If a human tells a lie while hooked up to a polygraph machine, they will probably get busted.
That’s because telling a lie apparently creates a measurable, electrical, Pants-On-Fire reaction in almost all of us.
But now it turns out that a lie detector test can be used on plants!
And this discovery potentially changes everything about the way we think about our universe.
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In New York City, we tend to think (affectionately) of pigeons as kind of dirty, irritating birds—-but no one can deny that they can fly like the wind.
Pigeons are sort of like NYC itself—stinky, infuriating, but still soaring.
Mike Tyson has been in the news lately because he has raised hundreds of homing pigeons over the years, including pigeons he races. Of this unlikely union, he says he tries not to get too attached to his birds, because they sometimes get sick, inju
red, or caught by predators. The less attached he is, Mike says, “the less difficulties I have in my home and in my everyday life.”
NO ONE WANTS THAT.
Mike also knows that you should NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A HOMING PIGEON.
Because a homing pigeon can be transported hundreds, even thousands of miles from its home roost, and as soon as it’s released, it will fly straight back home. Pretty much no matter where or how far away from home they are. With very little hesitation.
In fact—and this is truly amazing—they can find their way home EVEN IF YOU MOVE IT. 
Let me say that again. EVEN IF YOU MOVE THEIR HOME SOMEWHERE ELSE, THEY CAN STILL FIND IT AND GO HOME.
WELL…we still don’t know how they do it.
But lots of theories about how they do it have already been completely disproved, so you can pretty much forget about anything reasonably logical.
Nope. They don’t do it by smell, memory, the sun, landmarks, sight, magnetic fields, or sensitive hearing.
Instead, the evidence suggests that there is an UNKNOWN force, sense, or power that connects pigeons to their home, no matter where they are, and no matter where you move it.
“Second to the left and straight on till morning.” (Peter Pan’s directions home.)
Quantum physics (known as the Science of Conscious
ness) tells us that, at the sub-atomic level (where particles are unimaginably small), those particles are located at a specific place—like an address—in space and time.
But those particles are ALSO wave-like at the same time, and in their vibrating form they spread out all over everywhere, which means that, like a wave, they’re also located everywhere at once. (Don’t even try to understand this, no one does.)
An analogy would be that your Home is not only at, say, 172 W. 14th Street (a particular place or location with a mailbox). At the quantum level, in its vibrating, wavy state, home is also “anywhere (and everywhere) you hang your hat.”
A perfect metaphor for this quantum situation is the Internet.
Right now ask yourself, “Where is the internet?”
If you think about it, the Internet is sort of out there everywhere in the ether, and very hard to grab onto.
But it’s also at the very specific address of your personal laptop, and your website’s URL.
With the Internet, Everywhere and Somewhere both exist at the same time.
Or, in the tender words of Elvis Presley, “Home is where the heart is, and my heart is anywhere you are.” (Sigh.)
This is a very quantum situation.
And living organisms in nature somehow seem to open a doorway into this quantum realm.
In fact, if we had the consciousness of a pigeon, we would have a consciousness that we can barely imagine.
So here is one fascinating, evidence-based theory suggested by Rupert Sheldrake (one of my all-time favorite science geniuses) about how pigeons get home.
Sheldrake thinks that the consciousness of a pigeon is very different than ours:
When a pigeon is born, it already has all the awareness it will ever have. It already knows everything that will happen to it, almost like a map of its life that is spread out before it. One continuous awareness that extends from its birth to its death.
This is very interesting to think about. For us, that would be like having all your deathbed memories—looking back on everything that happened in your life—delivered to you at the very moment you’re born.
Most of us probably wouldn’t really want that kind of consciousness.
We prefer the surprises that make life so interesting.
But Sheldrake helps us to imagine the consciousness of a pigeon, so diff
erent from our own.
In pigeon consciousness, it knows everything that’s going to happen.
Sort of like going to a good psychic on the Upper West Side. Except better.
And its life unfolds exactly as anticipated.
BUT A PIGEON DOESN’T EVEN KNOW THAT IT KNOWS.
Since the pigeon has no language, it doesn’t have the concept of 
“anticipated.” Without language, its experience is all visual and sensory. It doesn’t think or reason in words, like the endless chatter we have in our heads. It doesn’t worry about the past or the future like we do. Language is the source of most of our human angst about those things.
“Yesterday I did this, tomorrow I hope THAT won’t happen.”
No, a pigeon is aware of its entire history from birth till death (no surprises!), but experiences it as one timeless moment. The entire life history of the pigeon all exists at the same time, including the trip away from and back to the loft.
In some sense, the pigeon never went anywhere.
Sort of like when you rewind a cartoon or a film backwards, and there’s a spectacle of wild confusion, arms and legs flailing everywhere, but then amazingly everything still ends up in the right place. 
“Home, where my music’s playing. Home, where my love lies waiting…” (Paul and Art are forever figuring out how to get Home.)
Sooooo….The possible answer to how the pigeon finds its way home is that part of the pigeon’s mind is already home and never left home.
“Gee, but it’s great to be back home. Home is where I wanna be-ee.”
When a pigeon is released, the part of its mind that’s still at home guides it back to its loft.
Because in some sense it’s already there.
Glinda: “You’ve always had the power to go back home to Kansas.”
Dorothy: “I have?”
Scarecrow: “Then why didn’t you tell her before?”
Glinda: “Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”
(Dorothy just had to learn that she was already there.)
The consciousness of the pigeon is distributed in time in a way that, from our
point of view, makes it capable of performing miracles.
But from the pigeon’s point of view, it’s just another ho-hum day in the life.
That means that, except for the poison of our human language telling us there’s a past, a present, and an unknowable future, tormenting us constantly about what’s going to happen next, we could possibly have the consciousness of a pigeon and see our entire lifetime all at once.
With pigeon-consciousness, we would fall into a timeless quantum realm
—an Already-There existence—
the 4th dimensional world of nature, where darkness holds no threat, and anxiety and fear would leave us— to forever go
in peace.
Pigeon-Think would put a lot of psychics out of business.
And no matter where we went, we’d always, already, be Home.
The “doves” released at weddings and ceremonies are actually white homing pigeons. And every day, hundreds of pigeons find their way home–and right into Mike Tyson’s heart. We can all be heartened by that.
“Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.”
Soner or later, we’re all Homeward Bound. So perhaps, New York City, we could cut our fellow winged travelers a little slack. We all have a lot in common. Pigeon poop notwithstanding.
Home: You’re already there.
Get Ignited!
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As we are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century (where did the FIRST one go????), it is good to get a little perspective on things. For example, will radio DJs continue to exhort us to listen to the hits of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and now the “00s?” How will they say it? The “Zeroes?” These are the kinds of things I wonder about.
In the 70s, there was a famous “Counterclockwise” study done by social-psychologist Ellen Langer. In this study, Langer and her team created a historically accurate physical environment typical of the year 1959, and then got a group of elderly men to live exactly as if it was 1959. For a whole week, they cooked, ate, slept, and lived in 1959, listening to the music and discussing the issues of the day.
There was also a control group that spent a week together just reminiscing about 1959 but not acting as if it really was that time.
The control group had a very lovely time together, but that was about it.
But—and this is truly amazing—the group of guys who put themselves into a 1959 state of mind experienced profound changes. Their memory, physical flexibility, dexterity, vision, hearing, and general well-being all improved dramatically.
Most important, after just one week of living as if they were younger,
Langer’s old fellas showed improvements in finger length!
Yes!!! “Shriveled arthritic fingers got LONGER—as they released and embraced a younger, 1959 perspective.” (Michael Gelb)
By the way, this story about LANGER’S LONGER 
FINGERS is soon to be a major motion picture starring Jennifer Aniston. (This is not a joke).
And if arthritis can be un-bent, this “living as-if” technique holds tremendous—albeit complicated—promise for wrinkles in 2011.
Most everyone (in the Western world, at least) has surely heard by now that to live our best life, we should BE HERE NOW, be in the POWER OF NOW, try to LIVE IN THE NOW, and not worry about the past or the future. It just makes sense, if you think about it.
The thing is, there really is no NOW.
I can prove it. Right now, take a moment to try to measure the RIGHT-
NOW-THIS-VERY-SECOND moment you are currently experiencing. The instant you try to capture it—let’s say by looking at your watch—that moment has already vanished into the past. No matter how hard you try to catch the Now—breaking it down into smaller and smaller increments all the way down to nanoseconds—it has already passed by the time you try to grab it.
So I think we might need to have a serious conversation with Eckhart Tolle.
Because there really is no present, only the past and the future merging. There is only trying to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh so mellow—or worrying about whether I will see you in September or lose you to a summer love. Just smaller and smaller moments of future-then-past, future-then-past, future-then-past. And even those don’t really exist.
Even though it seems like time is moving, what we’re really experiencing is one thing vanishing and another appearing. Our genius brains effortlessly connect these vanishing and appearing acts together, giving us the illusion of time passing.
But it’s just a trick.
Most of us have experienced the distinct feeling that time has passed either too quickly or too slowly. When I sit down to write, I struggle for awhile, but once the words begin to flow, I lose all sense of time. Hours can 
go by, and it can seem like minutes.
On the other hand, time goes waaaaayyyy too slowly when I’m at the Dentist’s Office.
Human language is the main source of our feeling that time is moving forward in a linear way. You’ve probably heard that in this modern world, we are mostly Human Doings instead of Human Beings. We say, “Yesterday I did this, tomorrow I’ll do that.” With our language, we’ve created the dreaded 40- (or 80-) hour work week, the stingy 2-week vacation, the rambunctious 5-minute speed date, the 60-second microwave Pop-Tart, and the “When I’m 64” Pop-Song. As we’ve evolved, we have abandoned our own inner sense of time, and replaced it with clock and calendar time.
The indigenous Aborigines in Australia, on the other hand, still experience time based on the natural rhythms of the seasons and the lunar and solar cycles. Their time is not linear but more circular. Their days are marked in “sleeps”. One hour might be measured by how long it takes to roast a 
Witchety Grub in the hot sand—a big, plump, yummy morsel that I happen to have personally sampled. (I call it the “Witchetying Hour.” Of course, most of the time they don’t roast the Witchety Grub, but just pop it—still wiggling—into their mouths. At that point, it’s a witchety swallow in a Witchety Second.)
In other words, the Aborigines have retained their essential sense of how time feels.
But linear clock time doesn’t really exist any more than subjective feeling time does. Because actually, we live in Eternity.
We live in a river of time in which the source of the river (our past) and its final destination ahead of us (our future) exist simultaneously. Events that have already passed must still be around. And events in the future must exist like new scenes just around the river bend. Physicist Fred Alan Wolf puts it beautifully: “When we say time passes, we mean that we pass. Time is an experience in itself that is, paradoxically, timeless.”
Or another way of putting it: “Diamonds are forever.” Everybody knows what that means.
The river of eternity can flow both ways. Most of us assume that everything we can remember has already happened. And if asked why we don’t remember scenes from our future, we’d probably answer: “Duh, because they haven’t happened yet.” But what if memory, like the river, goes both ways—and you can remember the future just as well as you can recall the past? 
Animals, by the way, probably have no experience of time passing. They don’t have language, and think exclusively with images. They just Are.
They are Animals Being.
In her study, Langer’s Finger-Growers were Time Travelers. And they didn’t really have to GO anywhere to get somewhere else.
Probably the biggest thing that limits all of us in our own time-travelin
g access to the future and the past is our illusion that we are each a separate, singular entity, an ego, or an “I,” living in a world of time and space.
A Human Doing.
Our Doing-ness pins our mind in time rather than timelessness.
By the way, I think the Beatles were on to something timeless and quantum-y (and maybe something drug-y) when they wrote on
e of my favorite songs from childhood:
“Eight days a week, I lo-o-o-o-ove you (ba-dup), Eight days a week, it’s not enough to show I care.” (Human Being)
Then of course there was Prince, who famously sang, “Act your age, not your shoe size, mama.” (Human Doing. Definitely).
So, Mr. Dee-Jay and the rest of us, as we enter the “10s” or the “Teens(?),” here’s my suggestion: Don’t put Time in a Bottle.
Instead, pull a Long-Finger.
Ask yourself, “What if we didn’t know how old we are?”
Keep reminding yourself that you’re not a Doing but a Being, and that you’re connected with everything, living in timelessness.
And try acting the age you feel, not the age you are. Since you really, truly aren’t that age anyway.
It will probably do more to keep the spring in your step, the song in your heart, and the length in your toes than any other single thing you ever do.
Young is the new old!
Get Ignited!
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Mary Poppins, Nanny Extraordinaire, quickly had her young charges
believing that cleaning their room could be magical and fun. In essence, she gave them the placebo effect!
Any “sugar” treatment that we believe to be real medicine is called a placebo.
Throughout human history, lots and lots of people have been cured of serious illnesses after they’ve taken SUGAR PILLS, all the while believing that their sugar pill was actually medicine.
And that’s the awesome power of the placebo effect.
“Spit-spot!”
Until the early 1900s, the most common medical practice performed by doctors was blood-letting (deliberately cutting the skin open and draining large amounts of blood).
And patients LET their doctors do this to them.
That’s probably why it’s called blood-LETTING.
Since there wasn’t much actual medicine available, they also LET their doctors treat their wounds with arsenic and prescribe rattlesnake oil drinks for lots of other things.
And yet, at least one third (maybe more) of our ancestors who were seriously ill got better, simply because they believed that letting their doctor bleed them, or drinking something really disgusting, would heal them.
Mary Poppins would surely agree that they were on the right track.
In fact today, if you truly believed on every level that chewing on waterbugs would cure your asthma, you’d have about a 50/50 chance that it would work!
“…makes the medicine go down, the medicine go dow-wown, medicine go down.”
In modern studies, sugar pills and other placebos have successfully alleviated pain, depression, anxiety, diseases, inflammatory disorders, and even some cancers.
The U.S. Dept of Health (the ultimate in Consensus Reality) reports that 50% of severely depressed people get better if they take an antidepressant like Prozac. This same agency also reports that 32% of depressed people get better if they take a sugar pill they THINK is an antidepressant.
One woman who participated in an antidepressant study was cured after 30 years of debilitating depression. But she was on sugar pills the whole time! She was totally shocked when she found out, because she even experienced side effects! And her brain scans actually showed huge before-and-after differences.
Then there are also PLACEBO SURGERIES.
A big study was done with patients with severe, debilitating knee pain. Some groups of these patients had knee surgery, and most people improved.
The real surgery really helped.
But there was also a group that had a totally fake, Placebo Surgery.
Those patients were sedated, and given standard incisions in their knees. During the surgery, Dr. Just-Kidding talked and acted authentically—including all the appropriate sound effects—and then sewed them back up without doing anything at all.
Yes! The placebo surgery group’s knees improved just as much as the re
al surgery groups!
Mary wouldn’t be surprised.
There are even PLACEBO BRAIN SURGERIES.
In studies, real surgeries are performed to implant dopamine into the brains of Parkinson’s patients, who suffer from a lack of it. This surgery really helps to improve the quality of life for some people.
But FAKE Brain Surgeries are also performed. Those patients don’t get any dopamine. All they get is having their brains opened up and exposed to the air.
Hannibal Lecter, the Anti-Mary, comes to mind.
In other words, their brains only THINK they’re getting a dopamine implant.
But whether the surgery is real or fake, all the patients do just about as well.
What seems to matter isn’t the implant itself, but that patients’ brains THINK they’ve gotten it.
What I want to know is: HOW DO YOU GET PEOPLE TO SIGN ON FOR A BRAIN SURGERY STUDY LIKE THIS?????
“Yes, definitely, I WOULD like to sign up for a brain surgery that might be totally fake.” 
Well, that’s the ULTIMATE Mary.
“You see, in every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun, and snap! The job’s a game!”
All this points to the fact that when you believe something, your biology sometimes appears to adapt very effectively.
Our beliefs seem to act as filters—just the way a pair of colored sunglasses filters the light to our eyes—changing how we see and experience the world.
The human brain cannot deal with conflicting information unless it can be integrated, so it picks one side of the conflict, and then suppresses everything that does not fit with that dominant belief. Just like sunglasses, our beliefs only let certain information in, and block out anything that conflicts with that
position.
That’s why a person who believes they are stupid will see confirmation of their stupidity everywhere, even if there is enormous evidence to the contrary.
The brain leaves very little room for doubt.
Those blinders work in our favor in many ways, like when we decide, say, to walk across hot coals with bare feet at a Firewalk. If there was ever a time when you don’t want any kind of internal conflict, this would be it.
I take it back. THIS is the ULTIMATE Mary.
“And every task you undertake becomes a piece of cake. A lark, a spree, it’s very clear to see!”
A deeply held belief can create one’s reality.
The way we look at something changes the thing we’re looking at. (And that’s what quantum physics tells us too, by the way.)
What a message! Think what we’ll be able to do in the world when we learn how to effectively harness that truth! (Sweet.)
The power of belief may be only a small piece of the enormous complexities of healing illness in the human body. But it may also hold one of the keys to freedom from suffering. 
Cleaning our rooms may still not always be fun, but Mary Poppins demonstrates something to us all that is much, much sweeter—the healing power of belief.
So…what if our ancestors hadn’t whole-heartedly believed in blood-letting?
(That would have been called blood-KEEPING, and it sounds like a good idea to me.)
Well, thank go
odness they did believe, or lots of us wouldn’t be here now…
Mary Poppins, you were way ahead of your time.
In a most delightful way!”
Get Ignited!
For every single human being on the planet, there are at least 1.5 million ants.
That basically means that the total mass of all the ants on the Earth is equal to the total mass of all the people on Earth.
Did you know this????
Of all insects in the world, the ant has the largest brain. (This also explains why huge NYC waterbugs are so DUMB.) Below right is a picture of an ant brain. (How did they GET this??)
In fact, the processing power of an ant’s brain and a Macintosh II computer might just be pretty similar!
In other words, they’re smart.
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Our place in the universe is about to be clarified.
The LISA satellite is going up next year (2011). LISA is three satellites that are connected by laser beams in a triangle 3,000,000 miles across, the largest satellite system ever.
LISA will actually be able to look back in time and detect the shock waves coming all the way back from the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago. Read the full article >>
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