Could Advanced Human Habitat Prevent/Cure Addiction? New Discovery suggests a Space of Love could be Pivotal

Image by Genesis EcoFund: Addiction Free in a Space of Love 

Credit: “Addiction” 

Source: https://loopylettuce.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/marijuana-myth-addiction/

“Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.”

~ Bruce Alexander, Professor of Psychology

Source: Huffington Post: The Blog: "The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think" by Johann Hari *

It’s not you. It’s your cage.

You can imagine our response to reading these words in The Huffington Post’s Blog Entry “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think,” by Johan Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs…

We could have told you that.

For years Genesis has advocated for reintroducing a healthy space of love into peoples’ lives by means of the incorporation of high-order rainforest ecosystems. The clinical name we gave this is Advanced Human Habitat, and after today perhaps psychologists and addiction specialists may finally take note and hear us out.

But let’s backtrack a bit.

As part of his three and a half year, 30,000 mile journey around the world in search of the real drivers of the war on drugs, Johann Hari stumbled across the likes of psychologist Bruce Alexander and physician Gabor Mate—both Canadian specialists in the field of addiction and mental health.

It was Dr. Mate who, according to Hari, first explained that despite having used the same drug for the same length of time which turns street-users into addicts, those who use elicit drugs for medical purposes simply stop once treatment is no longer required.

Hmmm…so what’s all this about the “opiate effect on the brain” and all the other stuff we’ve heard over the years about the nature of addictive substances? Surely if it’s a neurochemical phenomenon, then ANYONE exposed to “addictive substances” should get addicted. It turns out this is just not the case.

Bruce Alexander’s work suggests why. His experiments with rats showed that when kept in isolation and given a choice between drug-laced water and regular water, rats invariably become “addicted.”
 
However, when Professor Alexander created a “rat park” which consisted of “a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want,”* rats given the choice of drug-laced water and regular water simply shunned the drugs. They remained sober.

Image: “Rat Park” by Stuart McMillen 

Source: http://www.stuartmcmillen.com/comics_en/rat-park/

 
Next, after letting his test rats in the isolation cage use for 50 days (become seriously addicted), he transferred them to Rat Park and—remarkably—apart from a few withdrawal symptoms, they stopped their heavy usage and went back to living normal lives.
Although Hari seemed surprised by these results, we at Genesis are not. In his defense, Hari does make the admission and startlingly profound statement which we all need to take to heart:

“So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.”*

Now, we are not ones to rat out the esteemed author and blogger whose work inspired today’s article and which we are so generously quoting from, but it’s not necessarily human connection which is lacking. Reconnecting with manic individuals and a toxic lifestyle won’t necessarily help prevent/alleviate addiction. We must understand the difference between Professor Alexander’s rat park and the rate race.

Image: “Rat Race” by www.polyp.org.uk

Source: polyp.org.uk: Cartoons about Consumerism

There are many people who feel isolated though they are surrounded by others. Many people are shy, or have all-out social anxiety disorder. They may feel more comfortable and at home with a good book, a pet, gardening, in nature, etc.

As a matter of fact, many individuals (ascetics, for instance) who thrive in isolation do so precisely because they “go back to nature.” Be it the lone hunter, trapper, woodsman, explorer, adventurer, castaway, etc., we are all familiar with the reality that nature provides more than enough “meaningful connection.”

Isolation is not absence of people. Isolation is an absence of love.

What human beings need is a space of love.

If we achieve that space of love through loved ones, family, friends, other positive relationships, good. But what happens when nobody’s around? Do we start having “separation anxiety?” Or, what if we don’t have the luxury or good fortune of a loving family, many friends, and positive relationships? What if our human support network is not all it’s cracked up to be? What then?

Advanced Human Habitat, with high-order ecosystems generating fields of collective harmony and symbiosis—spaces of love—can be for us what “Rat Park” was for Professor Alexander’s rats.

Advanced Human Habitat is humanity’s “nicer cage.”

A video can’t do it justice. But use your imagination.

Video: PeapodLife Living Wall EcoSystem Fitch Street – Advanced Human Habitat creates a Space of Love to help fight Addiction

Can’t you see this as a BIG STEP in the right direction toward preventing and alleviating addictions and many of the other “coping mechanism” we have for our inherently “isolated” lives?



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* All Quotes in today’s blog sourced from Huffington Post “The Blog”: The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think by Johann Hari, Posted: 01/20/2015 3:20 pm EST

Can Plants Think, Talk, Read your Mind? Evidence for Plant Consciousness Mounts

Image: Still Frame from “Little Shop of Horrors” 

Source: dishesandhoes.com: Dishes and Hoes: An Urban Garden and Whole Food Blog: Getting Schooled by Solomon

“I just come and talk to the plants, really – very important to talk to them. They respond.”

~ Prince Charles

Source: dailymail.co.uk: Daily Mail Online: Prince Charles has revealed he now 'instructs' his plants

The Prince of Wales took some flak from his critics for that comment back in 1986. When asked again recently if he still spoke to planets, joked in a self-deprecating way, “No, now I instruct them instead.”   

But how strange, really, is the notion that plants are sentient beings capable of awareness and interaction which is more akin to its higher-order cousins (animals and humans)?

There is mounting evidence that plants have such capacities—albeit in rudimentary forms. We won’t spend time recounting the same info, we’ll give you links and you can read it for yourself.

From The Economist article on the question to The Epoch Times blog(s) on the subject, and many other sources online in between, a growing debate on the question of plant sentience among “serious” scientists is reason enough to stand up and take notice. 

The challenge materialist scientists face is not so much proving or disproving the phenomenon exists; but rather, explaining how/why it should exist. Materialist science has this challenge precisely due to its own limits: materialism.

The fact that plants have no brain or central nervous system puts “serious scientists” into a bit of a quandary. Yes, they can come up with alternative theories, chemical processes and point to alternative bio-electrical pathways in plants. But that’s precisely the point: they assume that the brain and central nervous system (or corollary bio-chemical-electric network in plants) is the origin of consciousness.

Pardon the analogy, but this is like saying the Internet produces what it outputs.

A reasonable person observing only the Internet in isolation—that is, the technology alone—could easily come to such a conclusion. Electrical signals whizzing about this vast network of interconnected nodes. It’s obvious, is it not? The Internet is sentient in and of itself and reacts to the events of the world around it via technology. This is what is commonly referred to as the ghost in the machine.

Image: “Ghost in the Machine” 

Source: blog.microtask.com: Ghost in the machine: crowdsourcing the meaning of life

But those who know the truth about the Internet know that remove humans from the situation and what you get is a big, hulking mass of cables, circuit boards, screens and keyboards…dead tech.

The activity is dependent on CONSCIOUSNESS.  In this case, the consciousness of the humanity who designed, built and use the technology. Even if that consciousness is mostly bottled-up inside ego (cravings for and aversions to all manner of conceivable and inconceivable things reaching into the highest heights of conscious human awareness to the darkest depths of subconscious desire and depravity).

Sure your iPhone6 will give the appearance of sentience. Complete with a name (Siri) and lots of autonomous activity. But without an operator, it’s just a fancy little box with blinky lights and nifty sounds. That complex device was designed and constructed according to a template, and is an expression of the human mind.

Working backwards, then, how is the human brain any different than the iPhone6 or the Internet? We can observe lots of activity, and we can see it accept inputs and produce outputs. Thanks to EEG, MRI and other imaging technology we can see it very active during thinking, dreaming, meditation, etc. But is this evidence that it is the origin of it all?

If you sent a “bot” into the Internet which was incapable of detecting anything but its own nature—digital technology—it would be completely blind to the biological organisms that are truly behind and at the heart of the Internet, yes? It could explore the whole of the Internet as part of the digital paradigm and be completely blind to the underlying biological creators of the Network, despite the “signature” of those strange biological creatures all over the place…the digital representation of them.

Likewise, if one identifies solely with the material paradigm and “reason” (which is the intellectual paradigm on which artificial intelligence is based), one becomes blind to the underlying paradigm on which physical reality is based.

That underlying paradigm is energy and consciousness. Now, even physics (quantum mechanics in particular) recognizes that matter as such doesn’t exist. The fact that the observer effect has direct consequences on certain quantum experiments is reason enough to begin questioning the underlying “metaparadigm” of materialist science…the unquestioned underlying assumption that the physical universe is primary.

This question is explored in the excellent talk by Peter Russell called The Primacy of Consciousness.

Video: The Primacy of Consciousness - Peter Russell - Full Version

Source: YouTube: http://youtu.be/-d4ugppcRUE

The erroneous assumptions established by the metaparadigm of material science (that the material universe is primary and all phenomena stem from the foundation of the material) lock science into the problems of the scientific method: of concocting elaborate theories and then hunting for physical explanations which support said theories. As if material evidence is the only—and ultimate—arbiter of what is real and what is not.

Still, there is no reasonable scientific, economic, physical explanation for altruism and love…self-sacrifice, for instance. The many values we hold most dear fly in the face of all manner of logical argument, when reduced to that most “ultimate” arbiter…materialism. Materialism and love are incompatible, fundamentally, and so science simply ignores the latter in favour of its foundational metaparadigm.

Why? Were the metaparadigm proven—somehow—to be incorrect, the very foundations of the scientific community would be shaken, and much of what we hold true today would simply collapse like a deck of cards.

And that day is coming.

The real question we should be asking is this: what sense does it make to construct a universe where consciousness is an emergent phenomenon reserved for certain beings but not others? Does it not make more sense to design a universe on a common platform using a similar paradigm at all levels? Just as we constructed the Internet?

So here the atheists chime in with their evolution versus creationism argument. Sorry, it doesn’t hold up in this case.

Evolution is a theory, and while it is true that organisms change over time, no one has ever witnessed the birth of a new organism by means of natural selection. But all that aside, there’s an even greater reason why it doesn’t hold up in this case.

In the context of the present discussion, all life is bound by the same fundamental matrix with DNA at its very biological heart. Be it single-celled organisms to multi-cellular organisms to multi-individual super-organisms (ecosystems) to the planet itself, life follows repeating shapes and patterns at all levels. This happens on the physical as well as metaphysical planes. Truth be told, biology’s definition of “life as we know it” is far too narrow.

The sooner materialist science recognizes this, the sooner scientists will not only talk to plants, they will LISTEN. And REAL science can “emerge”…and the REAL magic can begin.

A Garden to Create Peace? Reverse Climate Change?

Watch more news videos | Latest from the US 

Video: ABC News 

Source: Video: abcnews.go.com: ABC News Source: Go Green With Your Own Indoor Garden

“A weed is but an unloved flower.”

― Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Source: goodreads.com: Goodreads Quotes About Gardening

Can a garden create peace? Reverse climate change? Are botanists the answer to world peace? And is science the “objective language” of peace and harmony?

Genesis Eco Fund can’t help but question the validity of some of the opinions / conclusions expressed by Dr. Peter Raven in the above video. As a matter of fact, his oversimplification of matters is typical of the kind of “scientific thinking” which causes so many of the problems we live with today.

For starters, we must make the distinction between a garden and an ecosystem. Dr. Raven seems to completely overlook the fact that nature’s basis for collective harmony and symbiosis is the ecosystem.

“Well-kept gardens” are entirely manmade phenomenon which, for the most part, offer humanity “tidied-up versions of nature,” or expressions of nature free of our subjective aesthetics of “ugliness” and “wildness.”

We so-called human beings like to think of ourselves as above all that “wildness” so we craft gardens in the image we have of ourselves: clean, ordered, flawless, perfect…like the legendary Garden of Eden itself.

So right away we see a problem. Gardens are not real. They are a projection. Gardens immediately provide a stripped down, sanitized, façade of nature—and heaven forbid any unwanted “pests” (members of nature) decide to come take up residence in our garden. Woe is them.

The second aspect of gardens and gardening is this misplaced idea that we are here to “lord over nature.” That somehow, without our direct intervention, nature won’t be able to evolve. At best we see ourselves as custodians of the natural world, at worst nature’s lord and master.

But it’s really all the same thing: our collective unconscious avoidance of self-control. The nature we are meant to be lord and master over is our own wild nature—anger, lust, pride, greed, etc. By assigning ourselves the role of taming the nature around us, we happily avoid looking at ourselves.

Which brings us to this question of can a garden create world peace? Ridiculous! You cannot go anywhere in the world and not encounter beautiful gardens! The trouble is, they are aesthetic; and aesthetics are the best anesthetic.

Some of the most beautiful and opulent gardens in the world happen to be owned by the wealthiest, most heartless bankers and industrialists—if not despots and tyrants!

Image: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon 

Source: water-is-life.blogspot.com: Water Is Life: The Decline Of Glorious Babylon

At the end of the day, then, this notion of creating world peace (or solving global warming) via gardens is a naïve utopian concept: simultaneous ego-projection and avoidance of the true source of our problems and suffering: ourselves; our own psyche. The answers lie within.

So what about an ecosystem? How does an ecosystem differ from a garden? For starters, an ecosystem is not an esthetic exercise. It’s beauty is there, but its beauty is primal, elemental…objective. The ecosystem is whole and complete—and messy. It is not carefully groomed, sanitized, etc.

More importantly, an ecosystem is collective harmony and symbiosis. Its functioning and energetic field reflects the fact that it is in a constant state of balancing. Unlike a garden which can only fall into “chaos” and must be “kept,” an ecosystem can self-organize, evolve, adapt, and surprise.

When a “pest” enters a garden, it must be “eradicated.” When a new organism enters an ecosystem, it is accommodated.  Sometimes, a foreign invader is introduced which the ecosystem cannot fully handle (English hares and cane toads in Australia), but still the self-organizing, self-correcting, ever-balancing activities of the ecosystem go on.

No garden can compete with nature’s level of determination and sophistication. A pest can wipe out a garden in no time at all.  It takes decades for an ecosystem to collapse. Gardens have no resilience compared to ecosystems.  They are too rigid in design and lack adaptability. Of course! Gardens are reflections of our minds…our so-called “objective science.”

Here we come to the real problem of this video: the erroneous belief that the scientific method is objective, and that somehow science holds the keys to solving our collective situation—which is, let’s face it, dire. 

We hold in our minds “scientific concepts” about the nature of reality which are, like the gardens we create:

1. projections of our own psyche


2. sanitized, oversimplified, stripped down versions of reality


3. rigidly designed, lacking in resilience and adaptability


4. must be “kept” in order that they do not fall into “chaos”


5. are aesthetic, and thus act as a powerful anesthetic to the consciousness.

Image: “Mind Projection” 

Source: pharrah13.com: Pharrah13 Live Psychic Reading: Astral Projection

Our attachment to materialist science and our wonder in our own scientific splendor (i.e. technology) is like any other drug. The fact that science is so wrapped up in personal, professional and economic gain simply adds fuel to the fire.

For anyone to believe that science is objective is just that: a belief; the new religion of our world. Strange, we see science advancing in leaps and bounds, and our societal and global problems lock-step with it, in much the same way that the ascension of organized religion created more problems than it solved.

That’s because both science and organized religion still only play with concepts. They are games in the mind. Science worships aesthetics and like any exercise of pure aesthetics, it is completely void of conscience.  Aesthetics is the best anesthetic. Science as we know it puts the conscience to sleep.

So botanists, studying “the science of plants” fail to recognize that plants simply do not function in the way they think they do. A plant in nature behaves differently than a plant in the laboratory. Plants are not little “bio-chemical machines.” They are individual members on an ecosystem.

So there is a science of expanded conscience. The first step is to expand one’s awareness to ecosystems. To study and comprehend how nature achieves collective harmony and symbiosis in naturally self-organizing, self-sustaining, and self-balancing systems seems like the logical place to start looking for answers on matters of peace and harmony for humanity.

Likewise, in terms of sustainability, climate change reversal, etc., why not look to ecosystems which were around long before this humanity arrived and will be here long after we have gone? 

Gardens? Ecosystems!