Opposite of “Drill Baby Drill”

I’ve been reading and hearing folks cry about how the USA is not drilling and is importing too much oil. I understand the jobs aspect, certainly. But I have always had a contrarian thought about this topic and I never hear anyone bring this up: To the extent that we buy and import oil/gas/coal/fossil fuels, we are essentially “conserving” our own and burning that of other nations. By “own”, I mean, that which we can dig up inside our current political borders.

This is a complex issue and I don’t mean to simplify it to say good or bad, but think about it, if we burn every last crumb of what we have here, THEN we will have to import 100% of it and there will be no recourse. If we burn others’, we will end up relatively, with more and more. So, to me, so long as things are politically stable, AND we can economically swing it, buying and burning other countries’ oil/gas, makes our slice of the pie (that we politically control), bigger in the longrun.

Also realize that in some ways, even though we are gluttons and that is not a good thing, it is an astounding fact that 90% of ALL the oil burned on ALL SIDES in World War II, came from Texas.

The scary thing is that unless some drastically new technology (not the stupid battery cars) is developed/discovered, or some serious conservation happens, there WILL be a day of reckoning – out about 100 to 250 years, where modern society will cease to “work”, for lack of a better term, as energy becomes so expensive that things we take for granted, like food and transportation (of food) become prohibitively expensive. I would expect “resource-wars” before that, but you get the idea. I’m not taking a political position on this, either, just making the observation. It’s coming. Those reading this probably won’t have to worry about it, but our kids might; or their kids.

I giggle a little at the fracking issue. Trust me, when the price goes high enough, they’ll frack; everyone, including your auntie, will frack. They’ll frack and frack some more because of what the price will do. Thought experiment: imagine a stream in the woods and EVERYONE knows it’s full of gold nuggets but they’re told, “don’t take the gold out”. How long do you think that gold will sit there? Well, sure, it depends on the consequences, as it always does, but when the price of something goes high enough, people will risk even death, to get at it (and I am by no means equating fracking with death.  Not at all.  The same group that ignores such a basic things as the variability of the sun, is now campaigning against fracking).

And before you get upset at how we are blowing through our natural resources (we are, let’s face it), try and realize how many GOOD things have come out of that. That’s the part the “anti-” crowd never wants to imagine or talk about. All the inventions and medicines and knowledge and industry that using the energy has unleashed. Oh yes, it has. It’s real, but it’s harder to imagine, particularly for the simple folks, which is what makes it easy to demagogue. Most of one side’s positions are conveniently on the “easy” side of the ledger and the other side has the complex arguments to make–the uphill climb.

Anyway, to the extent that we burn others’, we bank our own. That was the original premise. Someday we may be glad we did. God help us then.

Robert Lanza’s Biocentrism Theory corroborated by a Near Death Experience?

Ok. Heavy one tonight. Hea-vy. I’ve been reading about NDE’s for 10 years or more. The most influential book I’ve ever read is Embraced by the Light, by Betty Eadie. I’ve read it easily 10 times and see new things every time.

I’m not trying to advocate about NDE’s and make you believe in them. I’m not even sure how much of it I believe. I find them fascinating. I like to consider them as if they were true–you know, “what if?”. I do believe that these folks have had profound experiences and I do NOT believe that many of them are capable of making these things up. But you have to understand that the things they are trying to convey with mere words, are really spectacular concepts and experiences. Words don’t have the ability to convey the full meaning. So, like with any text, there is a lot of wiggle room. And if you want to poo-poo it, it’s probably not hard to do.

I also read/have read a fair amount of Cosmology. I enjoy it. My science and math background is nothing special. College basically. But you can enjoy and understand and follow these concepts, even if you don’t understand the details; the equations and such. The big bang–redshifted galaxies, the microwave background radiation. I would even say I can appreciate relativity, thanks to some great books like “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”. Particle physics and quantum mechanics is where I get lost, but you can follow the broader scientific battles: String theory, dark matter, open or closed universe, cosmological constant (Einstein’s big fudge in his equations that if he’d thought about it, he’d have done all of Hubble’s work on paper! Without a telescope! Let’s face it, he was tired, I’m sure).

Anyway, while reading this kind of stuff, I think to myself that the scientists have pushed things so far, that they will eventually have to factor in things that might normally be considered philosophy or spirituality. I’m not saying I’m some smart guy who knows things–it’s just a passing thought, but one that recurs. It’s a hunch really. It’s based on nothing concrete.

Then you read a book called “Beyond the Darkness” by Angie Fenimore, and in her description of her conversation with God, during her Near Death Experience, she was told that good and evil are actual laws of the universe; actual physical laws. This is her claim. Should scientists be considering this? Hmm, maybe. And maybe they’re not there yet. But it’s coming.

Many, many of the NDE accounts talk about time having no place and absolutely no meaning in the spirit world. Theologians have long said that “God is outside of time”, and I believe there is Biblical stuff on that, but I don’t know where; only that I’ve heard it. These NDE folks mostly confirm that. And it’s just so goofy that you can’t consider it, but they say that “over there, there is only the present”.

Biocentrism also has ideas on time:

Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.

This new theory, Biocentrism, by Robert Lanza, has the time issue as one of its tenets. So you see both sides; both disciplines, if you will, converging on several topics. And realize that this is all anecdotal on my part–I haven’t made any “study” of it.

Last night, I was reading an NDE on www.near-death.com, and I came across something very interesting. Reading Juliet Nightingale’s NDE, I came to this:

no matter how things may appear in this world of duality and illusion. It’s merely a hologram – created by the collective consciousness – for the sake of growth and evolution

Well that happens to be a core tenet of Mr. Lanza’s Biocentrism! She’s claimed to die and come back and stated very matter of factly that this is so, and it happens to tie out to a new TOE, or, Theory Of Everything.

Click here to read the NDE piece

Here is a link to Lanza’s Biocentrism for background:

Click here to read about Robert Lanza and Biocentrism

Here are points 3 and 4 of the 7 tenets spelled out on that page.

(3) The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves.

(4) Without consciousness, “matter” dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state.

What that says is that if no one is there to observe matter, it is not actually there, but is just a series of probability waves. It COULD be any one of the points in the set, but it is NONE of them. It’s only a possibility, until a biological observer “observes”, then, it takes one concrete form and all the other probabilities/possibilities collapse. Poof. They’re gone.

Said in a nutshell: “life creates the universe, not the other way around”.

Ok, now look, I’m not claiming to “know” anything. I am not claiming that I’m some big intellectual or anything like that. I just like to read. I like to read these two kinds of books. I have seen the same thing discussed in these two totally separate areas, and I find it interesting. That’s all. It’s neat, for lack of a better term.

My only follow up thought is that I wonder if there are any real scientists actually considering that these NDE folks might be able to point them in an experimental direction? Is there any cross-pollination with regard to ideas? I would think that traditional scientists would totally distance themselves from the NDE’ers. It’s not science, right? It would be like listening to a palm reader down the block from the supercollider.

Also, are there any zealous NDE’ers trying to get face time with big scientists to discuss things they may feel that they have “learned” “over there”?

It’s interesting.

Addendum:

The book on Biocentrism is a good read. There’s a parallel with Einstein that I noticed. You think Einstein: Big breakthrough in science. Outrageously ahead of his time, right? You read “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”, or really any decent account of it, and they will note that Einstein formed General and Special Relativity because of one thing: The speed of light.

Scientists had been measuring the speed of light in the late 1800′s and felt their measures were reliable. (It boggles my mind how you can measure something that does 186,000 miles per SECOND, but they did). Only trouble was, the speed was the same no matter what the source and observer were doing! It makes no sense. If you throw a baseball at 40 mph off a train doing 40, mph, it will approach a stationary observer at 80mph, right? Well light ALWAYS went the same speed, and no one could fathom it.

Einstein’s big breakthrough, was that he was the only one to actually ACCEPT these experimental results and he said, “…what if?” He looked at what the ramifications would be if this were true. Other scientists just blew it off–they didn’t believe the data. Their own prejudices stopped them from working the problem–but not our man AE.

The parallel to me, with Biocentrism, is that much of the theory is based on the double slit experiment. There is no sensible way to account for the behavior of a particle to be totally different, based ONLY on whether or not someone looks at it, but time and time again, you can reproduce this just GOOFY experimental result.

I’d like to think that Lanza was the first guy to take this result seriously and say, “…yes, we DO understand it to be this way and so where does that lead?”

So the double slit experiment, unexplainable since it was discovered 70 years ago or so I think, the double slit experiment is analagous to the constancy of the speed of light. It’s an idea no scientist wanted to tackle, because the result makes no sense, as we define sense.

You know what else doesn’t make sense? Why do managers continue to sacrifice bunt, when computer models show that it is almost always dumb to do so? Einstein and Lanza would not continue to bunt facing that data. –fog