Free Will ,Determinism, Synchronicity, St. Barnabus and Gilbert

Since moving to Burnaby I’ve been a church tourist. I’ve attended all the ones close to me and yesterday I saw St. Barnabus Church in my travels. My friend named his fine son Barnabus so I appreciate the Biblical significance of this less common reference.  Today the rain from inside was kind of depressing as a harbinger of Vancouver Eastern Rain Forest deluge that often goes on months.  We don’t have the snow of the east but there there’s sunshine and endless sky.  Here is mountains and clouds so it’s somewhat closed in, at times claustrophobic..  Church is an antidote with it’s inspiration and uplifting community association. To quote Third Day, we can ‘soar like eagles’.

So today I looked at the website and saw the St. Barnabus Church is holding the blessing of the pets, a St. Francis of Assisi tradition.  Gilbert my cockapoo, the best dog ever, was blessed by the Bishop of the Anglican Church here. We’re not sure it took since his interest in dogs genitals of either sex and his interest in their butts and the butts of cats and butts generally,  hasn’t changed.  We insist that this is perhaps the genetics of the French poodle as it certainly can’t come from the English cocker spaniel lineage.  

Gilbert comes to church with me as he comes to work . I’ve always picked places of work and church on their welcoming him.  I’m only modestly more upright in behaviour so he’s my ‘canary’ so to speak socially.  If people object to a little dog they’re soon object to me. 

Now these points, passing the church yesterday and it’s welcoming dog’s today, two ‘coincidences’ in my life seem to me to be synchronistic.  Dr. Carl Jung described the synchronistic as subjective experiences which to an outside observer would appear as coincidences.  The ‘objective’ observer sees events as ‘disconnected’ ,as was common in the ‘age of rationalism’ and the idea of disconnected objects in space. That was the now defunct ‘scientific materialism’ that still plagues those who ‘want the facts and nothing but the facts’.  The courts are still full of them but the science labs simply moved onto multi dimensional universes and quantum physics and the observer and observed interacting. 

If a butterfly flaps its wings in China there is a breeze here in North America.  Everything is ‘interconnected’.  Just because we don’t see the wind doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Like the proverbial 7 points of ‘connection’ in societies.  

I’m reading Niall Ferguson’s latest book, The Square and the Tower, (Networks and power, from Freemasons to Facebook) all about human interconnectedness.   Up to the. Magic Number of 150 about men and women can function as a society with limited structure because they mostly know and have contact with each other. (Sapiens, A brief history of humankind by Yuval Harari)  Beyond 150 there has historically been a need for formal governmental and organizational structures, each of which competes with others through commerce and war.   As Dr. Jordan Peterson speaks eloquently about there’s always this balance between chaos and order.

I love the Gospel of St. John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God.....’

The Hindus might say that sound was ‘om’ while the scientists might call it ‘bang’.   The mathematics of music is as exciting as the harmonics and how the arrangements of sound affect our mood and health. Music Therapy is just one application but for me there is the issue of vibration and the String Theory. The uniqueness of an individual elements by it’s ‘sound’.  All of these are interconnected in the ‘ONE ‘.  I love the music in church the reciting together and singing together in community. It’s not about performance but rather about community. 

So in church we gather as a community for prayer , praise and thanksgiving.  Prayer is simply talking to the One and Thanksgiving and Praise are simply positive celebration. Politics by contrast to religion seems predominantly to be negative and critical and I have never had much truck with the judgemental, God as scornful angry condemning.  I rather think of God as ‘HOME’.  The tides of my life go out and in like breathing.

So believing the world to be sacred and that the energy that is between all is best called ‘love’ and that which separates us is ‘fear’ I love to ‘meditate’ in church, ‘listening in community’ for guidance and presence. It’s a mystical place touched by hundreds of thousands minds and hearts and souls over often hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. I love the ‘choice’ of place for a church and the changed atmosphere of that place by so many worshiping there. I feel the difference between the places of war and the places of worship.  

Now because there are billions of people and trillions of beings consciousness, a decision, results in ripples and flows and conflict because we’re all not standing miles apart in an open field but rather huddled together on a subway. If I want to change my position or direction there’s all those around me.  We can do it of course with huffing and puffing and pushing and such.  Then a new flow is created.  But it’s not just ‘me’ doing things.

In 12 step programs they say G.O.D. Is  ‘Good Orderly Direction’ because the alienating effect of the zombism of drugs and alcohol in excess results in aberrant behaviour that the adults about must accommodate to adjust to. As people mature they feel the community and need for community and realize they are simply not alone as adolescents feel they are especially with the heady experience of first drunk on lust, fame, booze, or drugs. 

So I’m ‘called’ to church in my mind. Gilbert is welcome and we’re having the feeling that St. Barnabus might well be the answer for a prayer for now.  I’m inspired to get off the couch and go out in the rain, today,  on a Sunday to participate with my fellow humans in a transcendent ritual and feel the communion.  This is sharing bread and grape juice or wine with others as Jesus, our Lord and Savior, did at the Last Supper which beget the endless communion of God and Man in a cosmic consciousness and an unconscious dance made conscious in the shared experience. 

Hallelujah!

Libet , Free Will, Masculine God and the Energy Matrix

Benjamin Libet’s  experiment went like this.  He had volunteers hooked up to electro encephalograms and make a spontaneous movement. There was a precise timer each volunteer read at the moment they became aware of the urge to act.  There was a 200 millisecond delay, on average, between subjective urge and objective movement.

A signal appeared in the brain even earlier, approximately 500 milliseconds and  this was called the ‘readiness potential’.  This was interpreted initially as a blow to ‘free will’ and evidence of ‘determinism’ or ‘fate’.  That is not thought the case today as further experiments unfold. Trevena and Miller in University of Otago showed that it was unclear what the ‘readiness potential’ was as it was present regardless of the decision to act. Scourged and his team recently hypothesized that neural noise must pass a threshold and that this appeared like an readiness potential.  

First this all adds to the notion of the human and free will as a ‘second response” or ‘after thought”.  In spiritual theological terms God is considered male and man collectively female. God acts and man reacts.  Hence the prayer Thy Will Be Done rather than My Will Be Done.

The determinist position would be that we are a comic strip but unfortunately the ego of aetheists and determinists is too large for that.  They hypocritically deny free will but demand credit and esteem for denying free will. They deny God yet want the praise we give God. We are an after thought. Our actions follow thoughts by milliseconds.  Neuroscience teaches that consciousness itself is an after thought.

The Now is perhaps a ‘field’.  This brings forward the idea of the brain itself as not being the centre of the universe but rather an organic computer , like a communication receptor which can receive messages from elsewhere.

In further studies of the Libet phenomena  an observer could predict the movement before the volunteer even had the ‘urge’ to act.  This could indeed be a model of God and creation. String theory allows for the emergency switch and spontaneous unplanned or predicted events. God could interrupt a particularly catastrophic action.  It’s not so much what God does as what God prevents.  The possibility is raised.

But how this observer can manipulate action is as yet unknown.  It is known that the observer looking at the EEG could be prescentient.  The image follows of the neuroscientist as ‘brain reader’ and ‘soothsayer’. Armed with a portable EEG he could be a fine mentalist addition to any carne fortune teller’s game.

I like this research as I’ve been following it since the 80’s interested in the fundamental question of psychiatry which is ‘change’.  Can interventions bring about change.

St. Paul’s state “I do what I don’t want to do and I don’t do what I want to do’. This has been my central issue of research and reflection since I was a family physician and a patient died because he didn’t take the medication that was recommended to him by three physicians and not only that lied about not taking it.

That one case  lead to my interest in non compliance and non adherence to medical regimen.this is common in 30% or more of general clinical medicine rising to 80% in psychiatric medicine. It’s the elephant in the living room government denies.  Eventually this interest lead to addiction and addiction addiction psychiatry where St Paul would flourish.

Administrative medicine is an extension of legal medicine and exists purely by war and diplomacy and leverage, a rationalists wet dream, a purely masculine Mars God activity with all the room possible for grandiosity. It’s based on a set of outdated unscientific ideas that don’t take into account Libet or the unconscious. 

By contrast a clinician struggles with this rather beguiling phenomena.  Can I change this disease.  Can I help this person get a life. Mental health is the ability to love, work and play. Can I with a variety of tools in the armementariam change this persons desire to kill themselves or others.

 But most importantly can I do it without force and without paying the person. The family physician predominantly works with the conscious processes but a psychiatry addresses the unconscious and communicates in specific ways to achieve a mutual aim of change. It’s the exact opposite of coercive administrative medicine.

We found that we could change all manner of behaviour the way lawyer, administrators and judges and politicians do by ‘buying’ or ‘threatening’ people or causing pain or removing things.  This is what I did to some extent  as a family physician and especially in surgery. I worked in the conscious realm.  

As a psychiatrist I worked in the realm of conflicting internal programs , the anima or female and the animus or male.  I noted long ago that I could stop people killing themselves. When I was a family physician and later as a resident my patients killed themselves.  I actually stopped suicide in a suicide ward and reduced attempts remarkably and the effects of these interventions persisted for years.

However the government and administrative doctors in Canada have moved into killing people. Euthanasia is all the rage and death is paid for more than life. We’ve seen this extensively in the Planned Parenthood Abortion Industry Scandal with it’s billions of dollars funding.

I see tombstones in peoples eyes. I looked at an administrative doctor and saw tombstones in his eyes. He couldn’t tell the difference between lie and truth and literally used the metaphor for ‘entertainment’ as his idea of what a doctor’s role. He really believed that medicine was just a Shakespearean Stage.  But he had obviously never studied the Fool and knew less about their wisdom .

I believe this as a Tibetan Buddhist and St. John mystic might. But his choice of this view was based on his dying and the failure of his life like those who ‘give up’  increasing numbers seek euthanasia. The mentally ill are demonized by those who deny their own pain. Such a shame.

Like lawyers and men of the 19th century they talk of ‘pain’ in a mechanical way.  They actually live

in their ‘actuarial’ materialistic constructs. They are money and numbers. A comic strip 2 dimensional
reward seeking animal soulless machine construct.

Yet the universe is fractals and time. These experiments challenges the creepy silliness of the political

 administrative processes  so utterly outdated and so banal.

They do not know what they do.

But then I’m but a  kazoo in the symphony of life. I actually am a psychiatrist who reads the research and questions the very existence of this world. Because that’s the essence of psychiatry, reality. Do we create it or does it create us.  Whose pulling the string. It’s what a professional psychiatrists do not what lawyers or administrative doctors do despite their grandiosity and arrogance coupled with banal committees.

The administrative doctor is a slave.  The professional was once ‘free’. But we’re all selling our soul  to the company store.  Yet someone may be watching.  And we may be on the verge of WWWIII.  If it is a comic strip and my thoughts are merely voice over then I really must think more about those ‘b’ observers and the ‘energy matrix’.

The Swami said, “I am the bubble , make me the sea”.  I do that which I don’t want to do and don’t do that which I want to do.  My patients are pre contemplation, contemplative, determined and action phased..  The guys with the guns always cut the Georgian knots. it’s an Alexander thing. .  Their administrations are thuggish, careless, wasteful, lacking finesse, good at killing. Suck at healing.
I’m uncertain.  Ambivalent.  There seems a higher path. Thy will be done. I.d like to talk to the observer.