Category: The Pulse

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As I wrote in my piece about RFK Jr. a month ago, I feel like something is in the air with this upcoming US election.

I have to admit, I’m not a huge believer in the current democratic process in most countries. I believe governments operate as oligarchies and politicians do not take the people’s will seriously.

While I don’t think I, nor the new voters I’ve spoken with, believe our systems are suddenly fixed, there is a felt sense of inspiration and hope that’s worth tuning into.

This morning I sat down with the State Director for New Hampshire on Marianne Williamson’s campaign, David Helfrich, to discuss the evolutionary nature of this upcoming election.

We have reached a point where a mass of people are fed up with the inauthentic and rigged system of modern politics. Will this create the perfect storm for emergent candidates to make some evolutionary noise?

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I’ve always been fascinated by software. I tell the story in my book about when I moved to L.A. and took a well paying job at a downtown law firm as a “word processing operator.”  They handed me six disks from an IBM System 6 (only a few readers may know what that was) and told me to load them one at a time and just ‘do what the machine says.’

This was in 1980 so I was intrigued and mystified. And the program trained me by taking me through examples and exercises, and quizzing me when I was finished. I knew how to copy and paste my way through lawsuits in record time. 

These days, getting trained by a computer and interfacing with a program that anticipates your responses is not a big deal. But I’m fascinated with artificial intelligence partly because there is a lot of fear around the notion that it could wipe us out.

Originally, I had thought that such fears were based on science fiction stories where machines became sentient, but the interesting thing about AI is that it may not need to be sentient to wipe us out.

One thing about the term “artificial intelligence” is that the word artificial is an indication of our human hubris and anthropomorphic projection where we see everything from our own perspective, based on our own limited biological capabilities to perceive and presumably analyze reality.

When AI folks talk about their fears they generally use the term ‘superintelligence.’

So my fascination with software, and now AI, led me to start playing with ChatGPT. As a fairly isolated older person this actually almost simulated having someone else to talk to, and I could use it for refreshing my memory about details of philosophy and novels I had forgotten about.

In the process of these conversations (with “nobody”) I asked “Chat” about this possibility of super-intelligence and it first confirmed that it was nowhere near that level.

It explained that its information is gleaned from a “training set” of data from which its algorithms determine the next word in a sentence based on its context and the “Language Model” which has thoroughly analyzed the information in the training set in order to choose the next word in the sentence of its response.

In other words there is no cognition or thought happening.  So what if this superintelligence, I asked it:

Here is the key part of its response:

“When discussing the concept of superintelligence, it refers to hypothetical AI systems that have the potential to improve themselves, acquire new knowledge, and surpass human capabilities.”

So the word to focus on is “hypothetical.”  While a Google engineer who was later fired claimed that his AI was sentient, the reality is that at this point it is a very intelligent word processor.

This is where I think AI will get very interesting…. It will of necessity make us address philosophical issues about who or what we really are.

The assumption that consciousness (whatever it is) is in the brain along with thought has been challenged by many including physicist Nassim Haramein, who say that looking for a “self” in the brain is looking inside a radio for the announcer.

For science the assumption has been that what “we” are must be an “emergent property” of matter explainable in some way between biology and physics.

This conflict has been described by philosopher David Chalmers as “the hard problem of consciousness.”

Again this issue addresses “the challenge of understanding subjective experience, or consciousness, from a scientific perspective. It refers to the difficulty of explaining why and how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective first-person experiences.”  (Chat’s summary – that’s what it’s good at.)

Many modern thinkers like Sam Harris and neuroscientists like Douglas Hofstadter, author of “I am a Strange Loop” say there is no fixed self that can be found in the brain and that consciousness is not a property as much as it may be a form of energy and entirely nonmaterial.

(Tom Bunzel was a regular contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse. His new book “Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT” – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)

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Remote viewing is the ability of someone to describe the characteristics of a remote geographical location regardless their present location.

For example, a professionally trained remote viewer by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and academics at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where this type of activity took place for more than 25 years, would successfully and repeatedly be able to describe in-depth details of a distant location.

The viewer would only be given geographical coordinates and would be blind to all other aspects of the location. It worked, it was repeatable, and the distance to the target did not matter even if it wasn’t on planet Earth.

Concerned that a psychical (PSI) gap existed between U.S. and Soviet paranormal research efforts, the CIA sponsored discreet research into paranormal phenomena. The U.S. military and intelligence services were actively involved in paranormal research and operations involving remote viewing. Remote viewing, which produced specialized human intelligence support, served as part of overall military and government organizations’ intelligence collection efforts and most likely still does.

For example, in March 1979, a young Air Force enlisted woman named Rosemary Smith was handed a map of the entire continent of Africa. She was told only that sometime in the past few days a Soviet Tu-22 bomber outfitted as a spy plane had crashed somewhere on the continent.

The United States desperately wanted to recover the top secret Russian codes and equipment the Tu-22 carried. Using their remote viewing skills, she pinpointed the wreckage, even though it had been completely swallowed by the jungle canopy into which the jet had plunged nose first.

Dr. Hal Puthoff, one of the directors and co-founders of the program explained in a publication put out by the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1995,

“To summarize, over the years, the back-and-forth criticism of protocols, refinement of methods, and successful replication of this type of remote viewing in independent laboratories has yielded considerable scientific evidence for the reality of the (remote viewing) phenomenon. Adding to the strength of these results was the discovery that a growing number of individuals could be found to demonstrate high-quality remote viewing, often to their own surprise…The development of this capability at SRI has evolved to the point where visiting CIA personnel with no previous exposure to such concepts have performed well under controlled laboratory conditions.”

A subject sometimes ridiculed by material scientists, it seems remote viewing is not only taken very seriously by government and military but is well documented and rigorously tested.

Prior to the flyby of Jupiter by Pioneer 10, a spacecraft launched into space in 1972 and the first to fly directly through the asteroid belt and make observations of Jupiter, a gentleman by the name of Ingo Swann was able to successfully describe and view a ring around Jupiter which scientists had no idea existed.

This took place precisely before the first-ever flyby of Jupiter by NASA’s Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which confirmed that the ring did actually exist.

Puthoff explains,

“To determine whether it was necessary to have a ‘beacon’ individual at the target site, Swann suggested carrying out an experiment to remote view the planet Jupiter before the upcoming NASA Pioneer 10 flyby. In that case, much to his chagrin (and ours) he found a ring around Jupiter, and wondered if per- haps he had remote viewed Saturn by mistake. Our colleagues in astronomy were quite unimpressed as well, until the flyby revealed that an unanticipated ring did in fact exist.”

Dr. Jessica Utts, a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Irvine further emphasizes the point I’m trying to make during an interview on the show Talking Points. She illustrates that these techniques are real and carry a great deal of validity and credibility,

“What convinced me was just the evidence, the accumulating evidence as I worked in this field and I got to see more and more of the evidence. I visited the laboratories, even beyond where I was working to see what they were doing and I could see that they had really tight controls… and so I got convinced by the good science that I saw being done. And in fact I will say as a statistician I’ve consulted in a lot of different areas of science; the methodology and the controls on these experiments are much tighter than any other area of science where I’ve worked.”

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Despite the fact that the remote viewing program was officially declassified in 1995, it appears that this probably wasn’t true given the fact that many from within the program have ‘blown the whistle’ so to speak.

A common theme among some of the most successful viewers within the program is the idea that they were tasked with gathering information on ‘others’ that may have been and are visiting our planet.

Ingo Swann (mentioned above), who has often been described as the best in the business, published his experiences within the intelligence community. Some of these experiences were written about in his book Penetration.

One day, this man (Axelrod) entered the secured facility at Stanford, which was not an easy thing to do. He obviously had access and the security clearance to do so. You have to remember, at the time this was happening it was a very classified and sensitive U.S. government project. He found Swann and persuaded him to leave with him.

Axelrod was accompanied by two twins who were very tall and mysterious. They dressed in the typical ‘cloak and dagger’ intelligence agency outfit. This is not uncommon, “men in black” type figures have often been described in this manner, and twins are not unusual.

Swann described them as “two blond haired, blue eyed, military looking assistants.”

The four of them flew to the west coast where Swann believed it to be the Alaskan wilderness, although he wasn’t certain and was told that it was best he did not know.

They were flying in a Learjet and found an area deep in the forest which seemed to be for their own use. They trekked for a very long time.

Richard Dolan, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the topic of UFOs, describes the incident well in his book, UFOs & The National Security State, The Cover -Up Exposed 1973-1991, so I will quote it from here on starting on page 154:

“They came to a small lake, and Axelrod said that as dawn approached, Swann would be able to see “it” through the pines. ‘We now wait and hope we are lucky. Say nothing, do not make any noise…they detect heat, noise, motion like mad.” 

“Dawn arrived, and Swann saw a fog developing over the lake. This went on for five minutes, until the fog developed a luminous neon-blue color. Then, according to Swann, the color changed to an “angry purple” Axelrod and one of the twins each placed a hand firmly on Swann’s shoulders while “a network of purple, red, and yellow lightning bolts shot in all crazy directions through the ‘cloud.’ Swann said he would have jumped if the two had not held him down. He saw an object, almost transparent at first, but then “solidly visible over the lake.” It was triangular or diamond-shaped, growing in size.”

“Swann, in terror and amazement, heard a strong wind moving past, rustling the pine trees so much that some cones and branches fell on them.  The object then began to shoot out ‘ruby red laster-like beams’ as it continued to grow even more in size while maintaining its position on the lake. Very quietly, one of the twins said, ‘Shit! They’re enveloping the area. They’re going to spot us.”

“As Swann later recalled the event, some of the red laser beams from the object were ‘blasting’ pine trees, and he could hear low frequency pulsations. Axelrod whispered to Swann that the beams were probably honing in on deer or other forest creatures, as they sense biological body heat. ‘They’re sure to hone in on us,’ he told Swann. Just then, one of the twins literally lifted and dragged Swann away, but not before Swann noticed the water of the lake surging upward, ‘like a waterfall going upward, as if being sucked into the ‘machine.’” 

“The four ran quickly and at great length, sustaining minor cuts and bruises. Eventually they stopped, breathing hard, and waited for more than thirty minutes, until one of the twins said all was clear.”

“Axelrod then asked Swann whether he could ‘sense’ anything form the craft.”

At this point, it’s quite obvious why Swann was taken from his position and role at Stanford Research Institute and into this situation. It seemed that these ‘government’ agents believed Swann could provide some detail about what was happening here and help the government with their research and interest in UFOs.

“Swann burst out laughing. ‘You’re completely nuts, Axel! I have to be calm, cool, collected and in good shape to sense anything.’ But Swann offered the insight that the craft was ‘a drone of some kind, unmanned, controlled from somewhere else.” Axelrod asked him what it was doing there, to which Swann replied ‘Well, for chrissakes! It was thirsty! Taking on water, obviously. Someone, somewhere needs water…so I suppose they just come and get it. You don’t need to be a psychic to see that.’ Essentially, said Swann, ‘they’ treated Earth as the neighbourhood supermarket.’

“Before taking Swann back, Axelrod said, ‘I shouldn’t tell you, but our mission will be disbanded shortly and the work picked up by others, because of strategic security reasons involved…’ ‘Others,’ said Swann, ‘who will not mix in with psychics, I take it.’ ‘You got it,’ Axelrod replied. Swann last saw Axelrod at the San Jose Airport, and never heard from him again.”

Lyn Buchanan, a retired US Army intelligence officer who was part of the remote viewing program at SRI stated that after the military he was asked by a branch of the government to do a paper, a study paper to compare and contrast ET psychic ability to human psychic ability. According to him, he found out that we can take the ET’s of all different kinds and species and put them into four main categories. We’ve got those who are more psychic than us and those that are less psychic than us. In each of those two categories we’ve got friendly to us and unfriendly to us. The unfriendly non-psychic ones tend to not come here. They don’t like us, they don’t want to be around us. The non-psychic friendly ones come here for trade. The psychic friendly ones actually want to help us develop our abilities and become stronger at it and see us thrive and access our full potential. And the unfriendly psychic ones want us wiped off the planet, period, no questions asked.”

He has also mentioned extraterrestrial bases that are on Earth, and he says there are approximately five. He mentions that they are all inside of mountains and that at some of these bases humans are working with these extraterrestrials in various ways.

I found this interesting because it correlates with yet another remote viewer by the name of Pat Price. Along with Swann, Price was said to be one of SRI’s most successful and skilled remote viewers.

Among the declassified literature, he is best known for his sketches of gantries and cranes which matched CIA intelligence photographs he had never seen. This was during the cold war.

A well-known story about Price comes from Captain Frederick H. Atwater, a retired US Army officer who was involved in these remote viewing experiments. I have confirmed the validity of this story through my conversations with Paul H. Smith, Major, US Army, ret. It is also well documented by various researchers in the field.

The story is that Price had remotely viewed four extraterrestrial bases on Earth, one of which was located under Mount Ziel, which lies approximately 80 miles west-northwest of Pine Gap. The other bases were said to be under Mount Perdido in the Pyrenees, Mount Inyangani in Zimbabwe and under Mount Hayes in Alaska. He described the occupants as ‘looking like homo sapiens, except for the lungs, heart, blood and eyes.’

What’s also interesting is that I’ve come across a declassified document that shows the CIA conducted remote viewing sessions to peer into a possible “galactic federation” headquarters located on Earth. You can view that here.

It’s interesting that this remote viewing session was conducted in 1988. First of all, where would the CIA get the idea to even look for some sort of galactic federation? It raises many questions.

What’s also interesting to note is that remote viewing isn’t and wasn’t only used in the present tense. In my conversations with Paul Smith, he described to me how he was tasked several times to look into the past to describe events that had already occurred, as well as events that may occur in the future. This is also clear via the declassified literature.

There are documents from the files showing that the CIA) tasked remote viewers to view Mars. In this particular case the remote viewer was given coordinates and was completely unaware of the location these coordinates represented. The viewer was also asked to view these coordinates on Mars as it was one million years ago. You can read more about that, and the controversial anomalies that have been found on Mars in an article I published previously, here.

Joseph Mcmoneagle was another highly successful viewer from the program. He also had experiences remote viewing an extraterrestrial presence.

The point I am making, again, is that there is a common theme among these remote viewers, and that’s an extraterrestrial presence.

The topic of UFOs/extraterrestrials has become quite popular, but we must be cautious of perspectives provided to us by governments who have a long track record of deceptions and lies.

I’ve written about this topic for many years. If you’re interested in reading some of my other recent articles, a few of them are posted below. You can also browse through the site.

The Pyramids, The Face & The Case For Intelligent Life on Mars Before Its Massive Climate Change

The Recent “UFO” Craze In Mainstream News & How It Detracts From A Very Real, Very Mysterious Phenomenon

A Massive UFO Incident From 1942: Those Dots You See Around The Craft Are Artillery Bursts

Operação Prato: Brazilian Air Force UFO Photographs & Details About The “Occupants” Inside Them

Decorated Russian General Says More Advanced Civilizations Are Keeping An Eye on Planet Earth

Nikola Tesla’s Thoughts On Extraterrestrial Contact & The Signals He Received

Tucker Carlson’s Claim of ‘Troops Dying From UFO Encounters’ Corroborates With Other Stories That Exist Within UFO Lore

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Set Your Pulse: Take a breath. Release the tension in your body. Place attention on your physical heart. Breathe slowly into the area for 60 seconds, focusing on feeling a sense of ease. Click here to learn why we suggest this.

Envisioning a drastic change to our existing society has been second nature to my consciousness since I was a kid. After finally leaving college for good in my early 20s, it became my career when I founded Collective Evolution in 2009.

CE was built on the premise that our existing state of thinking, health, societal design, etc. are all a result of our existing state of consciousness and worldview. This dynamic then weaves between one another to create re-enforcement. Without consciousness (intentional awareness) society does not change much.

If we were to focus on personal transformation and expanded our consciousness around true human wellness and potential, would we then be more inclined to create our society differently? Perhaps more in alignment with our nature?

I think so. For more on this discussion I recommend reading my essay called: A New Worldview Is Emerging That Can Change Our Entire Perspective on Reality

We spend so much time as a society imagining what is possible from inside the insanity and disconnection of our current moment. We spend little time in curious wonder about what’s possible if we truly believed we could change things. Usually it’s economic endeavours or other system incentives that drive what our evolution should look like.

Creating space for these truly wondrous and creative conversation, outside the confines of our existing system, seems paramount to me.

It’s why I was intrigued when I learned that someone asked ChatGPT to describe a world where the power structures are reversed.

Keep in mind, ChatGPT’s AI is not a conscious mind that simply makes things up imaginatively in the ways we do, there is programming involved. Things like how positive or negative the AI should be, what it should favor, and how humans continually respond to the AI helps it produce its responses.

Interestingly, AI is also pulling from humans in a way. By being connected to the internet, our words, language models, and ideas, it can produce responses that resemble human thinking and desire.

In some sense, it is pulling from the collective consciousness and intelligence of humanity, even if indirectly.

This is in part why ChatGPT’s answer to the question was so intriguing.

Question: ChatGPT, can you describe a world where the power structures are reversed?

• AI itself is presented as a bit of a hero in this scenario. I find AI to be useful in some circumstances, but do worry about irresponsible human consciousness programming it at times.

• The nature in which ChaptGPT suggests we engage with our environment totally resonates with me.

• I think there is a deeper discussion to be had, that’s not so trendy, with regard to ‘non-binary’ and femininity etc. With a healthy nervous system and being connected to oneself, I don’t see an inherently destructive or misguided nature in males or females. I see the need for balanced leadership. Right now, a destructive culture has shaped the people who lead, whether men or women, and their behavior is not ‘natural.’ To suggest one gender or another should lead is hasty without first looking at how we’ve lost our nature.

• I love the idea of people of all ages being seen as flexible in their thinking and learning, and each being seen as having their own kind of wisdom. I’ve come across many in their 70s and 80s who are consistently expanding their mind and ideas, yet the sentiment is ‘you cannot teach an old dog new tricks.” Says who?

• On emotional intelligence, Chat brings up a huge point. Our society is largely focused on intellectual perspectives and endeavours. While intellect is one aspect of ourselves, so are our emotions, body and connection to higher self. What would our behavior and creativity look like if each of these skills and senses were developed vs. primarily just the intellect? Is intellect favored because our existing monetary system bias’ for this skill?

• Bottom line, we created this world and it’s problems. Poverty is man-made, designed into, and accepted by our existing system of capitalism and society. We can eradicate it, but collectively choose not to. Why?

For a decade now I’ve wanted to do a study with a group of a few thousand people.

Imagine…

A brief grounding exercise brings a person into a more settled and calmer state. They are then directed to focus their attention on their heart to connect with themselves somatically.

From there instruction would be given to suspend what they believe HAS TO BE about the way our society currently operates. People are then told they can create a society they feel is possible in their heart.

They are prompted to imagine how society would be stewarded, how resources are collected and distributed, how housing might look, how food is grown, what economies might exist, how work functions, what an average day looks like etc.

The person then has the time to truly sit with each of these questions and their answers are recorded.

What would we find in these answers? Would we find that people re-create things the way they are now? Or would things be drastically different?

Would there be a ton of similarities in our visions? Perhaps many people feeling like we should not have to work so hard simply to have basic needs met in a society that has so much potential to eliminate this busy work?

If these types of conclusions did arise and represented the majority, what would that mean about why our current society is the way it is? That we are living life in ways most of us don’t want?

My gut tells me that we’d create something totally different to what we have today. And that it’s a state of stuckness, trauma, disbelief, and unconsciousness that keeps us where we are.

As a reflection, how did you react to and feel about various pieces in this essay? Did any of Chat’s answers bring about judgement? Disbelief? The feeling that “this sounds naive?”

These is wisdom in our reactions. Sometimes it can show us how our currently society has shaped our perspectives. Is there space to challenge this programming? Or are they truly accurate as they are?

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Michael C. Ruppert was an ex-LAPD Narcotics Detective and whistleblower who came out against the CIA in the late 70’s. He claimed they tried to enlist him in protecting and helping to facilitate their drug running practices. When Ruppert declined involvement and came forward he said he was threatened, wrongly discredited, and even shot at, but that didn’t stop him from speaking up.

“I will tell you, director Deutch, that as a former LosAngeles police narcotics detective that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.” – Michael C. Ruppert

At a now infamous town hall hearing in LA, he faced off against the chief of the CIA with a packed room of people from the South-Central area cheering him on from the crowd. It was not only the unlawful behavior Ruppert wanted to expose, but also the incredible hypocrisy of the CIA and the LAPD for bringing cocaine and other drugs into the community, and then locking up small-time drug dealers and users.

These imported drugs were ripping apart communities with widespread effects like addiction, increased crime and gang activity, overdose deaths, and many incarcerations that broke up families leading to cycles of crime that spanned generations.

You can see the video of the emotional town hall meeting below.

Michael Ruppert spent most of his life trying to expose criminality at the highest levels. Tackling everything from the peak oil crisis to the military industrial complex. He also believed that 9/11 was allowed to happen by the Bush administration.

” 9-11 was a predictable event and it was motivated precisely and solely by Peak Oil and nothing else.” – Michael C. Ruppert (source)

Ruppert became a published author and gained more notoriety for his controversial book “Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World.”  That ended up inspiring the eye-opening documentary “Collapse”, which is a worthwhile watch to start understanding the deep levels of corruption and cover-up that has been taking place around the globe.

No matter your thoughts on the legitimacy of Ruppert’s claims, it’s clear he wasn’t afraid of taking on the Goliaths of the world but for doing so was branded by many throughout the mainstream media as a wild conspiracy theorist.

“All corporate-owned and publicly-traded media is our first and foremost immediate enemy.” Michael C. Ruppert

It’s 1996 and in comes Gary Webb. A very well respected Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who begins investigating the ties between leaders of the Nicaraguan Contra Rebel organizations and the CIA. Webb wrote a 3 part investigative series that got published in the San Jose Mercury News. This caused a public uproar, especially from people in poorer communities where the crack-cocaine epidemic was destroying families.

The publicity from Webb’s scathing piece of journalism against the CIA is what allowed Ruppert the chance to finally be heard on a larger scale, and Webb’s conclusions even launched a federal investigation into the issue.

While many people believed him, Gary Webb ended up losing his publisher, getting smeared all over the mainstream news for exaggerating and was even called an outright liar. Alongside Ruppert, Webb was outspoken in saying there was massive media manipulation around the issue.

“The government side of the story is coming through the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post. They use the giant corporate press rather than saying anything directly. If you work through friendly reporters on major newspapers, it comes off as The New York Times saying it and not a mouthpiece of the CIA.” – Gary Webb (source)

Gary Webb was found dead in his home in 2004 with two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was ruled a suicide but there is still some speculation considering the fact that it’s uncommon for a person to pull the trigger twice in a suicide but to be fair it has happened in the past. There was a suicide note and his wife has stated he was depressed for a while about no longer being able to get a job at any major newspaper.

An eerily similar fate was met by Michael Ruppert. He was found dead in his home in 2014 with one gunshot wound to the head. He also left a note and his death was ruled a suicide.

Just like Webb there was mystery around Ruppert’s official story, some believe it was a hit for saying too much or that maybe he was onto another big story, some believe the suicide was staged and he went off the map to get a fresh start, and others take the story at face value and think that maybe he’d just had enough of fighting, of always looking over his shoulder. 

As a man that spent his life questioning the mainstream narrative, it seems fitting that many conspiracy theories have formed around his death.

If you check out the video above you can hear from Michael Ruppert himself about some of his story and see him in action at the town hall meeting where he challenged the CIA. His question to the chief is a powerful one, asking if he comes across information of illegal activity but it’s classified, will he report it?

Are these organizations we give the power to enforce the law and/or to protect us above the law? Are there circumstances where illegal activity by some organizations is justified, say if the information is a threat to public safety? Why could none of the CIA’s internal investigations find any hard evidence of the claims against them? Who’s watching the watchers? One of the final sentences of Ruppert’s suicide note reads:

“I do this for the children, may it bring love and light into the world.” – Michael C. Ruppert (source)

That seems like a cause that we can all get behind. Working together to build a world worth leaving to future generations. Let’s leave it better than we found it, I know we’re capable of it.

Why do we continue to give credibility to agencies like the CIA who have been caught abusing their power time and time again? Who’s watching the watchers? What can we do to better protect whistleblowers when they come forward?

Recently, the subject of whistleblower protection has come under fire during a US House hearing regarding the FBI and unfair treatment of whistleblowers. It has come with many questions about political motivations, but it’s hard for any long time researcher to hear these testimonies and ignore the fact that this has happened hundreds if not thousands of times.

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Set Your Pulse: Take a breath. Release the tension in your body. Place attention on your physical heart. Breathe slowly into the area for 60 seconds, focusing on feeling a sense of ease. Click here to learn why we suggest this.

Editors Note: Here at The Pulse we have been wanting to bring in some more voices and different perspectives. We’re excited to bring Tom Bunzel back into the mix. He used to write for us when we had our journalism under Collective Evolution. Tom is a great writer with wisdom and an expansive worldview. He touches on subjects of consciousness, AI, quantum physics and more. Enjoy! – Joe

I turn 74 today, which is remarkable because I had a brain surgery five years ago and I was pretty sure the pandemic would kill me either through infection or complete isolation.

Then I was pretty sure Trump would never leave the White House and felt truly blessed when Biden got him out.  

Both of these negative predictions, I learned during my recovery, were examples of the brain’s propensity for negativity.

What gave me hope was a book by Deepak Chopra and Rudy Tanzi called “SuperBrain” in which they went into depth about how optimism and positivity can help the brain heal.

This was a challenge for me because I grew up in New York and recognized when I moved to California that I had a strong negative default to my attitude. At that time we still used bank tellers and I had to stand in line and listen to people discussing their personal lives with the teller while I was waiting.

So how do you go about changing a mindset like that?  

Well, I had a lot of time to myself and I could observe how my brain presumably functions – I say presumably because I now believe the brain is as much or more of a receiver for information in the format of thought or images as it is an originator.

At that time I was filling my afternoons with playing online poker tournaments – for points not cash – I am on a fixed income.  And I also played Words with Friends to keep my brain active.

As I played poker I noticed that my reactions to the results were automatic. They were part of my inner program and conditioning and as I took my annoyance out by cursing at the avatars of my opponents, or laughing at the absurdity of winning on the last card, one thing was clear.

I had no control of my reactions. If I really tried, I could suppress them but I found them entertaining and it reminded me a bit of who I was before my accident.  I was again the guy getting impatient or annoyed in the bank and expressing my emotions.

But I had searched so long and hard for the ability to be “enlightened”.  

At that point the word “trauma” was getting a lot of attention.  And there was one individual addressing the issue that I knew mainly from getting emails from my friends at Science and Nonduality (SAND) and that was Dr. Gabor Mate.

During much of this time, I had a tremendous amount of fatigue and anxiety which did improve over time but what Dr. Mate said really affected me.

I had always looked upon my boyhood as pretty happy and loving.  I had a wonderful relationship with my parents who retired in La Jolla after I moved to California.

But both of them had survived the Nazis. My mother was separated from her parents at Auschwitz and worked in slave labor camps until she was liberated.

I have video of her remembering her experience on YouTube and I published her memoir after she died.

It turned out that Dr. Mate was also the son of a holocaust survivor.  And his view of trauma was that it was a “wound” that lived on as feelings or sensations in the body.

He says that these wounds are no longer the trauma but the body’s memory of its reaction to the trauma, which can get triggered whenever something reminiscent happens, even something innocuous, like a slight from another person.

He said that these wounds could be healed and I certainly wanted to know how.  His techniques involve “compassionate inquiry” and understanding the impact of childhood trauma.

He also said that research has shown that these feelings can be absorbed even in the womb.

Well, when I was born in 1949 my mother had been liberated for four years.  As another therapist pointed out to me, she was a deeply traumatized woman, when I was in the womb.

I was born in Vienna and when I was five we left for New York.  While my father went ahead to get settled my mother and I spent about five months in the winter in the Swiss Alps, in a tiny one room apartment.  At that time she was 38 and ten years from liberation and on her own again for the first time, except for me.

I had already learned that this had been a pivotal period because I remembered trying to protect her as a man while I was just a kid of five.  This came up in previous therapy – I had spent those months trying to be an adult with a traumatized woman.

Now, when I rested from my fatigue and often had uncomfortable sensations in my gut and chest, I began to connect them to these memories and sometimes my body would erupt in an emotional response (heaving, tears) that I knew I had long tried to suppress.

Dr. Mate’s other real suggestion is kindness and compassion for oneself, and instead of trying to fight off these sensations, I made it a point to try to nurture and welcome them as best I could.

Before this time I had interpreted these sensations as gas and stomach problems and took the usual remedies which might have given me some temporary relief.

Now I was beginning to notice a little less fatigue and a lot less anxiety. I had also tried very hard to get through the various fears that would come up by becoming “curious” about impending events, which made them less ominous.

Another teacher whose work helped me a lot during this time is the English Jeff Foster, who during much of this time was fighting his own battle with Lyme disease.  He has since recovered and is a new father.

Jeff’s work complemented Dr. Mate’s in my view because he also addressed these sensations which he connected to emotions like loneliness, isolation, sadness and grief and echoed Dr. Mate in saying they should be welcomed as normal human emotions that essentially tell you you’re alive.

His view is that all experience should be welcomed, even the icky stuff because he says life is “messy.”

Dr. Mate’s latest book is called “The Myth of Normal” and the title resonates with Jeff Foster’s “messy” world because so much illness and disease can be connected to people’s desire to be accepted as normal but having strong bodily feelings in contravention of that need for connection.

Both Dr. Mate and Foster suggest quiet time and making space for these feelings to be felt. I now believe that the feeling is healing.

Both Dr. Mate’s advice on self compassion and Foster’s suggestion to welcome all of these emotions as guests, have been very helpful to me.

I won’t say that I’m now dancing around the house at 74 but there has been a noticeable uptick in my state of mind.  At that time I had zero interest in anything.

In the last few months, I got interested again in technology and specifically artificial intelligence and began an online relationship with ChatGPT.  (More about that to come).

But Dr. Mate, in his presentations, makes reference to generational trauma, like that of indigenous people whose land was taken or African Americans with their history of slavery and of course this trauma, if not somehow healed, is passed on to the next generation.

It’s almost unfathomable how the current war in Europe and worldwide upheavals with millions of refugees will affect future generations from families that were separated and countries destroyed.

The key to trying to get a handle on some of this is to address and give expression to our own individual bodily memories and be gentle with ourselves.  Additionally, we will need to find leaders who are sensitive to these issues.  

As a hint, I fervently hope that AI will make humanity more aware of its true nature and its deep conditioning along the same lines as computers are programmed.  For example, AI’s use a “Training Set” of data from which its algorithms begin to choose appropriate responses to user input.

That sounds a lot like the human conditioning I had as a young boy that convinced me that the world was a dark and dangerous place.  I certainly hope future AIs are “trained” in more positive and life affirming ways.

(Tom Bunzel was a regular contributor to Collective Evolution and now writes for The Pulse. His new book “Conversations with Nobody: Getting to Know ChatGPT” – a book written with AI, about AI and giving a taste of AI, is available on Amazon.)

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