dances and Movements which threw her at times into a Rabbit Hole. She also talks about Freedom and the willingness to bare our suffering, GOD's Love, Solitude and Silence.

John Butler - 'Discovering Stillness - Part 1' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Wonders Of Spiritual Unfoldment' and Mystic Approaches.' His loves were farming and meditation. Tells his story of spiritual unfoldment and how he discovered stillness. It was not always an easy path for him and he went through periods of depressions and hopelessness. 'Realisation is not a personal attainment - it usually comes at times of deep prayer or quietness when the mind is clear of personal me.' 'I'm just a quiet old man of regular habits going up and down the hill to church each day, sitting on a bench when the weather is warm. I don't speak much. Adventures are inside.' 'From worldliness the absolute completion of Pure Being can seem out of touch, more theoretical than real. How can it be relevant to need? Once known however any return to ordinary worldly ways only seem to emphasise its loss. Total longing brings its own reward but all feelings of achievement disappear. Incomparable gifts of Heavenly Grace instruct, inspire, save us from drowning in the world'.

John Butler - 'Discovering Stillness - Part 2' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Wonders Of Spiritual Unfoldment' and Mystic Approaches.' His loves were farming and meditation. Tells his story of spiritual unfoldment and how he discovered stillness. It was not always an easy path for him and he went through periods of depressions and hopelessness. 'Realisation is not a personal attainment - it usually comes at times of deep prayer or quietness when the mind is clear of personal me.' 'I'm just a quiet old man of regular habits going up and down the hill to church each day, sitting on a bench when the weather is warm. I don't speak much. Adventures are inside.' 'From worldliness the absolute completion of Pure Being can seem out of touch, more theoretical than real. How can it be relevant to need? Once known however any return to ordinary worldly ways only seem to emphasise its loss. Total longing brings its own reward but all feelings of achievement disappear. Incomparable gifts of Heavenly Grace instruct, inspire, save us from drowning in the world'.

Ginger Gilmour - 'Bright Side Of The Moon' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Bright Side Of The Moon' Met and married Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour with whom she had 4 children. Started her spiritual journey when she became very ill and discovered meditation. Worked and trained with Irena Tweedie, Cecil Collins, Dr Wenger Engel and Gerhard Adler on her processes over the years. 'I discovered the answer to the shadow Collective Unconscious including Anima and Animus. I realised I had always placed a shield between myself and my shadow - I only wanted to focus on Love light and Beauty - I discovered the shadow was marked - 'do not enter broken dreams' I was a puppet controlled by the darkness.' In this interview she talks about her life, her passions, her struggles and breakthroughs and her realizations. Ginger now works as a painter and sculptor.

Mick Collins - 'My Crisis And Transformation' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Unselfish Spirit.' Mick left school at 15, working as a manual labourer before joining the army. Visited a Tibetan Monastery intending to stay 2 days and ended up living there for 3 years. 'I started contemplating various attachments and aversions in my conventional existence' and began reflecting on the significance on what a more intimate perspective could mean in the way he lived; began to observe and question how duality was embedded in my thoughts and behaviour.' He was also fascinated by the interplay between form and emptiness. But on a long train journey had an extraordinary experience where he had a heightened sense of compassion and profound feelings of love followed two days later by a slide into a diametrically opposed state. Was flooded by intense emotions; felt he was caught in a conflict between good and evil compounded by feelings of fear and terror. Left monastery and slowly started to find balance again with the help of Jungian work. Felt he had taken a journey into the unknown without a map. Eventually integrated the spiritual crisis and started to learn the interplay between doing and being which is now his passion.

Chloe Goodchild - The Voice Of Silence

Chloe is the founder of The Naked Voice and the heart of her work is the practice of the spoken and sung voice as a Gateway to discover our Non Dual Awareness. Deafness in childhood catalyzed Chloe's discovery of inner sound and silence. This deep encounter with her inner self, catalyzed questions like: " Who Am I", "Who is Singing", " How can I transform my sadness". Chloe had many encounters with indigenous wisdom teachers, spiritual and classical Indian music masters, ultimately leading to a transformative 'no-mind' experience in Northern India, inspired by the great luminary and saint, Anandamayi Ma. This gave birth to the unique method of sound and voice, which Chloe eventually named, The Naked Voice. Her autobiography, The Naked Voice - Journey to the Spirit of Sound tells the story of these formative early years. In this in-depth interview with Renate she talks about her life and her work http://www.thenakedvoice.com

Andrew Rawlinson - 'THE HIT' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Hit - Into The Rock'N'Roll Universe And Beyond' and 'The Book Of Enlightened Masters - Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions.' . Andrew Talks about his life and how he was aware that he was continually 'hit' by realisations, small and large, that enabled him to see through his conditioning. 'The HIT is both a grace and a disturbance. All worlds are a show.. Reality is open It is constantly transforming itself It goes beyond itself It is where illusion begins. All derangements are connected. Like sub atomic particles they just keep reflecting each other jumping between each other and turning into each other. Just like a magic trick where certainty and deception change places. It's a jungle, as soon as you find a path you loose it. Everybody is looking for who they are ------- but they are nobody Not only is the world stranger than you imagine - it is stranger than you can imagine. And we are all collaborators in creation. And what is it to collaborate? To know that we are the mirror as well as the face in it, pain and what cures pain. This is the expanse of spirit: rich and dark. Yes, it's the Gods who are rocking us, who are looking for someone to receive them. There is really no reality without identity, and identity is a show.'

Stephen Fulder - 'Awakening Arrives By Itself' - Interview by Iain McNay

'The spacious groundless sense of being needs to become part of our nature, to be familiar territory and then awakening arrives by itself. The ultimate cannot belong to anyone nor can there be someone who is awakened.' Stephen talks us through his spiritual journey and realisations. From realising that there was no fixed reality when he was a child to having his earlier insights confirmed when he took LSD in his 20s. He was drawn to India and the 'Mother Ganges' where he discovered the teachings of S.N. Goenka. Spent time on many retreats with Sayama and other Buddhist teachers such as Stephen Batchelor and Christopher Titmuss. Formed the Israel Insight Society; distanced himself from Buddhism but fully embraced the teachings of the Buddha and still teaches around 15 retreats a year. Also works in the area of Palestinian/Israeli reconciliation. 'There is no way to peace, Peace is the way.' Can describe his lived experience with great precision and clarity; took part on a study which explored 3 stages: Stage 1 - ordinary sense of self and boundary Stage 2 - sense of dropping boundary to some extent Stage 3 - dissolution In this interview he explains these stages in detail.

Gabor Harsanyi - 'The Master Of Silence' - Interview by Iain McNay

Gabor was born in Communist Hungary but escaped after the failed 1956 uprising. Travelled on foot to Italy and then lived in a refugee camp for a time in Italy before reaching Canada. Became a multi-millionaire very quickly but then found he was miserable and depressed when he realised this outer success didn't bring him any real happiness.'I had achieved outer freedom but was far, far away from inner, real freedom.' The market crashed and he lost almost everything. Lived in a forest for a time, 'I wanted to say NO to civilisation.' Moved to Mexico and then started to experience, real, deep, suicidal depression. Moved in with an Indian tribe in Ecuador, 'it was there I found that I could not just sit and BE like the Indians.' 'This suicidal depression became my greatest teacher.' He discovered the secret to finding real freedom was going inside his body, 'Whenever I was able to do it I became calm and my mind would stop. I spent much time sitting by the water and experimenting with grounding my body to the beach. There were moments when all of a sudden the sound of the waves became different and the mind was so still that there were hardly any remnants of the depression. I would get up and start walking and the sand and the water on my feet felt unlike it had ever felt before. This marked the beginning of the end of depression'. After a time he was able to surrender to his ultimate love - presence - the silence of nothing where the mind takes a back seat and becomes the servant and the original being is once again on the throne. He now helps people free themselves from thought addiction.

Georgi Y Johnson and Bart Ten Berge - 'Anxiety And Awakening' - Moderated by Renate and Iain McNay

In this interview Georgi Y Johnson, Author of "I AM HERE" and her Partner Bart Ten Berge, Author of "THE GIFT" 7 STEPS to a Happy and Fulfilled Life", discuss the meaning of anxiety and depression in the process of Awakening. Fear is a natural part of physical life but we need to unhook our fears as the authority on our thoughts, feelings and choices. The way to do this is not to repress fear but give it space. Liberated fear is alive and appropriate to the moment. For many, severe Anxiety or Panic attacks can be the turning point in finding themselves. Georgi is telling us her own story of a period of Deep Depression, Panic Attacks and Anxiety; looking for help she met Bart who is a Healer and the co-founder of the International School of Spiritual Psychology (ISSP) based in Holland.

Martyn Wilson - 'The State Of No Thought' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Enlightenment - The Keys To Consciousness.' Martyn only talks from his own experience. He was an ordinary guy with a normal life; family, work and all the usual stresses. He met Maria who was interested in spiritual enlightenment and at first he was very sceptical of her interest. He set out to disprove that such a thing existed and worked hard to find faults in her arguments. But then 'the impossible happened' and he actually started to wake up himself. He found a method that stilled his mind, and his thoughts would stop for few seconds. He persevered and in time those few seconds became a few minutes. He then found he could stop all uncontrolled thoughts and was in control of his mind. What had been his master became his servant. He talks us through his story and shares the method that he found worked for him as a meditation.

Nurit Oren - 'The Blonde On The Rocky Road to Freedom' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Blind Leading The Blonde On The Road To Freedom.' Nurit was born in Israel, her parents were atheist Jewish pioneers - in a Kibbutz where the kids lived separately - there was no family unit to relate to - was allowed to be wild/play naked. But all changed when family moved to Canada. In her late teens served in the Israeli army for two years where she was stationed in Gaza where it was very dangerous. One day she hitchhiked to the wailing wall in Jerusalem and stuck a piece of paper between the cracks saying ' I want to find true love, divine love, the love of God that is pure, unchanging and everlasting.' Found books by Muktananda and went to live in his ashram in India where she was a dedicated disciple. There she got up at 3am every day - then meditation then chanting then work no breakfast, then chanting then lunch then work then more chanting then work, then dinner. There was no socialising at all. She had a kundalini awakening then decided to stay indefinitely. But Muktananda died. Moved to Toronto, found a teacher called Dr Mills and stayed with him for 15 years. She had then been on a spiritual path for 40 years and still didn't feel free. Met Gabor Harsanyi, 'It's very simple. Look at me and feel your hand without looking at it. Notice that your mind will stop.' When she did this something shifted inside her She felt a very subtle sensation of wellness and peace. 'Now I get it' she realised 'This is it.. this is what I have been searching for.'

Georgi Y Johnson - 'I AM HERE' - Interview by Renate McNay

Georgi is the Author of "I AM HERE - Opening the windows of life and beauty". In this interview she talks about her process of Awakening which led her into writing this book and the teaching of I AM HERE. Her first conscious awakening was when she was 2 years old, lying on the bed and calling her own name, like a Mantra, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, when suddenly she became strange to herself."I was not me, not this name.so who was I"? Sporadic awakenings continued and she realised later that it was her conviction to understand the meaning of Life which she beautifully played out in her book "I AM HERE". She talks about the three stages of her awakening which started from the head up, the heart was still held prisoner, later the heart was open to unconditional love yet the body was still held prisoner. She also explains the difference between Consciousness, Awareness and Emptiness..'Enlightenment comes with the liberation of Awareness.'

Russel Williams - 'Looking Through The Horse's Eyes' - Interview by Iain McNay.

Russel was born in 1921 in a very poor family. He was orphaned at 11 and came close to death many times. In the second world war he took part in the Dunkirk evacuation and lived through the Blitz. He was never afraid. He joined a circus after the war and worked with the animals. It was here that he suddenly became aware that, 'I am the horses, dogs, the lion, the trees - everything is true nature.' He hasn't had any unwanted thoughts since he was 29 years old. 'The only way to attain experience is to come to complete emptiness; that is to come to the end of the thought mind. But you will find that the emptiness was never empty because it is a potential for all that may come to be. We enter into an area of extremely fine aspects of consciousness that dissolves into itself and loses duality. And then there is only 'that.' Everything leads back to this emptiness. No form of understanding can connect you to this. It has to be seen within itself. The peace that passes all understanding that is emptiness. It is completely fulfilling in itself. You can just BE instead of think.'Russel has a book available written with Steve Taylor, 'Not I, Not Other Than I: The Life and Teachings of Russel Williams'.

Ravi Ravindra - 'A Voice Without A Form' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of many books including 'Science and the Sacred,' 'Krishnamurti - Two Birds On One Three' and 'Heart Without Measure. - Gurdjieff work with Madam de Salzmann.' Ravi was born in India in 1939. As a teenager he found himself reading the works of Swami Vivekananda and being 'pulled by a longing to understand the mystery and significance of life. He was struck by one particular statement: 'I am a voice without a form.' It opened a door to a new dimension for him. He talks about his time with Krishnamurti, 'Silence was a special delight to both of us, it was easy to understand each other's thoughts and feelings.' And then his 10 years with Madame De Salzmann who was head of the Gurdjieff work since the latter's death in 1949. She stressed, 'attention is all that we have, that is to say, attention is all that we can bring. The rest is out of our control. A higher energy is there. The purpose of man's existence on Earth is to allow the exchange of energy between the earth and higher levels of existence.'

Arjuna Ardagh - 'Waking Up and Changing the World' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Translucent Revolution - How People Just Like you are waking up and changing the world,' Better Than Sex - The Ecstatic Art of Awakening Coaching' and 'How About Now' talks about his life and work. In 1991, after returning to India for a prolonged period of meditation, Arjuna met H.W.L. Poonja, a direct student of Ramana Maharshi. With Poonja's help, Ardagh went through a radical shift of perspective. Rather than attaining what he had imagined, he had the profound realization that what he had been seeking for was what he already was, and always had been. He realized that it was in the abandonment of all seeking and wanting that the heart found its fulfillment. In 1992 Ardagh to return to the West to "share this secret with his friends." He returned to Seattle and began to work with people one-on-one and in groups, facilitating a dramatic shift in awareness with thousands of people throughout the United States and Europe. He quickly discovered that this same realization was easily accessible to anyone who was willing to look in the right place, and that this had a profound effect on simple day-to-day life.

Reggie Ray - 'Finding Realization In The Body' - Interview by Renate McNay

Dr. Reginald "Reggie" Ray is the Founder and Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation. He met Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1970, a few weeks after his arrival in the US, and became one of his first American students. After spending time in India he moved to Colorado where he became the first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies. From the beginning of his study with Trungpa Rinpoche, Reggie held many roles in Rinpoche's lineage - student, scholar, meditation instructor, and teacher. Reggie has always combined his study and teaching with a strong meditation practice, including daily practice and annual solitary retreats of 1-3 months each year. He has accumulated some 6-7 years in solitary retreat, in which he has explored all of Trungpa Rinpoche's practice teachings. He has also explored somatic teachings east and west, traditional and modern, such as Yoga and Qi Gung (which he practices today) and traditions such as the work of Gerda Alexander, Rolfing, and Hakomi therapy and therapeutic techniques. He now incorporates much of the wisdom of these earth-based lineages and traditions into his teaching, because, as he says, Vajrayana is essentially an earth-based tradition already. Reggie has written extensively and is the author of several books including "Indestructible Truth", "Secret of the Vajra World" and "Touching Enlightenment - Finding Realization in the Body." "To be awake, to be enlightened, is to be fully and completely embodied. To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are, in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation."

Rory O'Connor - 'I Can't Do This Anymore' - Interview by Iain McNay

Rory was the youngest of 8 children and raised in the Catholic tradition. 'I remember looking at my parent's life and thinking that it seemed like a kind of hell, a trap that they 'believed' they could not get out of. From where I stood, frustration seemed to dog their lives.' He became a drummer in a heavy metal band but became very depressed and stopped playing music. But he kept searching, reading, started TM, and openings started to appear. 'At some point in my late thirties I had a real moment of clarity, a paradigm shift. I realised that what I understood of quantum science and the eastern traditions was essentially describing the same thing ie. the concept of everything appearing out of nothing through the observer. From then on 'reality' seemed a lot less 'solid'. 'Concurrent events in my personal life had also conspired to create an actual 'breakdown' moment where the pain of trying to keep everything 'together' caused me to smash the kitchen table to pieces with my bare hands only to find myself sitting in the rubble saying repeatedly "I can't do this anymore". It may not sound like it but this 'moment of surrender' was the best thing that ever happened to me.' 'When you know that you know nothing then you are free to consider anything and believe nothing. It doesn't matter how you describe it or label it life simply is what it is and the description/label is meaningless'

Heath Thompson - 'Returning To The Source Is Stillness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Heath's spirituality began by joining a Buddhist practice under the teachings of the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn. He joined a two-year distance learning course called Foundation of Buddhism but quit believing that if there is an Absolute Truth it would be simple and not require academic discussion to find it. His Realisation occurred over two, perhaps three 'moments'; the first happened the day he quit the course, 'I was sitting in the garden absent-mindedly watching bees and insects flying around while drinking tea and I suddenly noticed a feeling appear in my stomach that vanished the moment I witnessed it, and an inner voice said to me "you will never feel that again." So he decided to simply sit without a real reason and just be silent and see if it returns - and it did, long enough for him to realise what was being expressed; an endless pool of stillness. 'My life totally changed a month later when getting out of bed I glanced through the window at the sky and saw, felt, heard the same Presence I had felt on the inside and I knew at once all is One, there is no inside or outside, no here or there, no birth or death, nowhere to go, nothing to do - all is as it is. I laughed at myself for even though I suspected the Truth to be simple I had not expected it to be ablaze wherever I looked. This happened in October 2009 and I spent until February 2011 feeling unable to express what I knew as my sangha had people with over 20 years experience of practice who didn't like my attempts to question some of the teachings. In the end I decided to leave and spend my time learning from nature.'

Debra Wilkinson - 'Awake And Ready' - Interview by Iain McNay

Debra was the child of an alcoholic Mother who started seeking because she could not live with her mind's conditioning anymore. She was a mass of anxiety, hurt and plagued by the past and terrified by the future. She started to meditate which helped to lift the heavy energies she had acquired. She developed a very painful nerve condition and learnt to be with the pain. Found that a dreadful curse became a true blessing. She would spend 5 hours a day in meditation and got to the point where, 'I was done.' 'I thought I knew who I was but suddenly I wasn't that anymore. So I sat with it and asked 'Who Am I?' 'Who or what is that?' And the answer came 'I am God!' I realised in that moment I am God in expression and now my mind was free. Now there is just me and God and me knowing that I am God.'

Linda Clair - 'I Am Enlightened' - Interview by Renate McNay

Linda was born in Sydney in 1958. She had virtually no interest in meditation or spiritual matters until the age of 37, when she was introduced to Peter Jones, who became her first teacher. This meeting was an intense experience for her. There was a depth to the communication she had never experienced before, and it triggered a search for freedom, which was soon the major focus of her life. At this time she had two teenage children and was running a small business, but she managed to make time for intensive meditation. In 1997 she had a profound awakening during a ten-day retreat in northern New South Wales. She later described the experience as 'deeper than bliss'.There was a marked change in her after the awakening, which was really a very strong glimpse of enlightenment. She knew now what was possible, and she also knew that she would not be satisfied until that state became permanent. She maintained the humble attitude of a student and continued to practice.During this time she met the Japanese Zen Master, Hogen Yamahata, who also impressed her with his deeply enlightened presence and humility.In 2004 she travelled to Japan and spent six weeks at a Zen monastery with Hogen-san's Master, Harada Tangen Roshi, known as Roshi Sama. Her time with him was intense. She sensed she was close to the culmination of her journey. She returned to Australia in a deeply detached, peaceful state. Roshi Sama gave her the name Dai'an Jishin, which translates as 'deep peace, compassionate heart/mind'. Her search ended during a ten-day retreat with Hogen-san at Springbrook, in the mountains behind the Gold Coast in Queensland.'Everything changed. All fear disappeared. I was left with nothing and nothing to lose. The depth of peace and satisfaction overwhelmed me, and it continues to deepen every day. Life is immediate. There is no desire for anything more or different. This is enough.'

Francis Bennett - 'The Key To Happiness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Francis Bennett was a Roman Catholic, Trappist monk for a number of years. He lived in two monasteries of the Trappist Order in the US and was also a member of an urban, contemplative monastic community originally founded in Paris, France in 1975. He has lived in France at several monasteries, and in Canada at a small monastic community in Montreal Quebec. He received a five and a half year monastic/spiritual formation with the Trappists before he made his vows as a monk at Gethsemani Abbey in 1983. He has worked in ministry in the area of spiritual Care in the hospice movement, as a hospital chaplain and in spiritual care of the sick and dying in parish settings. In 2010, while in the middle of a Church Service in his monastery in Montreal, Francis suddenly experienced what he has come to call, "a radical perceptual shift in consciousness", in which he discovered the ever present presence of spacious, pure awareness. He came to see that this awareness is actually the unchanging essence of who he really is and always has been; the Supreme Self. He also came to see simultaneously, that this vast, infinite sense of presence at the center of his being (and at the center of the being of everyone else on the planet) is actually not at all separate from the presence of God, which he had been looking for during his many years as a monk and spiritual seeker.

Jah Wobble - 'Riding The Sonic Boom To Heaven' - Interview by Iain McNay

Jah Wobble was the original bass player in the band, Public Image Limited (PIL), which was formed by former Sex-pistols singer John Lydon (Rotten). He was 17 when he joined the band. He came from a tough and at times violent East London background. When he was young he developed a taste for short wave radio oscillations; they put him into a stat...e of trance and he could sleep better. 'It felt like listening to infinity.' From an early age he had strong spiritual bent, he discovered the Upanishads and was captivated by ancient teachings. Music, especially the bass guitar and his spiritual life became indelibly intertwined. 'When you truly accept the bass as an emanation of God as the ground of existence you make a friend of impermanence, a state of flux, therefore the fear of losing what you have diminishes.you truly ride the rhythm - you will reside in the residence of 'OM' you can ride the sonic boom to heaven.' 'My bass playing relies first and foremost on intuition - it is necessary to remain innocent - intuition is directed from the solar plexus - the knowing sun in the guts.' After years on the road with bands he became an alcoholic, 'Whenever I drank all the fear disappeared and the tension left my body' but he couldn't go on like that and became completely burnt out. His Marriage broke up and he was left with crushing sense of failure. After joining AA and finding a real depth in his spiritual path life, 'I found I was grateful for every drink and drug I had taken because it was because of them I now had a beautiful and stable life which in turn led to a great productivity. I felt really alive and sensitised, I had simply grasped what it is to be human. Everything in life was sort of emptying out and becoming simpler. I was now at the stage of developing a meditative mind. There came a point where there was no difference between making music and spirituality - the world might have been getting crazier but I was getting better.'

Jenny Boyd - 'Staring Into The Face Of God' - Interview by Iain McNay

Jenny Boyd is the author of 'It's Not only Rock 'n' Roll' a book where she presents interviews with 75 musicians about how their creativity functions. Jenny works as a psychologist and addictions consultant in London. She wanted to understand how the minds and souls of these artist could create such great music. Her own spiritual awakening first started when she was 18. 'A tingling sensation rippled through my body, everything appearing crystal clear. I felt like a channel for the deeper parts of myself, as if I was watching myself from above. There was also a feeling of unity. My search for enlightenment had begun, I was now on a path from which I would often swerve but never leave.' In 1967 she travelled with the Beatles to India to spend time with Maharishi Maheshi Yogi (her sister Pattie was going out with - and later married - George Harrison at the time)

Here she learnt to meditate. She became a successful model in London, and later married Mick Fleetwood the drummer in Fleetwood Mac. 'After many years of being involved with everything that went along with rock 'n' roll I decided to go to college and study psychology.' She talks about her own journey as well as the fascinating process she discovered about musicians creativity. 'Peak experience can happen when the artist is totally in the here and now. A time of complete concentration that overtakes the mundane - the experience of eternity right here and now - by completely concentrating on the music they are able to open themselves up - the result can be songs that come from nowhere.'

Nicholas Hagger - '+A+-A = The Great Nothing' - Interview by Iain McNay

Nicholas Hagger is a poet, cultural historian and philosopher and is the author of more than 35 books including his two latest just released, 'My Double life 1 - This Dark Wood' and 'My Double Life 2 - A Rainbow Over the Hills.' In this interview he talks about his life, his spiritual awakenings and how they have changed the way he sees reality. 'I asked Japanese poet Junzabuto Nishwaki in 1965 for a distillation of the wisdom of the East - he wrote on a business card +A+-A=0. The Great Nothing. He explained that the Universe is a unity that reconciles all contradictions, that the One combines day and night, life or death.'

'Libya accelerated my drastic purgation and remaking of myself. I was on the universal mystic way without realising it - I didn't know that my dark night of the senses would help me back onto the right path of detachments, illumination and transformations - I would have to traverse hell before I could reach inner serenity - I now felt more intensely than ever that I had lost my way in a dark wood and was I still searching for my right path.' 'This was my first glimpse of the celebrated golden flower, the centre and the source of my being. White light flowing upwards... a spring opened up inside me... visions wobbled inside me... I saw a fountain of light .Finally I said to myself , 'I surrender' and I was drunk with flowing light.'

Giles Hutchins - The Illusion Of Separation - Interview by Iain McNay

Giles has written two books, The Illusion of Separation and The Nature of Business. He says, "Our patterns of thinking and learning are all based on a world of things which we are encouraged to think of as separate building. The dominant world view allows us to count and measure objects without their having any relational value for us.... It provides for neat definitions and a sense of control over life yet projects a logic that sets humans apart from each other and from Nature itself. Yet the deeper we look into nature the more we realise that nothing in life is separate; everything is a dynamic interplay. Life is essentially co-creative, fluid and connective. Separateness is an illusion we have created which has fast become a dangerous delusion infecting how we think and relate in business politics and beyond. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the critical problem facing our planet cannot be resolved with the same thinking that created the problems in the first place. In Devon, my daily meditations and yoga were supplemented with sitting against trees I got to know intimately. I learnt a Druidic tree meditation and healing practice which I practiced daily with the trees. I also started writing short articles while sitting next to trees, blogs for a personal website. Then the Guardian newspaper offered to pay for me to write blogs for them and soon after that a publisher approached me about writing a book on business inspired by nature. 'Leaving corporate life was all contrary to my conditioning of security, career, status, financial income, etc. and while my earnings have been pathetic in comparison since, it is with no regrets. I gave myself the vital space and time to deepen my inner psychic connection to Nature and also to recover from years of shell-shocking global travel, stress, burning the candle at both ends. I underwent something of a metamorphosis from 2012 to 2014, gradually healing while letting go of old mentalities, going through a 'dark night of the soul', embracing the unconscious depths of my imaginal realm and making friends once again with the stillness within."

Kristiina Helin - Seeing Is Seeing Itself - Interview by Renate McNay

Kristiina is a Finnish Music Stage Director and a mother. As a child she had strong energy and Out of Body experiences which left her terrified. Having also had a violent upbringing she realized the need for relaxing and releasing emotional stress was essential. In her twenties she entered an Acting School in London where she explored her senses and radically questioned her perception and reality. Coincidentally she found out about Japanese Butoh Dance and travelled to Japan to study its philosophy. The most important exercise was Bisoku movement which is extremely slow. Dancing for example to the smell of a flower or to different images, becoming one with whatever caught her attention; a blade of grass, a tree. Back in Holland she entered a long period of silence where she took action to the zero and fell into a deep depression. At a gathering with Rupert Spira in Amsterdam she had a profound shift in her perception, looking into a mirror she was neither in her body nor in the mirror, she had disappeared.

Adrian Rides and John Flaherty - 'Addiction and Awakening' - Interview by Iain McNay

John is author of the book, 'Addiction Unplugged - How To Be Free and has worked in the field of addiction for 25 years. He was previously a Catholic Priest but left when he was 35 having felt he had handed his life over to the Church. At this point he felt physically, mentally and emotionally drained and he knew it was time to move on. Adrian started drinking heavily at an early age to avoid feelings of intense anxiety and reached the point where his marriage had broken down and he was in a deep depression. He discovered meditation and his life started to change. Shortly afterwards he had an experience, 'I realised that now is all that there is and that the past and future were simply torments of my mind. I realised that I was alive, that my aliveness was not separate from the aliveness in everything, I realised that I was life itself and that I had found myself.' He also works in the field of addiction and teaches mindfulness in London. Adrian's website is:www.lovelifelivenow.com and John's is http://www.beawarebealive.com

Eimear Moran - 'A Feather On The Breath Of God' - Interview by Renate McNay

Eimear Moran is the Author of the book, 'The Garden Path Home to Eden - A new Way of seeing Love, Self and the Garden.' Eimear could always see the Divine in Nature and when her life seemed to fall apart she could only allow this total "free Fall" in the safe place of her Garden where she would sit with all her pain and loneliness. One day she sat in her Garden looking at a Hawthorn Tree; it was a grey, cold day and miserable. The tree looked poor and barren and she thought: "I must look as barren to this tree as he to me." In this moment she woke up and realized her true Nature. An amazing feeling of love came over her, it was a reality of heavenly perfection and she knew she had met God. Eimear can be contacted at:eimearmoran@eircom.net

Prajna Ginty - 'The Edge Of Grace' - Interview by Renate McNay

Prajna is a Mother, Spiritual Teacher and Author of the book, 'Edge of Grace - A Seeker's Path to the Heart of Liberation.' She was on top of the 'Enlightenment Mountain' and spent 7 years in Samadhi when she was thrown by spirit into a cauldron of transmuting fire. A long walk in the dark night began where she felt she cannot live this life anymore. One night she went close to the Cliff and began jumping when something picked her up saying, 'this is your purpose and the life to live,.you're staying, go home.' Prajna explains: 'I want everyone to know that regardless of their circumstances they can directly experience wholeness, return to the deepest peace and live in freedom'.

Bart Marshall - 'Only This Emptiness' - Interview by Iain McNay

In the Vietnam War a mortar landed nearby that blew Bart into a clear and brilliant blackness that, "Felt like home. I would have gladly stayed in that blackness, but instead I was brought back into a world I could no longer view in the same way." When he returned in 1968 he experimented with LSD, read everything he could find that might offer clues to what had happened to him, studied meditation and attended workshops. After 20 years he hit a wall as a seeker and then met the teacher Richard Rose whom he studied with for 5 years. It was after a weekend with Douglas Harding that a breakthrough finally happened. "Being the source of everything that is nothing - everything and nothing, only this emptiness."

Deborah Westmoreland - 'Being Knowing Being' - Interview by Renate McNay

Deborah Westmoreland is a poet, a spiritual teacher and the author of Being Knowing Being, which is an upcoming book of spiritual essays. After several tragedies her big question was, "How can I end suffering?" She was sick and tired of Deborah. Her mind was too busy to sit in meditation so she started doing running meditations finding the moment. Never got ahead of her breath, nor behind. She disconnected from all her belief structures and attachments till she awakened one day, and realized that she had always been in Heaven. She says, "You have to become disinterested in the character, not interested in the story. Suffering is optional it's self-imposed." She never had a spiritual teacher, nor followed any teaching.

Ocke de Boer - 'Higher Being Bodies' - Interview by Iain McNay

Ocke is the author of the book, Higher being Bodies, which is based on a non-dualistic approach to the Fourth Way. Ever since hearing the song, 'Why Are We Sleeping' by Kevin Ayers when he was a teenager, Ocke realized that reality was different to what he had learnt and wanted to wake up. He became a sailor when he was 16, worked in a youth prison when he was 20, and then started to read Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. "This was like coming home," he says. In this interview, he talks about applying sacred ideas and explains 'coating,' the dual-nature of human beings. We have a physical body composed of material from the Earth and a Kesdjan body which is composed of matter from the solar system. "I am the absence of my presence and I am the absence of the presence of my presence."

Thomas Mueller - 'The Matrix Of Silence' - Interview by Renate McNay

Thomas Mueller is the author of The Natural Health Matrix: Eastern Wisdom for Western Minds. He is an Ayurvedic Practitioner, Meditation and Yoga Teacher and the Founder of AYUWAVE. In this interview he tells us his journey for health and peace and his path to waking up. He spent 10 years in the Ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Vedic University in Holland and taught hundreds of students around the globe Ayurvedic therapies, meditation and yoga. The biggest thing he learnt was TRUST, and listening to the Song of Silence became the Matrix leading him to an incredible source of energy and peace.

Christine Jensen - 'Trauma and Awakening' - Interview by Renate McNay

Christine specializes in 'Trauma Resolution Work' which was originally pioneered by American psychologist, Peter Levine. She was brought up in the outbacks of Australia very connected to nature, the stars and the earth and sees today the importance of it for regulation and harmony of our nervous system. She talks about trauma in spirituality and why trauma is in the way to fully Awaken. "Everything we experience is registered in the body and it has to be felt there so that the nervous system can release the blocked energy of the trauma, shock and stress, and heal. Our whole human system from psyche to cell wants to heal and move towards greater wholeness."

Faisal Muqaddam - 'The Essential Enneagram as a Spiritual Path to Awakening' - Interview by Eleonora Gilbert

Faisal Muqaddam is the originator of the Diamond Logos teachings. He is a psycho-spiritual teacher and a trained Reichan and bioenergetics therapist. He has been teaching for the last 35 years in the USA, Middle East and Europe. In this interview we explore the concept of 'the family hole' and how the child develops his personality structure based on what's psychologically 'missing' in the family. Also we explore the essential states of each type and which organs in our body are related to its ennea-type.

Faisal Muqaddam - 'The Glory Of The Human Being.' - Interview by Renate McNay

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Conscious TV - Homepage

It is officially time to prepare for this years Nights Of Fire: A Conscious Evolution. Hosted by Spun Out Productions, the annual music festival kicks off on Thursday, August 17, and runs through the morning of Monday, August 21. Located at The Woods at Bear Creek, a glampingglamorous campingground in Franklinville, NY, Nights of Fire will offer its patrons an educational exploration through fire dancing, art, live music, and workshops.

As eloquently described on the Nights Of Fire Event Page:Nights Of Fire is a FIRE, Art, Music, & EDUCATIONAL RETREAT. We invite all likeminded individuals and those who seek to learn and do more to improve themselves and the world around US. NIGHTS OF FIRE is an educational retreat where YOU can come study many different forms of FIRE SPINNING, FLOW, DANCE, DRUMMING, PAINTING and much more. Evolve with us at night as we will teach you how to celebrate life and simply being alive through song and dance with live music.

Pre-sales for the festival are no longer online, however, you can pick up a $75 ticket thru a ticket rep, or grab one for $100 at the gate! The ticket includes camping and parking.

Take a peek below and click the play button. Youll find a Rochester Groovecast podcast episode. This episode is a preview of the upcoming Nights Of Fire Music Festival. During the episode, youll listen to Roots of Creation, Freekbass, The Mantras, Madam Bliss, Dixons Violin, Stereo Nest, Subsoil, Space Junk, Haewa, and Flux Capacitor. All of these artists are performing at this years Nights Of Fire Music Festival.

If you peek even farther below, youll find an episode timestamp, and Nights Of Fires daily schedule.

Enjoy!

Timestamp:00:00: Roots Of Creation- Different04:12: Episode Introduction09:56: Roots Of Creation- Row Jimmy15:23: Freekbass- Put It In A Letter18:42: Freekbass- Milkhunt23:25: The Mantras- Here We Go29:27: The Mantras- Dirt Nap35:26: Madam Bliss Remix- Notorious BIG Dead Wrong39:15: Madam Bliss Remix- Erykah Badu On And On44:10: Dixons Violin- Ignition (Correction! Jade Dragon is the album name)!46:31: Dixons Violin- Night Spirit50:56: Stereo Nest- Gradient Peak55:03: Stereo Nest- Elder Ladder59:39: Subsoil- Joe Rogan1:03:24: Subsoil- Great Unknown1:07:34: Space Junk- Ascension1:14:31: Haewa- Chem De-Vision1:18:15: Haewa- Swampin1:23:35: Episode Closing Comments1:26:46: Flux Capacitor- Big Bad1:36:29: Flux Capacitor- Unite

Read more:
Nights Of Fire: A Conscious Evolution Festival Preview - NYSMusic

Finland isin the top five of the most digitally advancedcountries in the world, according to the Digital Evolution Index.

The world is rapidly moving towards digitalisation and automation in all areas of society. Yet some of the most digitally advanced economies in the world are struggling to sustain digital growth and innovation Finland being one of them. This years Digital Evolution Indexplaces Finland in the Stall Out Zone; a category for digitally advanced countries that have reached so-called digital plateaus of slowing momentum in terms of digital growth.

Moving past these digital plateaus will require a conscious effort by these countries to reinvent themselves, to bet on a rising digital technology in which it has leadership, and to eliminate impediments to innovation, the researchers behind the Digital Evolution Index suggest. The states in the Stall Out category among them all Nordic nations seem to suffer from issues on both the supply and demand sides of digital growth; past digitalisation is not translating into future innovation because of market saturation and a lacking start-up culture.

Yet, compared to its Nordic neighbours, Finland has fared quite well in adding fresh fuel to its digital innovation engine to keep it running. The past years have been a turbulent time for Finnish business, with a long economic recession following the decline of Nokias mobile phone production, yet Finlands digital sector is now evolving faster than those in any other Nordic countries. In fact, Finland is not far away from being included in the Stand Out zone for digitally advanced countries with a fast-paced digital evolution.

Nevertheless, the road from the stall out category to the stand out zone is a slippery one, and as noted in the Harvard Business Review, all countries need to continuously generate new demand to avoid stalling out. Countries in the Break Out zone, with China in the forefront, are evolving rapidly and have the potential to become the leaders of digital business and technology in a matter of years. China has gone from almost no digital innovation at the turn of the century to having a population of 730 million Internet users today. This rapid development has made China the country with the largest number of Internet users in the entire world, and thus a lucrative market for e-commerce.

If Finland wants to remain at the vanguard of digitalisation, it should look to countries with a similar population size but with a faster digital evolution. Examples of such countries are Estonia, Singapore and New Zealand. Estonia is, of course, a particularly interesting example not only because of its geographical proximity to Finland, but also because of its leading position in e-government.

As the data used to measure each countrys pace of digital evolution in this years Digital Evolution Index was gathered between 2008 and 2015, it is worth keeping in mind that Finland only declared its recessionary era to be over as recently as last year. Digital evolution in Finland is thus likely to pick up speed in the coming few years, if it has not already done so. A promising example for Finlands digital future is Slush a phenomenally successful start-up event that brings together the global tech scene in the winter darkness of Helsinki.

Nicole BerglundHelsinki Times

Originally posted here:
Finland in the Stall Out zone for digital evolution? - Helsinki Times