The Mind Defined

J.Hamilton

While there can be a number of reference for the term mind including conscious, subconscious, unconscious, and super-conscious minds, definitions range all over the place. I define the mind as the conscious part of us that we can detect, project and “think” with – though in a very limited fashion. It is what we filter the world with which is primarily a product of comparing what we have already experienced. I say the mind does little beyond lining up existing facts as conjecture and projecting forward in a linear manner and very often incorrectly. This basic fact about mistakes keeps most people in holding patterns their entire lives because of an inability to effectively embrace and process new information. Intuition is not of the mind and in fact, the mind undermines our trust in intuition (because the mind has no reference for it).

It is interesting that we are not the mind because we can control the mind. We can shape it, teach it perspective and habits and patterns, therefore the mind is malleable. “we” control the mind. As well, I find I cannot trust the mind and it gets me in most of my troubles, i.e., “missing the mark,” the Aramaic definition of sin. Clearly, the mind is a reactive and protective device because it is limited to what it “knows” and can only react if it is beyond its capacity to label something or pigeonhole something. Further, we are not the body and we are not our brains.

Therefore I see the mind as a survival mechanism for a brain on overload.
With a significant amount of research and observation, I see the mind as synonymous with the ego and little more than a survival mechanism for an organism lost to its natural state of connection and inherent guidance that is found in the rest of nature. I see the mind as filtering out information to the point that it misses almost everything that goes on. For example, in the award winning documentary, What the Bleep, Joe Dispensa says “the brain consciously processes about 2000 bits of information a second while awash in 400 billion bits of ever changing information. And while the subconscious mind is capable of lots of calculations, I do not believe it processes new information. I believe the subconscious mind instead learns, stores, processes and applies specific habits and patterns as specific responses to life. As the body ranges out of the comfort of its habitat of patterns and patterns lodged in the sub-conscious mind, the brain goes on overload because of its inability to process new information. The conscious mind’s job is to restrict new incoming information because of the very poor processing of new/foreign information.

Therefore, I see the ego and conscious mind as a filter and restriction on too much incoming information getting to be processed by the brain. My experience says the mind is synonymous with resistance. I believe what is perceived as the types of manmade success are only learned habits and patterns in response to life. Someone learns very early in life to never be out of money, therefore they get “an education” become wealthy and are perceived as successful when in fact their entire life is based on a fear of not having money.

My years of research says our natural state is an intact connection with the order that all of animate and inanimate life shares. This connection processes all of life with no issues. without this connection, the brain on overload sets up the mind as a repository of automated, habitual and reactionary responses to everything. We live our lives in little tiny worlds of limited capacities to respond to the incredible wealth and expression of an incredible universe. On our own, we miss much of what is going on 🙂

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I don’t read much.. I have enough going on documenting my own work but I am reading (finally) The Source Field Investigations by David Wilcock.. If nothing else, I find what I am reading to be an exact match for our conversation – twice now.

Here is something pretty undeniable about what is called by some “the Hive Mind” and others “The Morphic Field” suggesting we do not originate our thinking.. maybe our patterns and habits but I continue to suggest we are governed by something larger than ourselves, and our primary mission is to become better “receivers.”

I worked with a major league soccer team in Guadalajara, Mexico a few years ago.. the title of my talk was Goats with Eyes in the Back of Their Heads. The idea was, as they did NFB, as they quieted their nervous systems down, they had better subtle communication going down the field. They could better sense where each was and they moved down the field as one.. and with a single aim.

Much better than every team member bringing their hang overs, emotional baggage from the disagreement with the wife, girl friend, or kids, or just coming from discovering a slight new dent in the side of their new car in the parking lot. Coherence and resonance is big 🙂

Added as an excerpt from The Source Field Investigations
by David Wilcock

At this point, we may need to consider a shift in perspective. Let’s start by asking ourselves this question: What, exactly, is Mind? Even when we discuss the pineal gland, we are still prone to think of the mind as something that exists within each person—where one mind then sends messages to another mind like a two-way radio. However, what if we’re actually all sharing the same mind, to some degree—and that mind is far more energetic in nature than we’ve been led to believe?

Let’s go back to Backster and really think about what he discovered. If the mind is an energetic field, then bacteria could be sharing the same mind as plants. Plants could share the same mind as eggs. Eggs could share the same mind as animals. And all living things may share the same mind with us. When Backster wanted to burn a leaf, the plant responded. When Backster started watering a plant, it tracked his move­ments. Backster once told me his plants always “screamed” when one man came into the lab—and this man turned out to mow lawns for a living. When two people meditate together and then go their separate ways, a jolting flash of light in one person’s eyes will create an identical brainwave shock in the other person—25 percent of the time. The Insti­tute of HeartMath showed that when we live together, work together or have an affinity for each other, we begin synchronizing brainwaves, heartbeat patterns and other vital signs. Dr. William Braud found that a nervous person could be calmed down by “remote influencing.” A detracted person could have better concentration and an immediate improvement in mental focus—simply by having someone else do thinking for them at a distance.

Thoughts Occurring Directly in the Source Field

A September 2010 article in Wired magazine featured a discussion between Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on what they called “the hive mind.” A surprising number of human innovations appear in different people’s minds simultaneously—as if we’re all using the same energy field to think with. As new ideas are introduced into that energy field, they suddenly become available to everyone.

Steven Johnson: . . . Calculus, the electrical battery, the telephone, the steam engine, the radio—all these ground­breaking innovations were hit upon by multiple inventors working in parallel with no knowledge of one another…

Kevin Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another. . . . Gregor Mendel’s ideas about genetics, for example: He formulated them in 1865, but they were ignored for 35 years because they were too advanced. Nobody could incorporate them. Then, when the collective mind was ready and his idea was only one hop away, three different scientists independently rediscovered his work within roughly a year of one another.’

An article in The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell reveals that this phenomenon is far more prevalent than most people think. As of 1922, fully 148 different major scientific discoveries had been documented as occurring nearly simultaneously.

This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what sci­ence historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major sci­entific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathemati­cians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wil­helm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland. “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Schemer in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:

“The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times indepen­dently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simulta­neously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Sym­mington.”2

Dr. Erwin Laszlo commented on how often this effect appears in history.

The great breakthroughs of classical Hebrew, Greek, Chi­nese and Indian culture occurred almost at the same time [750 to 399 B.C.] … among people who were not likely to have been in actual communication.3

In Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s classic The Presence of the Past, a variety of experiments support the idea that we are all accessing a common data bank of information when we try to think about something—such as solve a particular  puzzle or problem—just like these inventors were doing. In one case, Sheldrake gave a difficult hidden-figure puzzle to random groups of people and timed how long it took them to solve it.

Then the solution was revealed to two million viewers in a British televi­sion broadcast. Everyone watched as the hidden face of a Cossack emerged from the background—including his handlebar mustache. When Sheldrake then gave the puzzle to new groups in Europe, Africa and America who had not seen the original puzzle nor the British TV show with the answer, they nonetheless solved it much faster.4

Dr. Paul Pearsall’s fascinating work with organ transplants is another example of shared thoughts—though in this case there is a clear biological component involved. Dr. Pearsall has authored more than two hundred professional articles and eighteen best-selling books on this fas­cinating subject, and the entire article—with all the incredible specifics— is free to read on Pearsall’s Web site.5

According to this study of patients who have received transplanted organs, particularly hearts, it is not uncommon for memories, behaviors, preferences and habits associated with the donor to be transferred to the recipient. . . . A total sample of 74 transplant recipients (23 of which were heart transplants) … showed various degrees of changes that paralleled the personalities of their donors.⁶

Thoughts are apparently being stored within individual organs before they appear in the recipient’s mind. The Source Field has spoken once again.

The Co-Intelligence Institute gives a thorough summary of experiments Sheldrake has either run himself or compiled in his impressive work on this concept of the shared mind. All of these breakthroughs suggest we are using the Source Field to think—at least to some degree.

In one experiment, British biologist Rupert Sheldrake took three short, similar Japanese rhymes—one a meaning­less jumble of disconnected Japanese words, the second a newly composed verse and the third a traditional rhyme known by millions of Japanese. Neither Sheldrake nor the English schoolchildren he got to memorize these verses knew which was which, nor did they know any Japanese. The most easily learned rhyme turned out to be the one well-known to Japanese.

Experiment I: In the 19206 Harvard University psycholo­gist William McDougall did experiments for 15 years in which rats learned to escape from a tank. The first generation of rats averaged 200 mistakes before they learned the right way out; the last generation 20 mistakes…

Experiment 2: In later efforts to duplicate McDougall’s experiments in Australia, similar rats made fewer mistakes right from the start. Later generations of rats did better even when they were not descendents of the earlier rats…

Experiment 3: In the 1920S in Southampton, England, a bird called the blue tit discovered it could tear the tops of milk bottles on doorsteps and drink the cream. Soon this skill showed up in blue tits over a hundred miles away, which is odd in that they seldom fly further than 15 miles. . . . [The habit] spread faster and faster until by 1947 it was universal throughout Britain[,] . . . Holland, Sweden and Denmark. German occupation cut off milk deliveries in Holland for eight years—five years longer than the life of a blue tit. Then, in 1948 the milk started to be delivered. Within months blue tits all over Holland were drinking cream. .

Experiment 4: In the early sixties psychiatrists Dr. Milan Ryzl of Prague and Dr. Vladimir L. Raikov of Moscow hyp­notized subjects into believing they were living incarnations of historical personages. Such subjects would develop talents associated with their alter egos. A subject told she was the artist Raphael took only a month to develop drawing skills up to the standard of a good graphic designer. .

[Experiment 5 is Sheldrake’s hidden-figure puzzle, already discussed.]

Experiment 6: Psychologist Dr. Arden Mahlberg of Mad­ison, Wisconsin, created a variation of Morse code that should have been no harder to learn than the standard variety. Sub­jects learned the real code much faster than his invented one, not knowing which was which.

Experiment : Gary Schwartz, Yale professor of psychol­ogy, selected 24 common 3-letter words in Hebrew and 24 rare ones, all from the Old Testament, all in Hebrew script. For each word, he created a scrambled version (as, in English, one might do by scrambling “dog” to spell “odg”). .. . [Among participants with no knowledge of Hebrew,] not only was the confidence [in the accuracy of their guesses] significantly higher with the real words than with the false words (regard­less of subjects, words, or experiments), but the common words got higher confidence scores than the rarer words. . . .

Schwartz’s experiment was also covered in Combs, Holland and Rob­rtson’s Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster in 2000. The phrase “morphic fields” is Sheldrake’s own term for thought forms that build up within the Source Field.

Schwartz found, as Sheldrake’s theory would predict, that students rated the real words with considerably greater confi­dence than the ones that had been scrambled (though they did not accurately guess their meaning). Moreover, he found that confidence ratings were about twice as high for the words that occur frequently in the Old Testament compared with those that occur only rarely. The idea here is that the real words had, in fact, been learned by countless persons through­out history, forming strong morphic fields; the most frequently occurring words had, of course, been seen and read the great­est number of times. . . . Similar experiments have been car­ried out using Persian words and even Morse code.