Dear Family,
As I have already told you, I thought that this new blog should concentrate on the chronological review of my journey, marked by the interventions of the invisible hand. However, and thanks to the pleasant surprise when considering the review of my oldest ‘coincidence’, belonging to the 1st family stage, with the discovery of the flying mind UFM and the path to Salvation, I had to hurry the prompt introduction of The Law and The Course. After all, that first intervention is conclusive proof of the Spiritual world and of Miracles.
Looking back now at the 2nd stage of my family’s evolution, I see that my mother’s decision to ‘replace’ my father (when I was about 9 years old) caused my upbringing to be the responsibility of my maternal grandmother without any interference from parents or blood siblings. Today I can only say Thank you, Mom, because the amount of love with which I was raised, I could hardly have received in any other way. (I was loved with the love that one has for an orphan.)
The two previous paragraphs were written, for the most part, before the heart attack. As is obvious, the vision, once the events have happened, is always 20-20. My new perspective:
My first epiphany, my feeling of spirituality, motivated by the death of my father, eventually led me to ‘discover’ the Law of One.
My second epiphany, my sense of miracles, brought on by my salvation from drowning, the ‘death’ of my mother’s marriage and the ‘near death’ of a son, led me to the discovery of A Course in Miracles.
My third epiphany, my ‘as above, so below’ feeling, motivated by my heart attack, is leading me to Undo It.
When I say “my feeling” I mean to feel, to ‘experience in my own flesh’ (Well, actually in the mind that God gave me, the spiritual one, and which is the same one that He has given to all of us, not the brain of my mortal body).
Reflecting on these three epiphanies, I now see that they are not independent and I can perceive a much more coherent picture:
The first epiphany, the Law of One, has so far revealed to me a “credible” story of God’s existence and His Creation. (And I clarify the “so far”: each epiphany has led to new readings of the Law, and each reading has significantly and radically increased and changed my understanding of it. This in itself is a “testimony” that I hope to present in a future blog (or more, if necessary).
For now, I just want to highlight the following: RA, In Book 1, Session 13, Pg 137, reveals to us
Ra: I am Ra. The first known thing in the creation is infinity. The infinity is creation.
Ra: I am Ra. Infinity became aware. This was the next step.
Ra: I am Ra. Awareness led to the focus of infinity into infinite energy..………………………………The Creator is the focusing of infinity as an aware or conscious principle called by us as closely as we can create understanding/learning in your language, intelligent infinity
Questioner: Then can you tell me how the galaxy and planetary systems were formed?
Ra: I am Ra. You must imagine a great leap of thought in this query, for at the last query the physical, as you call, it, universes were not yet born.
The energies moved in increasingly intelligent patterns until the individualization of various energies emanating from the creative principle of intelligent infinity became such as to be co-Creators. Thus the so-called physical matter began. The concept of light is instrumental in grasping this great leap of thought as this vibrational distortion of infinity is the building block of that which is known as matter, the light being intelligent and full of energy, thus being the first distortion of intelligent infinity which was called by the creative principle. This light of love was made to have in its occurrences of being certain characteristics, among them the infinite whole paradoxically described by the straight line, as you would call it. This paradox is responsible for the shape of the various physical illusion entities you call solar systems, galaxies, and planets of revolving and tending towards the lenticular.
This last paragraph is super deep and we will have to digest it very slowly in the announced ‘future blog’, here I just want to point out that physical matter is an effect of creation, not its origin! And our physical body, matter, is therefore not our true origin. No! As we will see, we are part of the Original Thought. We are Spirit.
In other sessions RA confirms to us that this Creator decided to individualize Himself, but by extending Himself, not by forming separate beings or entities. Everything is One because the Creator, being Infinite, never divided Himself, only extended Himself. As part of Creation we are part of that Whole. We are part of the Creator, the Intelligent Infinite.
RA also tells us that once planets and galaxies had been created, the Creator arranged for some of his “extensions” (us, His Sons and Daughters) to use physical bodies as vehicles to experience the infinite possibility of energy combinations, to experience ourselves that focus of infinity as a conscious principle.
And furthermore, as I pointed out in the quote, it speaks to us of Universes. These are created by that “co-Creative individualization”, which has full authority to determine different ‘basic’ laws for each one. In the case of ours, in which ‘we happen to live’, these, called ‘distortions’, are the Law of Free Choice (Free Will), or first distortion, and the second is that of Love (but not exclusively carnal love, as we will analyze in the future).
We will also describe that in addition to Distortions there are 8 Dimensions (vibrations) that, like a musical scale, increase in intensity and the last ‘note’ is the beginning of the next scale (universe). And RA reveals to us that on our planet we are exactly in the transition between the 3rd and 4th dimensions.
As we can see from what has been summarized so far, Creation seems to develop on two planes: the metaphysical or spiritual (the Original) and the physical. And the evolution is similar but independent for each one, and there must be harmony in the developments, 3rd with 3rd and 4th with 4th, and although both have to do with Love, we must learn that there are two types: Love for oneself only, which we call negative, and Love for others (which includes the first) and which we call positive. And the requirement to graduate from the third to the fourth dimension is to select one of the two.
The problem is to reach the passing mark, which in the positive case is ‘only’ 51%, but given our bellicose and individualistic nature it does not seem to have been achieved to any significant degree in the past, nor the 95% required for the negative case, (forgive me for the descriptiveness but this shows the quality of SOB needed to graduate in this category; could this be the justification for the quality of world leaders that are emerging lately?)
The hope is that there is a clause that says a planet in 4th positive density is only compatible for 4th positive entities, so it seems that negatives and/or non-graduates are going to have to change planets, because RA informs us that Earth is now in 4th+. (And the subterfuge of changing the judges, or the laws, is not going to work!)
The other great hope is that there are also two paths to achieving graduation, one described only by the Law and involving synchronizing energies between the metaphysical and physical spiritual centers and applying not only to the 3rd dimension but to all density changes (the ‘graduations’).
But the Law also explains that the “veil” can be lifted. And as we will see in the next blog, the veil consists of an “improvement” that occurred to some Logos (one of the co-Creative individualizations) to implant the “veil of forgetfulness”, to erase the memory of Divine paternity, to every entity before incarnating in the 3rd dimension. The justification was supposed to be to give the plenitude of free will and thus achieve a notable decrease in the duration of the learning cycles of 3rd and 4th dimensions. In other words, to increase the efficiency of self-experimentation. (Any similarity with some current methods of government is not a coincidence, all because the efficiency).
And it is precisely here that Jesus appears, a messenger of God (according to RA originating from an advanced stage of the 4th dimension, that of Love) and preaches that we must remember and recognize God as our Common Father during his earthly apostolate two thousand years ago and his Student Manual in the Course of Miracles. And my second epiphany. I am very close to completing my first 365 days of practicing the Manual and I can attest to its effectiveness and my willingness not only to repeat the practice but to try to “live” it. I will assimilate it to ‘My Way of Compostela’.
And here comes what I have already identified as my third epiphany, although it is too recent for me to have fully digested it, I can already assure you that it has reinforced my evolution of “changing my thinking”, of replacing fear with love, death with eternal life. The verification of the possibility of eliminating errors and their consequences in physical illnesses, through dietary and spiritual practices, has simply provided a palpable demonstration of my faith in God and the method of the Course.
Let me repeat the following evidence here:
Wednesday, May 8, 2024 10:13 AM
DECEPTION
What Everyone Needs to Understand About Human Vision Learning how we see and avoiding self-deception. Posted February 28, 2022 | Reviewed by Davia Sills Psychology Today
Key Points
Human vision is a surprisingly creative process .
Beliefs influence our observations of the world around us, often leading us to see what we expect to see.
Everything we see is either in the past or a projected estimate of the future.
Human vision is much closer to cognitive theater than video surveillance. Source: Michael Morse/Pexels “He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.” ―Philip K. Dick, Ubik, 1969 novel
It is close to impossible for us to intuitively understand the complex and surprising process of human vision. As a result, most people lack a fundamental grasp of how they see. This is an odd situation, considering how much we rely on vision.
Although the science is not complete, enough is known for us to think more sensibly about what we “see” and prevent us from placing too much trust in our observations. Unfortunately, overconfidence is common. I encounter it frequently during talks and interviews about extraordinary claims and critical thinking issues. Without hesitation, for example, many people award unjustified credibility to eyewitness accounts of alien visitations, Bigfoot, ghosts, etc. (Harrison 2013).
Science has revealed that human vision is much closer to cognitive theater than video surveillance. But how many people know this? Most are unaware that seeing is largely a creative act, a process that presents us with a version of reality rather than an accurate reproduction. Our eyes and brains simply do not capture and display the world as it really is
The brain instead produces a customized representation of a scene. What we see, as a matter of routine, are functional fantasies meant to be of practical use. If more people filtered every important observation through an awareness of this, it could substantially reduce self-deception and irrationality. And that would be a significant step toward a more sensible world.
A Quick Glance at How We See
Human vision begins when photons (particles of light) hit the eye. The retina performs a bit of nature’s magic by converting this light energy into electrical information, which races along the optic nerve to the brain. Once there, this raw data is read or translated as patterns. This is how we identify a big, round shape from a small, square shape or recognize that an attacking lion is not a beautiful flower.
While strange and imperfect, our vision works well enough for us most of the time. After all, our species can juggle, fly airplanes, and paint landscapes. But cognitive missteps are common because the normal vision process includes seeing things that are not there and missing or wildly misinterpreting things that are.
Too many people wrongly assume that human vision works something like a camera and accurately relays reality into our brains. This is a problem because excessive trust in the eyes can make one less likely to entertain doubts or seek confirming evidence after witnessing something significant. We all are prone to fooling ourselves in many ways, but excessive trust in vision is one of the quickest and surest routes to self-deception.
Vision takes up a large portion of overall brain activity, so it makes sense that the brain would seek efficiency by minimizing data clutter. When we look at a lawn, we do not need to be swamped with the visual detail of every blade of grass. Unfortunately, most people probably don’t realize just how much detail is left out. The brain only shows us an extremely small area in conscious focus. Typically, more than 99 percent of the surrounding environment is effectively absent. We miss a lot (Chabris and Simons 2010). Perhaps most troubling, however, is how our beliefs and past experiences can influence what we see.
“We do not see the world. We watch internal movies about the world.”
Most people I engage with on this topic are shocked to learn that fill-in images of things not present can be wholly created based on what the subconscious brain deems useful, desirable, expected, or consistent with a belief. They tend to be even more surprised when I explain that research shows we may naturally place more trust in these made-up visual images than we do images of things present in reality (Ehinger 2017). So, to recap, scenes we see in our heads are not only incomplete and highly edited but also routinely include imaginary elements. It is as if there is a screenplay to consult, and we all have a Hollywood CGI special-effects team in our heads. We do not see the world. We watch internal movies about the world. To be fair, let’s call them docudramas, presentations rooted in fact—but with ample artistic leeway.
Seeing is Believing vs. Believing is Seeing
If one morning, for some unknown reason, a large hole opened up in your living room floor, you might not see it. It’s right there in front of you. Your eyes travel over it. But it goes unseen in your brain. Why? You don’t see it because it shouldn’t be there. It’s an unexpected deviation from the reliable playbook. You believe in a solid living room floor, and that is what your brain sees. So, you step into the hole and fall to your death.
The influence of belief on our visual perceptions likely explains countless eyewitness claims of extraordinary and unlikely phenomena. An unidentified light in the sky, for example, might be seen very differently by people with different beliefs. Based on what we know about the interplay between belief and vision, enthusiastic UFO believers would be more likely to see an obvious alien spaceship in considerable detail than those who do not hold the prior belief. A line from Frank Herbert’s novel Dune comes to mind: “Hope clouds observation.”
Not only do we fail to see the world accurately or in full, neither do we see it in real-time. Everything we observe around us is old news. It already happened (Anwar 2013; Maus 2013). We visually experience our environments with a delay of hundreds of milliseconds. That may not sound like much, but sometimes it matters. The human brain evolved to cope with this delay reasonably well in most scenarios. It naturally makes subconscious attempts to estimate the speed and path of objects in motion and then show us projected or expected images of where they will be. This means the “present” that we see around us is a mixture of the past and an anticipated future.
None of this information is meant to belittle or denigrate our eyes and brains. The system of human vision is amazing and wonderous, a magnificent evolutionary achievement. But it is vital that we understand its unusual ways—and keep a close eye on the peculiar vulnerabilities that come with it.
References
Harrison, Guy P. 2013. Good Thinking: What You Need to Know to be Smarter, Safer, Wealthier, and Wiser. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 127-138.
Chabris, Christopher and Simons, Daniel. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. New York, NY: Crown Publishers.
Ehinger, B., et al. 2017. Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones. eLife, 6:e21761 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.21761.
Maus, Gerrit W., Fischer, Jason, and Whitney, David. Motion Dependent Representation of Space in Area MT+, Neuron 78, no. 3 (May 8, 201): 554–62.
Guy P. Harrison is the author of Think: Why You Should Question Everything
We have been thinking for millennia: seeing is believing, I believe what I see.
The Course insists I see what I think. I believe what I think. And modern science seems to agree. And those who preach Fake News! Because they take advantage of this weakness of our eyes to introduce falsehoods.
Our only defense? Trusting our Source, God. When you think with the mind He gave us, you will ‘feel’ what is true to think, not what the Ego tricks your brain into thinking.
I think, I believe, I see and I feel that,
I love you all,
Alberto