Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[1][2] It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind.[3] In contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of its absence, the philosophical zombie, which is defined as a being whose behavior and function are identical to one's own yet there is "no-one in there" experiencing it.

Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: "Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."[5]

Western philosophers, since the time of Descartes and Locke, have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness and identify its essential properties. Issues of concern in the philosophy of consciousness include whether the concept is fundamentally coherent; whether consciousness can ever be explained mechanistically; whether non-human consciousness exists and if so how can it be recognized; how consciousness relates to language; whether consciousness can be understood in a way that does not require a dualistic distinction between mental and physical states or properties; and whether it may ever be possible for computing machines like computers or robots to be conscious, a topic studied in the field of artificial intelligence.

Thanks to developments in technology over the past few decades, consciousness has become a significant topic of interdisciplinary research in cognitive science, with significant contributions from fields such as psychology, neuropsychology and neuroscience. The primary focus is on understanding what it means biologically and psychologically for information to be present in consciousnessthat is, on determining the neural and psychological correlates of consciousness. The majority of experimental studies assess consciousness in humans by asking subjects for a verbal report of their experiences (e.g., "tell me if you notice anything when I do this"). Issues of interest include phenomena such as subliminal perception, blindsight, denial of impairment, and altered states of consciousness produced by alcohol and other drugs, or spiritual or meditative techniques.

In medicine, consciousness is assessed by observing a patient's arousal and responsiveness, and can be seen as a continuum of states ranging from full alertness and comprehension, through disorientation, delirium, loss of meaningful communication, and finally loss of movement in response to painful stimuli.[6] Issues of practical concern include how the presence of consciousness can be assessed in severely ill, comatose, or anesthetized people, and how to treat conditions in which consciousness is impaired or disrupted.[7] The degree of consciousness is then measured by the Glasgow Coma Scale.

The origin of the modern concept of consciousness is often attributed to John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.[8] Locke defined consciousness as "the perception of what passes in a man's own mind".[9] His essay influenced the 18th-century view of consciousness, and his definition appeared in Samuel Johnson's celebrated Dictionary (1755).[10] "Consciousness" (French: conscience) is also defined in the 1753 volume of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopdie, as "the opinion or internal feeling that we ourselves have from what we do." [11]

The earliest English language uses of "conscious" and "consciousness" date back, however, to the 1500s. The English word "conscious" originally derived from the Latin conscius (con- "together" and scio "to know"), but the Latin word did not have the same meaning as our wordit meant "knowing with", in other words "having joint or common knowledge with another".[12] There were, however, many occurrences in Latin writings of the phrase conscius sibi, which translates literally as "knowing with oneself", or in other words "sharing knowledge with oneself about something". This phrase had the figurative meaning of "knowing that one knows", as the modern English word "conscious" does. In its earliest uses in the 1500s, the English word "conscious" retained the meaning of the Latin conscius. For example, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan wrote: "Where two, or more men, know of one and the same fact, they are said to be Conscious of it one to another."[13] The Latin phrase conscius sibi, whose meaning was more closely related to the current concept of consciousness, was rendered in English as "conscious to oneself" or "conscious unto oneself". For example, Archbishop Ussher wrote in 1613 of "being so conscious unto myself of my great weakness".[14] Locke's definition from 1690 illustrates that a gradual shift in meaning had taken place.

A related word was conscientia, which primarily means moral conscience. In the literal sense, "conscientia" means knowledge-with, that is, shared knowledge. The word first appears in Latin juridical texts by writers such as Cicero.[15] Here, conscientia is the knowledge that a witness has of the deed of someone else.[16]Ren Descartes (15961650) is generally taken to be the first philosopher to use conscientia in a way that does not fit this traditional meaning.[17] Descartes used conscientia the way modern speakers would use "conscience". In Search after Truth (Regul ad directionem ingenii ut et inquisitio veritatis per lumen naturale, Amsterdam 1701) he says "conscience or internal testimony" (conscienti, vel interno testimonio).[18][19]

The dictionary meaning of the word consciousness extends through several centuries and associated cognate meanings which have ranged from formal definitions to somewhat more skeptical definitions. One formal definition indicating the range of these cognate meanings is given in Webster's Third New International Dictionary stating that consciousness is: "(1) a. awareness or perception of an inward psychological or spiritual fact: intuitively perceived knowledge of something in one's inner self. b. inward awareness of an external object, state, or fact. c. concerned awareness: INTEREST, CONCERN -- often used with an attributive noun. (2): the state or activity that is characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, or thought: mind in the broadest possible sense: something in nature that is distinguished from the physical. (3): the totality in psychology of sensations, perceptions, ideas, attitudes and feelings of which an individual or a group is aware at any given time or within a particular time span -- compare STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS."

The philosophy of mind has given rise to many stances regarding consciousness. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy in 1998 defines consciousness as follows:

ConsciousnessPhilosophers have used the term 'consciousness' for four main topics: knowledge in general, intentionality, introspection (and the knowledge it specifically generates) and phenomenal experience... Something within one's mind is 'introspectively conscious' just in case one introspects it (or is poised to do so). Introspection is often thought to deliver one's primary knowledge of one's mental life. An experience or other mental entity is 'phenomenally conscious' just in case there is 'something it is like' for one to have it. The clearest examples are: perceptual experience, such as tastings and seeings; bodily-sensational experiences, such as those of pains, tickles and itches; imaginative experiences, such as those of one's own actions or perceptions; and streams of thought, as in the experience of thinking 'in words' or 'in images'. Introspection and phenomenality seem independent, or dissociable, although this is controversial.[20]

In a more skeptical definition of consciousness, Stuart Sutherland has exemplified some of the difficulties in fully ascertaining all of its cognate meanings in his entry for the 1989 version of the Macmillan Dictionary of Psychology:

ConsciousnessThe having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousnessto be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.[21]

Most writers on the philosophy of consciousness have been concerned with defending a particular point of view, and have organized their material accordingly. For surveys, the most common approach is to follow a historical path by associating stances with the philosophers who are most strongly associated with them, for example Descartes, Locke, Kant, etc. An alternative is to organize philosophical stances according to basic issues.

Philosophers and non-philosophers differ in their intuitions about what consciousness is.[22] While most people have a strong intuition for the existence of what they refer to as consciousness,[23] skeptics argue that this intuition is false, either because the concept of consciousness is intrinsically incoherent, or because our intuitions about it are based in illusions. Gilbert Ryle, for example, argued that traditional understanding of consciousness depends on a Cartesian dualist outlook that improperly distinguishes between mind and body, or between mind and world. He proposed that we speak not of minds, bodies, and the world, but of individuals, or persons, acting in the world. Thus, by speaking of "consciousness" we end up misleading ourselves by thinking that there is any sort of thing as consciousness separated from behavioral and linguistic understandings.[24] More generally, many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of producing a definition that does not involve circularity or fuzziness.[21]

Many philosophers have argued that consciousness is a unitary concept that is understood intuitively by the majority of people in spite of the difficulty in defining it.[23] Others, though, have argued that the level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people (for instance, the objective versus subjective aspects of consciousness), or else is an umbrella term encompassing a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.[25]

Ned Block proposed a distinction between two types of consciousness that he called phenomenal (P-consciousness) and access (A-consciousness).[26] P-consciousness, according to Block, is simply raw experience: it is moving, colored forms, sounds, sensations, emotions and feelings with our bodies' and responses at the center. These experiences, considered independently of any impact on behavior, are called qualia. A-consciousness, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby information in our minds is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behavior. So, when we perceive, information about what we perceive is access conscious; when we introspect, information about our thoughts is access conscious; when we remember, information about the past is access conscious, and so on. Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction,[27] others have broadly accepted it. David Chalmers has argued that A-consciousness can in principle be understood in mechanistic terms, but that understanding P-consciousness is much more challenging: he calls this the hard problem of consciousness.[28]

Some philosophers believe that Block's two types of consciousness are not the end of the story. William Lycan, for example, argued in his book Consciousness and Experience that at least eight clearly distinct types of consciousness can be identified (organism consciousness; control consciousness; consciousness of; state/event consciousness; reportability; introspective consciousness; subjective consciousness; self-consciousness)and that even this list omits several more obscure forms.[29]

There is also debate over whether or not a-consciousness and p-consciousness always co-exist or if they can exist separately. Although p-consciousness without a-consciousness is more widely accepted, there have been some hypothetical examples of A without P. Block for instance suggests the case of a zombie that is computationally identical to a person but without any subjectivity. However, he remains somewhat skeptical concluding "I dont know whether there are any actual cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness, but I hope I have illustrated their conceptual possibility." [30]

While philosophers tend to focus on types of consciousness that occur 'in the mind', in other disciplines such as sociology the emphasis is on the practical meaning of consciousness. In this vein, it is possible to identify four forms of consciousness:[31]

Mental processes (such as consciousness) and physical processes (such as brain events) seem to be correlated: but what is the basis of this connection and correlation between what seem to be two very different kinds of processes?

The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism. Descartes proposed that consciousness resides within an immaterial domain he called res cogitans (the realm of thought), in contrast to the domain of material things, which he called res extensa (the realm of extension).[32] He suggested that the interaction between these two domains occurs inside the brain, perhaps in a small midline structure called the pineal gland.[33]

Although it is widely accepted that Descartes explained the problem cogently, few later philosophers have been happy with his solution, and his ideas about the pineal gland have especially been ridiculed.[34] However, no alternative solution has gained general acceptance. Proposed solutions can be divided broadly into two categories: dualist solutions that maintain Descartes' rigid distinction between the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter but give different answers for how the two realms relate to each other; and monist solutions that maintain that there is really only one realm of being, of which consciousness and matter are both aspects. Each of these categories itself contains numerous variants. The two main types of dualism are substance dualism (which holds that the mind is formed of a distinct type of substance not governed by the laws of physics) and property dualism (which holds that the laws of physics are universally valid but cannot be used to explain the mind). The three main types of monism are physicalism (which holds that the mind consists of matter organized in a particular way), idealism (which holds that only thought or experience truly exists, and matter is merely an illusion), and neutral monism (which holds that both mind and matter are aspects of a distinct essence that is itself identical to neither of them). There are also, however, a large number of idiosyncratic theories that cannot cleanly be assigned to any of these schools of thought.[35]

Since the dawn of Newtonian science with its vision of simple mechanical principles governing the entire universe, some philosophers have been tempted by the idea that consciousness could be explained in purely physical terms. The first influential writer to propose such an idea explicitly was Julien Offray de La Mettrie, in his book Man a Machine (L'homme machine). His arguments, however, were very abstract.[36] The most influential modern physical theories of consciousness are based on psychology and neuroscience. Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman[37] and Antonio Damasio,[38] and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett,[39] seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain. Many other neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch,[40] have explored the neural basis of consciousness without attempting to frame all-encompassing global theories. At the same time, computer scientists working in the field of artificial intelligence have pursued the goal of creating digital computer programs that can simulate or embody consciousness.[41]

A few theoretical physicists have argued that classical physics is intrinsically incapable of explaining the holistic aspects of consciousness, but that quantum theory may provide the missing ingredients. Several theorists have therefore proposed quantum mind (QM) theories of consciousness.[42] Notable theories falling into this category include the holonomic brain theory of Karl Pribram and David Bohm, and the Orch-OR theory formulated by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Some of these QM theories offer descriptions of phenomenal consciousness, as well as QM interpretations of access consciousness. None of the quantum mechanical theories has been confirmed by experiment. Recent publications by G. Guerreshi, J. Cia, S. Popescu, and H. Briegel[43] could falsify proposals such as those of Hameroff, which rely on quantum entanglement in protein. At the present time many scientists and philosophers consider the arguments for an important role of quantum phenomena to be unconvincing.[44]

Apart from the general question of the "hard problem" of consciousness, roughly speaking, the question of how mental experience arises from a physical basis,[45] a more specialized question is how to square the subjective notion that we are in control of our decisions (at least in some small measure) with the customary view of causality that subsequent events are caused by prior events. The topic of free will is the philosophical and scientific examination of this conundrum.

Many philosophers consider experience to be the essence of consciousness, and believe that experience can only fully be known from the inside, subjectively. But if consciousness is subjective and not visible from the outside, why do the vast majority of people believe that other people are conscious, but rocks and trees are not?[46] This is called the problem of other minds.[47] It is particularly acute for people who believe in the possibility of philosophical zombies, that is, people who think it is possible in principle to have an entity that is physically indistinguishable from a human being and behaves like a human being in every way but nevertheless lacks consciousness.[48] Related issues have also been studied extensively by Greg Littmann of the University of Illinois.[49] and Colin Allen a professor at Indiana University regarding the literature and research studying artificial intelligence in androids.[50]

The most commonly given answer is that we attribute consciousness to other people because we see that they resemble us in appearance and behavior; we reason that if they look like us and act like us, they must be like us in other ways, including having experiences of the sort that we do.[51] There are, however, a variety of problems with that explanation. For one thing, it seems to violate the principle of parsimony, by postulating an invisible entity that is not necessary to explain what we observe.[51] Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.[52] More broadly, philosophers who do not accept the possibility of zombies generally believe that consciousness is reflected in behavior (including verbal behavior), and that we attribute consciousness on the basis of behavior. A more straightforward way of saying this is that we attribute experiences to people because of what they can do, including the fact that they can tell us about their experiences.[53]

The topic of animal consciousness is beset by a number of difficulties. It poses the problem of other minds in an especially severe form, because non-human animals, lacking the ability to express human language, cannot tell us about their experiences.[54] Also, it is difficult to reason objectively about the question, because a denial that an animal is conscious is often taken to imply that it does not feel, its life has no value, and that harming it is not morally wrong. Descartes, for example, has sometimes been blamed for mistreatment of animals due to the fact that he believed only humans have a non-physical mind.[55] Most people have a strong intuition that some animals, such as cats and dogs, are conscious, while others, such as insects, are not; but the sources of this intuition are not obvious, and are often based on personal interactions with pets and other animals they have observed.[54]

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known. Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled What Is it Like to Be a Bat?. He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself.[56] Other thinkers, such as Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.[57] Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive Donald Griffin's 2001 book Animal Minds reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.[58]

On July 7, 2012, eminent scientists from different branches of neuroscience gathered at the University of Cambridge to celebrate the Francis Crick Memorial Conference, which deals with consciousness in humans and pre-linguistic consciousness in nonhuman animals. After the conference, they signed in the presence of Stephen Hawking, the 'Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness', which summarizes the most important findings of the survey:

"We decided to reach a consensus and make a statement directed to the public that is not scientific. It's obvious to everyone in this room that animals have consciousness, but it is not obvious to the rest of the world. It is not obvious to the rest of the Western world or the Far East. It is not obvious to the society."[59]

"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals [...], including all mammals and birds, and other creatures, [...] have the necessary neural substrates of consciousness and the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors."[60]

The idea of an artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay.[61] However, the possibility of actually constructing a conscious machine was probably first discussed by Ada Lovelace, in a set of notes written in 1842 about the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, a precursor (never built) to modern electronic computers. Lovelace was essentially dismissive of the idea that a machine such as the Analytical Engine could think in a humanlike way. She wrote:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine.... The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.[62]

One of the most influential contributions to this question was an essay written in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Turing disavowed any interest in terminology, saying that even "Can machines think?" is too loaded with spurious connotations to be meaningful; but he proposed to replace all such questions with a specific operational test, which has become known as the Turing test.[63] To pass the test, a computer must be able to imitate a human well enough to fool interrogators. In his essay Turing discussed a variety of possible objections, and presented a counterargument to each of them. The Turing test is commonly cited in discussions of artificial intelligence as a proposed criterion for machine consciousness; it has provoked a great deal of philosophical debate. For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious,[64] while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.[65] A third group of scholars have argued that with technological growth once machines begin to display any substantial signs of human-like behavior then the dichotomy (of human consciousness compared to human-like consciousness) becomes pass and issues of machine autonomy begin to prevail even as observed in its nascent form within contemporary industry and technology.[49][50]Jrgen Schmidhuber argues that consciousness is simply the result of compression.[66] As an agent sees representation of itself recurring in the environment, the compression of this representation can be called consciousness.

In a lively exchange over what has come to be referred to as "the Chinese room argument", John Searle sought to refute the claim of proponents of what he calls "strong artificial intelligence (AI)" that a computer program can be conscious, though he does agree with advocates of "weak AI" that computer programs can be formatted to "simulate" conscious states. His own view is that consciousness has subjective, first-person causal powers by being essentially intentional due simply to the way human brains function biologically; conscious persons can perform computations, but consciousness is not inherently computational the way computer programs are. To make a Turing machine that speaks Chinese, Searle imagines a room with one monolingual English speaker (Searle himself, in fact), a book that designates a combination of Chinese symbols to be output paired with Chinese symbol input, and boxes filled with Chinese symbols. In this case, the English speaker is acting as a computer and the rulebook as a program. Searle argues that with such a machine, he would be able to process the inputs to outputs perfectly without having any understanding of Chinese, nor having any idea what the questions and answers could possibly mean. If the experiment were done in English, since Searle knows English, he would be able to take questions and give answers without any algorithms for English questions, and he would be effectively aware of what was being said and the purposes it might serve. Searle would pass the Turing test of answering the questions in both languages, but he is only conscious of what he is doing when he speaks English. Another way of putting the argument is to say that computer programs can pass the Turing test for processing the syntax of a language, but that the syntax cannot lead to semantic meaning in the way strong AI advocates hoped.[67][68]

In the literature concerning artificial intelligence, Searle's essay has been second only to Turing's in the volume of debate it has generated.[69] Searle himself was vague about what extra ingredients it would take to make a machine conscious: all he proposed was that what was needed was "causal powers" of the sort that the brain has and that computers lack. But other thinkers sympathetic to his basic argument have suggested that the necessary (though perhaps still not sufficient) extra conditions may include the ability to pass not just the verbal version of the Turing test, but the robotic version,[70] which requires grounding the robot's words in the robot's sensorimotor capacity to categorize and interact with the things in the world that its words are about, Turing-indistinguishably from a real person. Turing-scale robotics is an empirical branch of research on embodied cognition and situated cognition.[71]

In 2014, Victor Argonov has suggested a non-Turing test for machine consciousness based on machine's ability to produce philosophical judgments.[72] He argues that a deterministic machine must be regarded as conscious if it is able to produces judgments on all problematic properties of consciousness (such as qualia or binding) having no innate (preloaded) philosophical knowledge on these issues, no philosophical discussions while learning, and no informational models of other creatures in its memory (such models may implicitly or explicitly contain knowledge about these creatures consciousness). However, this test can be used only to detect, but not refute the existence of consciousness. A positive result proves that machine is conscious but a negative result proves nothing. For example, absence of philosophical judgments may be caused by lack of the machines intellect, not by absence of consciousness.

For many decades, consciousness as a research topic was avoided by the majority of mainstream scientists, because of a general feeling that a phenomenon defined in subjective terms could not properly be studied using objective experimental methods.[73] In 1975 George Mandler published an influential psychological study which distinguished between slow, serial, and limited conscious processes and fast, parallel and extensive unconscious ones.[74] Starting in the 1980s, an expanding community of neuroscientists and psychologists have associated themselves with a field called Consciousness Studies, giving rise to a stream of experimental work published in books,[75] journals such as Consciousness and Cognition, Frontiers in Consciousness Research, and the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with regular conferences organized by groups such as the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.[76]

Modern medical and psychological investigations into consciousness are based on psychological experiments (including, for example, the investigation of priming effects using subliminal stimuli), and on case studies of alterations in consciousness produced by trauma, illness, or drugs. Broadly viewed, scientific approaches are based on two core concepts. The first identifies the content of consciousness with the experiences that are reported by human subjects; the second makes use of the concept of consciousness that has been developed by neurologists and other medical professionals who deal with patients whose behavior is impaired. In either case, the ultimate goals are to develop techniques for assessing consciousness objectively in humans as well as other animals, and to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms that underlie it.[40]

Experimental research on consciousness presents special difficulties, due to the lack of a universally accepted operational definition. In the majority of experiments that are specifically about consciousness, the subjects are human, and the criterion used is verbal report: in other words, subjects are asked to describe their experiences, and their descriptions are treated as observations of the contents of consciousness.[77] For example, subjects who stare continuously at a Necker cube usually report that they experience it "flipping" between two 3D configurations, even though the stimulus itself remains the same.[78] The objective is to understand the relationship between the conscious awareness of stimuli (as indicated by verbal report) and the effects the stimuli have on brain activity and behavior. In several paradigms, such as the technique of response priming, the behavior of subjects is clearly influenced by stimuli for which they report no awareness, and suitable experimental manipulations can lead to increasing priming effects despite decreasing prime identification (double dissociation).[79]

Verbal report is widely considered to be the most reliable indicator of consciousness, but it raises a number of issues.[80] For one thing, if verbal reports are treated as observations, akin to observations in other branches of science, then the possibility arises that they may contain errorsbut it is difficult to make sense of the idea that subjects could be wrong about their own experiences, and even more difficult to see how such an error could be detected.[81]Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.[82] Another issue with verbal report as a criterion is that it restricts the field of study to humans who have language: this approach cannot be used to study consciousness in other species, pre-linguistic children, or people with types of brain damage that impair language. As a third issue, philosophers who dispute the validity of the Turing test may feel that it is possible, at least in principle, for verbal report to be dissociated from consciousness entirely: a philosophical zombie may give detailed verbal reports of awareness in the absence of any genuine awareness.[83]

Although verbal report is in practice the "gold standard" for ascribing consciousness, it is not the only possible criterion.[80] In medicine, consciousness is assessed as a combination of verbal behavior, arousal, brain activity and purposeful movement. The last three of these can be used as indicators of consciousness when verbal behavior is absent.[84] The scientific literature regarding the neural bases of arousal and purposeful movement is very extensive. Their reliability as indicators of consciousness is disputed, however, due to numerous studies showing that alert human subjects can be induced to behave purposefully in a variety of ways in spite of reporting a complete lack of awareness.[79] Studies of the neuroscience of free will have also shown that the experiences that people report when they behave purposefully sometimes do not correspond to their actual behaviors or to the patterns of electrical activity recorded from their brains.[85]

Another approach applies specifically to the study of self-awareness, that is, the ability to distinguish oneself from others. In the 1970s Gordon Gallup developed an operational test for self-awareness, known as the mirror test. The test examines whether animals are able to differentiate between seeing themselves in a mirror versus seeing other animals. The classic example involves placing a spot of coloring on the skin or fur near the individual's forehead and seeing if they attempt to remove it or at least touch the spot, thus indicating that they recognize that the individual they are seeing in the mirror is themselves.[86] Humans (older than 18 months) and other great apes, bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, pigeons, European magpies and elephants have all been observed to pass this test.[87]

A major part of the scientific literature on consciousness consists of studies that examine the relationship between the experiences reported by subjects and the activity that simultaneously takes place in their brainsthat is, studies of the neural correlates of consciousness. The hope is to find that activity in a particular part of the brain, or a particular pattern of global brain activity, which will be strongly predictive of conscious awareness. Several brain imaging techniques, such as EEG and fMRI, have been used for physical measures of brain activity in these studies.[88]

Another idea that has drawn attention for several decades is that consciousness is associated with high-frequency (gamma band) oscillations in brain activity. This idea arose from proposals in the 1980s, by Christof von der Malsburg and Wolf Singer, that gamma oscillations could solve the so-called binding problem, by linking information represented in different parts of the brain into a unified experience.[89]Rodolfo Llins, for example, proposed that consciousness results from recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance where the specific thalamocortical systems (content) and the non-specific (centromedial thalamus) thalamocortical systems (context) interact in the gamma band frequency via synchronous oscillations.[90]

A number of studies have shown that activity in primary sensory areas of the brain is not sufficient to produce consciousness: it is possible for subjects to report a lack of awareness even when areas such as the primary visual cortex show clear electrical responses to a stimulus.[91] Higher brain areas are seen as more promising, especially the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in a range of higher cognitive functions collectively known as executive functions. There is substantial evidence that a "top-down" flow of neural activity (i.e., activity propagating from the frontal cortex to sensory areas) is more predictive of conscious awareness than a "bottom-up" flow of activity.[92] The prefrontal cortex is not the only candidate area, however: studies by Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues have shown, for example, that visually responsive neurons in parts of the temporal lobe reflect the visual perception in the situation when conflicting visual images are presented to different eyes (i.e., bistable percepts during binocular rivalry).[93]

Modulation of neural responses may correlate with phenomenal experiences. In contrast to the raw electrical responses that do not correlate with consciousness, the modulation of these responses by other stimuli correlates surprisingly well with an important aspect of consciousness: namely with the phenomenal experience of stimulus intensity (brightness, contrast). In the research group of Danko Nikoli it has been shown that some of the changes in the subjectively perceived brightness correlated with the modulation of firing rates while others correlated with the modulation of neural synchrony.[94] An fMRI investigation suggested that these findings were strictly limited to the primary visual areas.[95] This indicates that, in the primary visual areas, changes in firing rates and synchrony can be considered as neural correlates of qualiaat least for some type of qualia.

In 2011, Graziano and Kastner[96] proposed the "attention schema" theory of awareness. In that theory, specific cortical areas, notably in the superior temporal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction, are used to build the construct of awareness and attribute it to other people. The same cortical machinery is also used to attribute awareness to oneself. Damage to these cortical regions can lead to deficits in consciousness such as hemispatial neglect. In the attention schema theory, the value of explaining the feature of awareness and attributing it to a person is to gain a useful predictive model of that person's attentional processing. Attention is a style of information processing in which a brain focuses its resources on a limited set of interrelated signals. Awareness, in this theory, is a useful, simplified schema that represents attentional states. To be aware of X is explained by constructing a model of one's attentional focus on X.

In the 2013, the perturbational complexity index (PCI) was proposed, a measure of the algorithmic complexity of the electrophysiological response of the cortex to transcranial magnetic stimulation. This measure was shown to be higher in individuals that are awake, in REM sleep or in a locked-in state than in those who are in deep sleep or in a vegetative state,[97] making it potentially useful as a quantitative assessment of consciousness states.

Assuming that not only humans but even some non-mammalian species are conscious, a number of evolutionary approaches to the problem of neural correlates of consciousness open up. For example, assuming that birds are conscious a common assumption among neuroscientists and ethologists due to the extensive cognitive repertoire of birds there are comparative neuroanatomical ways to validate some of the principal, currently competing, mammalian consciousnessbrain theories. The rationale for such a comparative study is that the avian brain deviates structurally from the mammalian brain. So how similar are they? What homologues can be identified? The general conclusion from the study by Butler, et al.,[98] is that some of the major theories for the mammalian brain [99][100][101] also appear to be valid for the avian brain. The structures assumed to be critical for consciousness in mammalian brains have homologous counterparts in avian brains. Thus the main portions of the theories of Crick and Koch,[99] Edelman and Tononi,[100] and Cotterill [101] seem to be compatible with the assumption that birds are conscious. Edelman also differentiates between what he calls primary consciousness (which is a trait shared by humans and non-human animals) and higher-order consciousness as it appears in humans alone along with human language capacity.[100] Certain aspects of the three theories, however, seem less easy to apply to the hypothesis of avian consciousness. For instance, the suggestion by Crick and Koch that layer 5 neurons of the mammalian brain have a special role, seems difficult to apply to the avian brain, since the avian homologues have a different morphology. Likewise, the theory of Eccles[102][103] seems incompatible, since a structural homologue/analogue to the dendron has not been found in avian brains. The assumption of an avian consciousness also brings the reptilian brain into focus. The reason is the structural continuity between avian and reptilian brains, meaning that the phylogenetic origin of consciousness may be earlier than suggested by many leading neuroscientists.

Joaquin Fuster of UCLA has advocated the position of the importance of the prefrontal cortex in humans, along with the areas of Wernicke and Broca, as being of particular importance to the development of human language capacities neuro-anatomically necessary for the emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans.[104]

Opinions are divided as to where in biological evolution consciousness emerged and about whether or not consciousness has any survival value. It has been argued that consciousness emerged (i) exclusively with the first humans, (ii) exclusively with the first mammals, (iii) independently in mammals and birds, or (iv) with the first reptiles.[105] Other authors date the origins of consciousness to the first animals with nervous systems or early vertebrates in the Cambrian over 500 million years ago.[106]Donald Griffin suggests in his book Animal Minds a gradual evolution of consciousness.[58] Each of these scenarios raises the question of the possible survival value of consciousness.

Thomas Henry Huxley defends in an essay titled On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History an epiphenomenalist theory of consciousness according to which consciousness is a causally inert effect of neural activity as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.[107] To this William James objects in his essay Are We Automata? by stating an evolutionary argument for mind-brain interaction implying that if the preservation and development of consciousness in the biological evolution is a result of natural selection, it is plausible that consciousness has not only been influenced by neural processes, but has had a survival value itself; and it could only have had this if it had been efficacious.[108][109]Karl Popper develops in the book The Self and Its Brain a similar evolutionary argument.[110]

Regarding the primary function of conscious processing, a recurring idea in recent theories is that phenomenal states somehow integrate neural activities and information-processing that would otherwise be independent.[111] This has been called the integration consensus. Another example has been proposed by Gerald Edelman called dynamic core hypothesis which puts emphasis on reentrant connections that reciprocally link areas of the brain in a massively parallel manner.[112] Edelman also stresses the importance of the evolutionary emergence of higher-order consciousness in humans from the historically older trait of primary consciousness which humans share with non-human animals (see Neural correlates section above). These theories of integrative function present solutions to two classic problems associated with consciousness: differentiation and unity. They show how our conscious experience can discriminate between a virtually unlimited number of different possible scenes and details (differentiation) because it integrates those details from our sensory systems, while the integrative nature of consciousness in this view easily explains how our experience can seem unified as one whole despite all of these individual parts. However, it remains unspecified which kinds of information are integrated in a conscious manner and which kinds can be integrated without consciousness. Nor is it explained what specific causal role conscious integration plays, nor why the same functionality cannot be achieved without consciousness. Obviously not all kinds of information are capable of being disseminated consciously (e.g., neural activity related to vegetative functions, reflexes, unconscious motor programs, low-level perceptual analyses, etc.) and many kinds of information can be disseminated and combined with other kinds without consciousness, as in intersensory interactions such as the ventriloquism effect.[113] Hence it remains unclear why any of it is conscious. For a review of the differences between conscious and unconscious integrations, see the article of E. Morsella.[113]

As noted earlier, even among writers who consider consciousness to be a well-defined thing, there is widespread dispute about which animals other than humans can be said to possess it.[114] Edelman has described this distinction as that of humans possessing higher-order consciousness while sharing the trait of primary consciousness with non-human animals (see previous paragraph). Thus, any examination of the evolution of consciousness is faced with great difficulties. Nevertheless, some writers have argued that consciousness can be viewed from the standpoint of evolutionary biology as an adaptation in the sense of a trait that increases fitness.[115] In his article "Evolution of consciousness", John Eccles argued that special anatomical and physical properties of the mammalian cerebral cortex gave rise to consciousness ("[a] psychon ... linked to [a] dendron through quantum physics").[116] Bernard Baars proposed that once in place, this "recursive" circuitry may have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms.[117]Peter Carruthers has put forth one such potential adaptive advantage gained by conscious creatures by suggesting that consciousness allows an individual to make distinctions between appearance and reality.[118] This ability would enable a creature to recognize the likelihood that their perceptions are deceiving them (e.g. that water in the distance may be a mirage) and behave accordingly, and it could also facilitate the manipulation of others by recognizing how things appear to them for both cooperative and devious ends.

Other philosophers, however, have suggested that consciousness would not be necessary for any functional advantage in evolutionary processes.[119][120] No one has given a causal explanation, they argue, of why it would not be possible for a functionally equivalent non-conscious organism (i.e., a philosophical zombie) to achieve the very same survival advantages as a conscious organism. If evolutionary processes are blind to the difference between function F being performed by conscious organism O and non-conscious organism O*, it is unclear what adaptive advantage consciousness could provide.[121] As a result, an exaptive explanation of consciousness has gained favor with some theorists that posit consciousness did not evolve as an adaptation but was an exaptation arising as a consequence of other developments such as increases in brain size or cortical rearrangement.[122] Consciousness in this sense has been compared to the blind spot in the retina where it is not an adaption of the retina, but instead just a by-product of the way the retinal axons were wired.[123] Several scholars including Pinker, Chomsky, Edelman, and Luria have indicated the importance of the emergence of human language as an important regulative mechanism of learning and memory in the context of the development of higher-order consciousness (see Neural correlates section above).

There are some brain states in which consciousness seems to be absent, including dreamless sleep, coma, and death. There are also a variety of circumstances that can change the relationship between the mind and the world in less drastic ways, producing what are known as altered states of consciousness. Some altered states occur naturally; others can be produced by drugs or brain damage.[124] Altered states can be accompanied by changes in thinking, disturbances in the sense of time, feelings of loss of control, changes in emotional expression, alternations in body image and changes in meaning or significance.[125]

The two most widely accepted altered states are sleep and dreaming. Although dream sleep and non-dream sleep appear very similar to an outside observer, each is associated with a distinct pattern of brain activity, metabolic activity, and eye movement; each is also associated with a distinct pattern of experience and cognition. During ordinary non-dream sleep, people who are awakened report only vague and sketchy thoughts, and their experiences do not cohere into a continuous narrative. During dream sleep, in contrast, people who are awakened report rich and detailed experiences in which events form a continuous progression, which may however be interrupted by bizarre or fantastic intrusions.[126] Thought processes during the dream state frequently show a high level of irrationality. Both dream and non-dream states are associated with severe disruption of memory: it usually disappears in seconds during the non-dream state, and in minutes after awakening from a dream unless actively refreshed.[127]

Research conducted on the effects of partial epileptic seizures on consciousness found that patients who suffer from partial epileptic seizures experience altered states of consciousness.[128][129] In partial epileptic seizures, consciousness is impaired or lost while some aspects of consciousness, often automated behaviors, remain intact. Studies found that when measuring the qualitative features during partial epileptic seizures, patients exhibited an increase in arousal and became absorbed in the experience of the seizure, followed by difficulty in focusing and shifting attention.

A variety of psychoactive drugs and alcohol have notable effects on consciousness.[130] These range from a simple dulling of awareness produced by sedatives, to increases in the intensity of sensory qualities produced by stimulants, cannabis, empathogensentactogens such as MDMA ("Ecstasy"), or most notably by the class of drugs known as psychedelics.[124]LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, Dimethyltryptamine, and others in this group can produce major distortions of perception, including hallucinations; some users even describe their drug-induced experiences as mystical or spiritual in quality. The brain mechanisms underlying these effects are not as well understood as those induced by use of alcohol,[130] but there is substantial evidence that alterations in the brain system that uses the chemical neurotransmitter serotonin play an essential role.[131]

There has been some research into physiological changes in yogis and people who practise various techniques of meditation. Some research with brain waves during meditation has reported differences between those corresponding to ordinary relaxation and those corresponding to meditation. It has been disputed, however, whether there is enough evidence to count these as physiologically distinct states of consciousness.[132]

The most extensive study of the characteristics of altered states of consciousness was made by psychologist Charles Tart in the 1960s and 1970s. Tart analyzed a state of consciousness as made up of a number of component processes, including exteroception (sensing the external world); interoception (sensing the body); input-processing (seeing meaning); emotions; memory; time sense; sense of identity; evaluation and cognitive processing; motor output; and interaction with the environment.[133] Each of these, in his view, could be altered in multiple ways by drugs or other manipulations. The components that Tart identified have not, however, been validated by empirical studies. Research in this area has not yet reached firm conclusions, but a recent questionnaire-based study identified eleven significant factors contributing to drug-induced states of consciousness: experience of unity; spiritual experience; blissful state; insightfulness; disembodiment; impaired control and cognition; anxiety; complex imagery; elementary imagery; audio-visual synesthesia; and changed meaning of percepts.[134]

Phenomenology is a method of inquiry that attempts to examine the structure of consciousness in its own right, putting aside problems regarding the relationship of consciousness to the physical world. This approach was first proposed by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, and later elaborated by other philosophers and scientists.[135] Husserl's original concept gave rise to two distinct lines of inquiry, in philosophy and psychology. In philosophy, phenomenology has largely been devoted to fundamental metaphysical questions, such as the nature of intentionality ("aboutness"). In psychology, phenomenology largely has meant attempting to investigate consciousness using the method of introspection, which means looking into one's own mind and reporting what one observes. This method fell into disrepute in the early twentieth century because of grave doubts about its reliability, but has been rehabilitated to some degree, especially when used in combination with techniques for examining brain activity.[136]

Introspectively, the world of conscious experience seems to have considerable structure. Immanuel Kant asserted that the world as we perceive it is organized according to a set of fundamental "intuitions", which include object (we perceive the world as a set of distinct things); shape; quality (color, warmth, etc.); space (distance, direction, and location); and time.[137] Some of these constructs, such as space and time, correspond to the way the world is structured by the laws of physics; for others the correspondence is not as clear. Understanding the physical basis of qualities, such as redness or pain, has been particularly challenging. David Chalmers has called this the hard problem of consciousness.[28] Some philosophers have argued that it is intrinsically unsolvable, because qualities ("qualia") are ineffable; that is, they are "raw feels", incapable of being analyzed into component processes.[138] Other psychologists and neuroscientists reject these arguments. For example, research on ideasthesia shows that qualia are organised into a semantic-like network. Nevertheless, it is clear that the relationship between a physical entity such as light and a perceptual quality such as color is extraordinarily complex and indirect, as demonstrated by a variety of optical illusions such as neon color spreading.[139]

In neuroscience, a great deal of effort has gone into investigating how the perceived world of conscious awareness is constructed inside the brain. The process is generally thought to involve two primary mechanisms: (1) hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, and (2) memory. Signals arising from sensory organs are transmitted to the brain and then processed in a series of stages, which extract multiple types of information from the raw input. In the visual system, for example, sensory signals from the eyes are transmitted to the thalamus and then to the primary visual cortex; inside the cerebral cortex they are sent to areas that extract features such as three-dimensional structure, shape, color, and motion.[140] Memory comes into play in at least two ways. First, it allows sensory information to be evaluated in the context of previous experience. Second, and even more importantly, working memory allows information to be integrated over time so that it can generate a stable representation of the worldGerald Edelman expressed this point vividly by titling one of his books about consciousness The Remembered Present.[141] In computational neuroscience, Bayesian approaches to brain function have been used to understand both the evaluation of sensory information in light of previous experience, and the integration of information over time. Bayesian models of the brain are probabilistic inference models, in which the brain takes advantage of prior knowledge to interpret uncertain sensory inputs in order to formulate a conscious percept; Bayesian models have successfully predicted many perceptual phenomena in vision and the nonvisual senses.[142][143][144]

Despite the large amount of information available, many important aspects of perception remain mysterious. A great deal is known about low-level signal processing in sensory systems, but the ways by which sensory systems interact with each other, with "executive" systems in the frontal cortex, and with the language system are very incompletely understood. At a deeper level, there are still basic conceptual issues that remain unresolved.[140] Many scientists have found it difficult to reconcile the fact that information is distributed across multiple brain areas with the apparent unity of consciousness: this is one aspect of the so-called binding problem.[145] There are also some scientists who have expressed grave reservations about the idea that the brain forms representations of the outside world at all: influential members of this group include psychologist J. J. Gibson and roboticist Rodney Brooks, who both argued in favor of "intelligence without representation".[146]

The medical approach to consciousness is practically oriented. It derives from a need to treat people whose brain function has been impaired as a result of disease, brain damage, toxins, or drugs. In medicine, conceptual distinctions are considered useful to the degree that they can help to guide treatments. Whereas the philosophical approach to consciousness focuses on its fundamental nature and its contents, the medical approach focuses on the amount of consciousness a person has: in medicine, consciousness is assessed as a "level" ranging from coma and brain death at the low end, to full alertness and purposeful responsiveness at the high end.[147]

Consciousness is of concern to patients and physicians, especially neurologists and anesthesiologists. Patients may suffer from disorders of consciousness, or may need to be anesthetized for a surgical procedure. Physicians may perform consciousness-related interventions such as instructing the patient to sleep, administering general anesthesia, or inducing medical coma.[147] Also, bioethicists may be concerned with the ethical implications of consciousness in medical cases of patients such as the Karen Ann Quinlan case,[148] while neuroscientists may study patients with impaired consciousness in hopes of gaining information about how the brain works.[149]

In medicine, consciousness is examined using a set of procedures known as neuropsychological assessment.[84] There are two commonly used methods for assessing the level of consciousness of a patient: a simple procedure that requires minimal training, and a more complex procedure that requires substantial expertise. The simple procedure begins by asking whether the patient is able to move and react to physical stimuli. If so, the next question is whether the patient can respond in a meaningful way to questions and commands. If so, the patient is asked for name, current location, and current day and time. A patient who can answer all of these questions is said to be "alert and oriented times four" (sometimes denoted "A&Ox4" on a medical chart), and is usually considered fully conscious.[150]

The more complex procedure is known as a neurological examination, and is usually carried out by a neurologist in a hospital setting. A formal neurological examination runs through a precisely delineated series of tests, beginning with tests for basic sensorimotor reflexes, and culminating with tests for sophisticated use of language. The outcome may be summarized using the Glasgow Coma Scale, which yields a number in the range 315, with a score of 3 to 8 indicating coma, and 15 indicating full consciousness. The Glasgow Coma Scale has three subscales, measuring the best motor response (ranging from "no motor response" to "obeys commands"), the best eye response (ranging from "no eye opening" to "eyes opening spontaneously") and the best verbal response (ranging from "no verbal response" to "fully oriented"). There is also a simpler pediatric version of the scale, for children too young to be able to use language.[147]

In 2013, an experimental procedure was developed to measure degrees of consciousness, the procedure involving stimulating the brain with a magnetic pulse, measuring resulting waves of electrical activity, and developing a consciousness score based on the complexity of the brain activity.[151]

Medical conditions that inhibit consciousness are considered disorders of consciousness.[152] This category generally includes minimally conscious state and persistent vegetative state, but sometimes also includes the less severe locked-in syndrome and more severe chronic coma.[152][153]Differential diagnosis of these disorders is an active area of biomedical research.[154][155][156] Finally, brain death results in an irreversible disruption of consciousness.[152] While other conditions may cause a moderate deterioration (e.g., dementia and delirium) or transient interruption (e.g., grand mal and petit mal seizures) of consciousness, they are not included in this category.

One of the most striking disorders of consciousness goes by the name anosognosia, a Greek-derived term meaning unawareness of disease. This is a condition in which patients are disabled in some way, most commonly as a result of a stroke, but either misunderstand the nature of the problem or deny that there is anything wrong with them.[157] The most frequently occurring form is seen in people who have experienced a stroke damaging the parietal lobe in the right hemisphere of the brain, giving rise to a syndrome known as hemispatial neglect, characterized by an inability to direct action or attention toward objects located to the left with respect to their bodies. Patients with hemispatial neglect are often paralyzed on the right side of the body, but sometimes deny being unable to move. When questioned about the obvious problem, the patient may avoid giving a direct answer, or may give an explanation that doesn't make sense. Patients with hemispatial neglect may also fail to recognize paralyzed parts of their bodies: one frequently mentioned case is of a man who repeatedly tried to throw his own paralyzed right leg out of the bed he was lying in, and when asked what he was doing, complained that somebody had put a dead leg into the bed with him. An even more striking type of anosognosia is AntonBabinski syndrome, a rarely occurring condition in which patients become blind but claim to be able to see normally, and persist in this claim in spite of all evidence to the contrary.[158]

William James is usually credited with popularizing the idea that human consciousness flows like a stream, in his Principles of Psychology of 1890. According to James, the "stream of thought" is governed by five characteristics: "(1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. (2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. (3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. (4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. (5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others".[159] A similar concept appears in Buddhist philosophy, expressed by the Sanskrit term Citta-satna, which is usually translated as mindstream or "mental continuum". Buddhist teachings describe that consciousness manifests moment to moment as sense impressions and mental phenomena that are continuously changing.[160] The teachings list six triggers that can result in the generation of different mental events.[160] These triggers are input from the five senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or touch sensations), or a thought (relating to the past, present or the future) that happen to arise in the mind. The mental events generated as a result of these triggers are: feelings, perceptions and intentions/behaviour. The moment-by-moment manifestation of the mind-stream is said to happen in every person all the time. It even happens in a scientist who analyses various phenomena in the world, or analyses the material body including the organ brain.[160] The manifestation of the mindstream is also described as being influenced by physical laws, biological laws, psychological laws, volitional laws, and universal laws.[160] The purpose of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness is to understand the inherent nature of the consciousness and its characteristics.[161]

In the west, the primary impact of the idea has been on literature rather than science: stream of consciousness as a narrative mode means writing in a way that attempts to portray the moment-to-moment thoughts and experiences of a character. This technique perhaps had its beginnings in the monologues of Shakespeare's plays, and reached its fullest development in the novels of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, although it has also been used by many other noted writers.[162]

Here for example is a passage from Joyce's Ulysses about the thoughts of Molly Bloom:

Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to get shut of her.[163]

To most philosophers, the word "consciousness" connotes the relationship between the mind and the world. To writers on spiritual or religious topics, it frequently connotes the relationship between the mind and God, or the relationship between the mind and deeper truths that are thought to be more fundamental than the physical world. Krishna consciousness, for example, is a term used to mean an intimate linkage between the mind of a worshipper and the god Krishna.[164] The mystical psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke distinguished between three types of consciousness: Simple Consciousness, awareness of the body, possessed by many animals; Self Consciousness, awareness of being aware, possessed only by humans; and Cosmic Consciousness, awareness of the life and order of the universe, possessed only by humans who are enlightened.[165] Many more examples could be given, such as the various levels of spiritual consciousness presented by Prem Saran Satsangi and Stuart Hameroff.[166] The most thorough account of the spiritual approach may be Ken Wilber's book The Spectrum of Consciousness, a comparison of western and eastern ways of thinking about the mind. Wilber described consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at one end, and more profound types of awareness at higher levels.[167]

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Arthur Brown 'Part 3 - 'The Core Of Stillness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Arthur has recorded many albums over a 50 year period and is best known for his No 1 Worldwide hit 'Fire.' He has been a major influence on many successful artists including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. His music has always been driven by his spiritual realisations. In Part 3 Arthur talks about his time spent studying and teaching the Beshara tradition. He then moved to Austin, Texas where he forged links with Gurdjieff groups while running a painting and decorating business with the Mothers of Invention drummer, Jimmy Carl Black. He tells an amusing story about being with Da Free John and talks about three people that had significant influence on this spiritual development, Mooji, Satyananda and Ganga. He formed a 'Healing Songs Therapy' group with counsellor Jim Maxwell where a song was created for each of their clients to help them heal. He toured with Robert Plant and in 2013 recorded an album 'based on the Cosmos' called 'Zim Zam Zim.' His spiritual journey was always in the foreground, 'Who Am I? Not my body, Not my thoughts. My mind is at peace. I can bear without the slightest restlessness all manifestations - all thoughts and images that arise - both pleasant and painful. Suddenly I know that this awareness of all and everything is itself a limitation. Subjects, object and consciousness are one and the same'

Loch Kelly - 'Falling Into Awake Awareness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Shift Into Freedom.' Loch was a keen sportsman when young. After one ice hockey game when he played in goal and made several amazing saves someone asked him how he did it. He explained, 'time slows down, I feel open and connected, I get really quiet inside and it seems it is strangely quiet on the outside too.' Someone gave him the 'Zen and the Art of Archery' book and he realised that others had had this experience too. At times he could feel exactly what was going on but wasn't thinking. He then started to investigate meditation. And then one night when walking home from college and feeling an overwhelming grief as a result of some recent losses his thoughts quietened, his heart broke open and the weight of despair lifted. He looked up at the stars and noticed that his usual sense of self had gone, yet he felt fully embodied and alive. A new process had begun. Experience showed him that consciousness can shift intelligently but he didn't know yet how to shift it intentionally. He went to Sri Lanka where he did long retreats and then India where he saw the Dalia Lama who recommended he study with Tulka Rinpoche where he learnt Awake Awareness. Over the next few years he embodied this teaching. He worked for many years with people in homeless shelters in NY and sees his life as a continual series of shifts. 'There is no end to the mystery of Life - most of it is beyond human understanding'

Arthur Brown 'Part 1 - The God Of Hellfire' - Interview by Iain McNay

Arthur has recorded many albums over a 50 year period and is best known for his No 1 Worldwide hit 'Fire.' He has been a major influence on many successful artists including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. His music has always been driven by his spiritual realisations, 'So many times I have come away from a gig, head full of stars, ears full of hissing, my throat sore with cinders. My body tired but my heart satisfied with song. What I lived I lived in the moment of performing. I didn't know how to receive the applause, that was not what I was there for, it was the moment when I was not there... my voice was singing but I was in bliss.' From an early age he roamed the hills near where he lived singing, talking in rhyme and making up poetry. His spiritual path led him to practice TM; Shivapuir Baba's 'decision exercise;' spend time living in a Gurdjieff community with JG Bennett and visiting Israel and singing for injured soldiers of both sides, as well as many other adventures. During this time he had many realisations: ''suddenly I was consciousness listening to me. I heard the beginning of everything, it sounded like a huge bell. Just before that I heard voices, sounding like Ohm. I knew that everyone heard it differently and that on different levels of consciousness the sound was different. I had in this meditation entered into the bliss body. It had in the contemplation of the sound become apparent that the bliss body was the balance of yin and yang. The movement of these two, from the original hum sound produced all subsequent sounds.'

Arthur Brown 'Part 2 - The Outer And The Inner become One' - Interview by Iain McNay

Arthur has recorded many albums over a 50 year period and is best known for his No 1 Worldwide hit 'Fire.' He has been a major influence on many successful artists including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop and the New York Dolls. His music has always been driven by his spiritual realisations, 'So many times I have come away from a gig, head full of stars, ears full of hissing, my throat sore with cinders. My body tired but my heart satisfied with song. What I lived I lived in the moment of performing. I didn't know how to receive the applause, that was not what I was there for, it was the moment when I was not there... my voice was singing but I was in bliss.' From an early age he roamed the hills near where he lived singing, talking in rhyme and making up poetry. His spiritual path led him to practice TM; Shivapuir Baba's 'decision exercise;' spend time living in a Gurdjieff community with JG Bennett and visiting Israel and singing for injured soldiers of both sides, as well as many other adventures. During this time he had many realisations: ''suddenly I was consciousness listening to me. I heard the beginning of everything, it sounded like a huge bell. Just before that I heard voices, sounding like Ohm. I knew that everyone heard it differently and that on different levels of consciousness the sound was different. I had in this meditation entered into the bliss body. It had in the contemplation of the sound become apparent that the bliss body was the balance of yin and yang. The movement of these two, from the original hum sound produced all subsequent sounds.'

Jon Bernie- ''Ordinary Freedom' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Ordinary Freedom' and 'The Unbelievable Happiness Of What Is.' When he was 4 years old Jon looking up at the stars and asked "what is going on here? Where are we? What is this?" At 6 he started to learn the violin and practiced 2 to 4 hours a day. At 16 he decided to sit in a chair indefinitely to see if he could find what he was looking for. 'Suddenly there was no more room, and there was no more me. It was like I had merged into the sun - like I had become the sun. It was like a kind of universal orgasm, as if every cell in my body had had its own nuclear explosion.' Later he became a monk meditating for 8 hours a day. After leaving the monastery he met Jean Klein who he describes as his 'root guru.' He also spent time with Robert Adams and Adyashanti. 'There was a deep letting go that I realized I had been waiting for a long, long time, and now here it was. In the past there had always been some remaining fear that kept me from fully letting go, but now it was time, and finally I just let it happen - was like a complete annihilation - would later refer to this experience as the end of fear.'

Jrgen Ziewe - 'Vistas Of Infinity' - Interview by Renate McNay

Author of 'The Ten Minute Moment,' 'Multi-Dimensional Man,' and 'Vistas of Infinity.' Jrgen started to meditate at an early age and at one point suddenly discovered himself out of his body. At first he didn't realise what had happened but found confirmation in the books of Carlos Casteneda. He found that there is a wormhole right in the centre of our brains which can catapult us into a parallel world. In this interview he talks us through his many dramatic adventures over 40 years into higher dimensional realities from the darkest places to the most illuminated regions of cosmic Consciousness and realms. He also found out what happens to us after death. He says: "The moment we leave our physical body behind our unconscious becomes our new external walking reality." "Every day I wake up it is the first day of an infinite future."

Jrgen Ziewe - The Ten Minute Moment' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Ten Minute Moment,' 'Multi-Dimensional Man,' and 'Vistas of Infinity.' After 40 years of meditation which had gradually taken him to deeper and deeper places Jrgen went on a 7 day personal retreat in as remote cabin in Scotland. He meditated most of the day and experienced a profound awakening. 'After a meditation I slowly opened my eyes and sized up my surroundings - my body had become part of the furniture. I could still perceive the external world through my eyes but my body had turned into a shell - a cardboard cutout - reality was being stripped away before my eyes. I could no longer be sure of what was happening - it was beyond and outside anything I had come to know. The stillness was too vast in its scope to be grasped. There was no reality as I knew it. The thing is it has always been different but I hadn't noticed. It was reality stripped of any familiarity. I could almost not bear it. For a moment I wanted to go back. In an instant I recognised that I was just a thought; an imagination without no substance. This was the death of all deaths. I had arrived at zero point. I was about to be surrendered and reabsorbed into the source. One more step and there would be no return - I was staring into the merciless face of God.' He also talks us through his life, how he refused to accept that the 5 senses was all there is to reality and how that led to a life long quest to find out who or what this consciousness was conscious of.

Paul Harris - 'Postcards From Beyond' - Interview by Iain McNay

Paul suffered from depression and was full of fear and self-doubt when he was younger. His saviour at that time was Indie music and his guitar. He then spent time in India and at one time just 'gave up.' 'The release was truly remarkable. It was like I was freed from my body completely. From the root of my being all the way above my head I just opened up completely. I was no longer 'Paul' or even human.' But his depression came back again in time and he was again miserable and unfulfilled. He found the Aukana Buddhist Monastery in Wiltshire in the UK and moved in for full time training. He meditated for 4 or 5 hours a day and developing mindfulness. For 9 years he pretty much lived on an acre of land. He now leads the monastery. 'I teach the way I have travelled so I know it works. The enlightened mind does not crave for life to be different.'

Sheikh Burhanuddin - 'The Journey Of A Modern Sufi Mystic'' - Interview by Iain McNay

Sheikh Burhanuddin talks about his fascinating journey and experiences along his way to become a Sheikh under the guidance of his master, Sheikh Nazim. From an early age when he was very drawn to be in nature he soon committed his life to finding a master who could guide him on his path. His spent time on different 'seclusions' which were very influential and helpful him with many realizations. He also had a session with spiritual healer Stephen Turoff which triggered a very deep state which lasted for nearly 3 years. He goes on to explain the Uwaysi System which is now an integral part of his teaching.

Paul disappears into the ocean (and Messi is God!) - Interview by Iain McNay

Something happened out of the blue to Paul when he was 15 playing football which was his passion. (he was signed as an apprentice to Cardiff City FC and wanted to become a professional footballer.) He had a strong sense to sit quietly and was overwhelming by a deep brilliant sense of beauty and peace. This went on for 18 months. He felt his sense of free will and choice was dropping away and that he was 'losing the story of Paul.' Life was becoming like a boundless football game. He felt like a kid on beach playing in an ocean of energy with no control over his experiences. He went on to stay in a monastery for 5 years and then lived as a hermit for a year in a caravan. He later married and had two children and now travels and talks with people. He says, 'My character just fell into the ocean.'

Mary Reed - 'The Journey Of An Unwitting Mystic' - Interview by Iain McNay

Mary is author of the book, 'Unwitting Mystic - Evolution Of The Message Of Love.' In the Summer of 2000 she heard a voice deep inside her saying 'You are supposed to be doing something very important.' It didn't leave her alone; the more she tried to ignore it the more persistent it became. She then started to have visions of Christ, Buddha, the Dalai Lama and others. She had no religious or spiritual background and tried to find help to understand and integrate them. Everything failed to make sense to her. Her life fell apart and she attempted suicide by taking 97 pills, but woke up 2 days later. She felt remorse and supreme surrender. Eventually she found help which led her to India where she is now based in a Nunnery. She tells her fascinating story and talks about the realisations life has led her to.

Michael A. Rodriguez -'The Uncreated Light Of Awareness' - Interview by Renate McNay

Michael A. Rodriguez is a spiritual Teacher and Author of the book "The Uncreated Light of Awareness" In this interview Michael tells us about his spiritual yearning as a child and his voracious thirst for Truth, how he became disenchanted with academia and entering a monastic life. He ate, drank, breathed, lived and slept Non-Duality and went through a 5 year purification and alchemical transformation called "Poverty" by Meister Eckhart. He says: "If you think the Universe came first, you are it's prisoner, when you know that you came first, you are free".

Cynthia Bourgeault - 'Seeing With The Eyes Of The Heart' - Interview by Renate McNay

The Reverend Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern day mystic, Episcopal priest and writer. She divides her time between solitude and traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian Contemplative and Wisdom Path. Author of several books including, "Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening", "Wisdom Jesus", "The Meaning of Mary Magdalene", "Love is Stronger than Death". In this Interview Cynthia tells us how her Christian Life began encountering the presence of Jesus when she received her first communion and then how she started searching for the missing message in the Church. Very important teachers were Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. She studied the Sacred Dances and Movements which threw her at times into a Rabbit Hole. She also talks about Freedom and the willingness to bare our suffering, GOD's Love, Solitude and Silence.

John Butler - 'Discovering Stillness - Part 1' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Wonders Of Spiritual Unfoldment' and Mystic Approaches.' His loves were farming and meditation. Tells his story of spiritual unfoldment and how he discovered stillness. It was not always an easy path for him and he went through periods of depressions and hopelessness. 'Realisation is not a personal attainment - it usually comes at times of deep prayer or quietness when the mind is clear of personal me.' 'I'm just a quiet old man of regular habits going up and down the hill to church each day, sitting on a bench when the weather is warm. I don't speak much. Adventures are inside.' 'From worldliness the absolute completion of Pure Being can seem out of touch, more theoretical than real. How can it be relevant to need? Once known however any return to ordinary worldly ways only seem to emphasise its loss. Total longing brings its own reward but all feelings of achievement disappear. Incomparable gifts of Heavenly Grace instruct, inspire, save us from drowning in the world'.

John Butler - 'Discovering Stillness - Part 2' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Wonders Of Spiritual Unfoldment' and Mystic Approaches.' His loves were farming and meditation. Tells his story of spiritual unfoldment and how he discovered stillness. It was not always an easy path for him and he went through periods of depressions and hopelessness. 'Realisation is not a personal attainment - it usually comes at times of deep prayer or quietness when the mind is clear of personal me.' 'I'm just a quiet old man of regular habits going up and down the hill to church each day, sitting on a bench when the weather is warm. I don't speak much. Adventures are inside.' 'From worldliness the absolute completion of Pure Being can seem out of touch, more theoretical than real. How can it be relevant to need? Once known however any return to ordinary worldly ways only seem to emphasise its loss. Total longing brings its own reward but all feelings of achievement disappear. Incomparable gifts of Heavenly Grace instruct, inspire, save us from drowning in the world'.

Ginger Gilmour - 'Bright Side Of The Moon' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Bright Side Of The Moon' Met and married Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour with whom she had 4 children. Started her spiritual journey when she became very ill and discovered meditation. Worked and trained with Irena Tweedie, Cecil Collins, Dr Wenger Engel and Gerhard Adler on her processes over the years. 'I discovered the answer to the shadow Collective Unconscious including Anima and Animus. I realised I had always placed a shield between myself and my shadow - I only wanted to focus on Love light and Beauty - I discovered the shadow was marked - 'do not enter broken dreams' I was a puppet controlled by the darkness.' In this interview she talks about her life, her passions, her struggles and breakthroughs and her realizations. Ginger now works as a painter and sculptor.

Mick Collins - 'My Crisis And Transformation' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Unselfish Spirit.' Mick left school at 15, working as a manual labourer before joining the army. Visited a Tibetan Monastery intending to stay 2 days and ended up living there for 3 years. 'I started contemplating various attachments and aversions in my conventional existence' and began reflecting on the significance on what a more intimate perspective could mean in the way he lived; began to observe and question how duality was embedded in my thoughts and behaviour.' He was also fascinated by the interplay between form and emptiness. But on a long train journey had an extraordinary experience where he had a heightened sense of compassion and profound feelings of love followed two days later by a slide into a diametrically opposed state. Was flooded by intense emotions; felt he was caught in a conflict between good and evil compounded by feelings of fear and terror. Left monastery and slowly started to find balance again with the help of Jungian work. Felt he had taken a journey into the unknown without a map. Eventually integrated the spiritual crisis and started to learn the interplay between doing and being which is now his passion.

Chloe Goodchild - The Voice Of Silence

Chloe is the founder of The Naked Voice and the heart of her work is the practice of the spoken and sung voice as a Gateway to discover our Non Dual Awareness. Deafness in childhood catalyzed Chloe's discovery of inner sound and silence. This deep encounter with her inner self, catalyzed questions like: " Who Am I", "Who is Singing", " How can I transform my sadness". Chloe had many encounters with indigenous wisdom teachers, spiritual and classical Indian music masters, ultimately leading to a transformative 'no-mind' experience in Northern India, inspired by the great luminary and saint, Anandamayi Ma. This gave birth to the unique method of sound and voice, which Chloe eventually named, The Naked Voice. Her autobiography, The Naked Voice - Journey to the Spirit of Sound tells the story of these formative early years. In this in-depth interview with Renate she talks about her life and her work http://www.thenakedvoice.com

Andrew Rawlinson - 'THE HIT' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Hit - Into The Rock'N'Roll Universe And Beyond' and 'The Book Of Enlightened Masters - Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions.' . Andrew Talks about his life and how he was aware that he was continually 'hit' by realisations, small and large, that enabled him to see through his conditioning. 'The HIT is both a grace and a disturbance. All worlds are a show.. Reality is open It is constantly transforming itself It goes beyond itself It is where illusion begins. All derangements are connected. Like sub atomic particles they just keep reflecting each other jumping between each other and turning into each other. Just like a magic trick where certainty and deception change places. It's a jungle, as soon as you find a path you loose it. Everybody is looking for who they are ------- but they are nobody Not only is the world stranger than you imagine - it is stranger than you can imagine. And we are all collaborators in creation. And what is it to collaborate? To know that we are the mirror as well as the face in it, pain and what cures pain. This is the expanse of spirit: rich and dark. Yes, it's the Gods who are rocking us, who are looking for someone to receive them. There is really no reality without identity, and identity is a show.'

Stephen Fulder - 'Awakening Arrives By Itself' - Interview by Iain McNay

'The spacious groundless sense of being needs to become part of our nature, to be familiar territory and then awakening arrives by itself. The ultimate cannot belong to anyone nor can there be someone who is awakened.' Stephen talks us through his spiritual journey and realisations. From realising that there was no fixed reality when he was a child to having his earlier insights confirmed when he took LSD in his 20s. He was drawn to India and the 'Mother Ganges' where he discovered the teachings of S.N. Goenka. Spent time on many retreats with Sayama and other Buddhist teachers such as Stephen Batchelor and Christopher Titmuss. Formed the Israel Insight Society; distanced himself from Buddhism but fully embraced the teachings of the Buddha and still teaches around 15 retreats a year. Also works in the area of Palestinian/Israeli reconciliation. 'There is no way to peace, Peace is the way.' Can describe his lived experience with great precision and clarity; took part on a study which explored 3 stages: Stage 1 - ordinary sense of self and boundary Stage 2 - sense of dropping boundary to some extent Stage 3 - dissolution In this interview he explains these stages in detail.

Gabor Harsanyi - 'The Master Of Silence' - Interview by Iain McNay

Gabor was born in Communist Hungary but escaped after the failed 1956 uprising. Travelled on foot to Italy and then lived in a refugee camp for a time in Italy before reaching Canada. Became a multi-millionaire very quickly but then found he was miserable and depressed when he realised this outer success didn't bring him any real happiness.'I had achieved outer freedom but was far, far away from inner, real freedom.' The market crashed and he lost almost everything. Lived in a forest for a time, 'I wanted to say NO to civilisation.' Moved to Mexico and then started to experience, real, deep, suicidal depression. Moved in with an Indian tribe in Ecuador, 'it was there I found that I could not just sit and BE like the Indians.' 'This suicidal depression became my greatest teacher.' He discovered the secret to finding real freedom was going inside his body, 'Whenever I was able to do it I became calm and my mind would stop. I spent much time sitting by the water and experimenting with grounding my body to the beach. There were moments when all of a sudden the sound of the waves became different and the mind was so still that there were hardly any remnants of the depression. I would get up and start walking and the sand and the water on my feet felt unlike it had ever felt before. This marked the beginning of the end of depression'. After a time he was able to surrender to his ultimate love - presence - the silence of nothing where the mind takes a back seat and becomes the servant and the original being is once again on the throne. He now helps people free themselves from thought addiction.

Georgi Y Johnson and Bart Ten Berge - 'Anxiety And Awakening' - Moderated by Renate and Iain McNay

In this interview Georgi Y Johnson, Author of "I AM HERE" and her Partner Bart Ten Berge, Author of "THE GIFT" 7 STEPS to a Happy and Fulfilled Life", discuss the meaning of anxiety and depression in the process of Awakening. Fear is a natural part of physical life but we need to unhook our fears as the authority on our thoughts, feelings and choices. The way to do this is not to repress fear but give it space. Liberated fear is alive and appropriate to the moment. For many, severe Anxiety or Panic attacks can be the turning point in finding themselves. Georgi is telling us her own story of a period of Deep Depression, Panic Attacks and Anxiety; looking for help she met Bart who is a Healer and the co-founder of the International School of Spiritual Psychology (ISSP) based in Holland.

Martyn Wilson - 'The State Of No Thought' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'Enlightenment - The Keys To Consciousness.' Martyn only talks from his own experience. He was an ordinary guy with a normal life; family, work and all the usual stresses. He met Maria who was interested in spiritual enlightenment and at first he was very sceptical of her interest. He set out to disprove that such a thing existed and worked hard to find faults in her arguments. But then 'the impossible happened' and he actually started to wake up himself. He found a method that stilled his mind, and his thoughts would stop for few seconds. He persevered and in time those few seconds became a few minutes. He then found he could stop all uncontrolled thoughts and was in control of his mind. What had been his master became his servant. He talks us through his story and shares the method that he found worked for him as a meditation.

Nurit Oren - 'The Blonde On The Rocky Road to Freedom' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Blind Leading The Blonde On The Road To Freedom.' Nurit was born in Israel, her parents were atheist Jewish pioneers - in a Kibbutz where the kids lived separately - there was no family unit to relate to - was allowed to be wild/play naked. But all changed when family moved to Canada. In her late teens served in the Israeli army for two years where she was stationed in Gaza where it was very dangerous. One day she hitchhiked to the wailing wall in Jerusalem and stuck a piece of paper between the cracks saying ' I want to find true love, divine love, the love of God that is pure, unchanging and everlasting.' Found books by Muktananda and went to live in his ashram in India where she was a dedicated disciple. There she got up at 3am every day - then meditation then chanting then work no breakfast, then chanting then lunch then work then more chanting then work, then dinner. There was no socialising at all. She had a kundalini awakening then decided to stay indefinitely. But Muktananda died. Moved to Toronto, found a teacher called Dr Mills and stayed with him for 15 years. She had then been on a spiritual path for 40 years and still didn't feel free. Met Gabor Harsanyi, 'It's very simple. Look at me and feel your hand without looking at it. Notice that your mind will stop.' When she did this something shifted inside her She felt a very subtle sensation of wellness and peace. 'Now I get it' she realised 'This is it.. this is what I have been searching for.'

Georgi Y Johnson - 'I AM HERE' - Interview by Renate McNay

Georgi is the Author of "I AM HERE - Opening the windows of life and beauty". In this interview she talks about her process of Awakening which led her into writing this book and the teaching of I AM HERE. Her first conscious awakening was when she was 2 years old, lying on the bed and calling her own name, like a Mantra, Georgi, Georgi, Georgi, when suddenly she became strange to herself."I was not me, not this name.so who was I"? Sporadic awakenings continued and she realised later that it was her conviction to understand the meaning of Life which she beautifully played out in her book "I AM HERE". She talks about the three stages of her awakening which started from the head up, the heart was still held prisoner, later the heart was open to unconditional love yet the body was still held prisoner. She also explains the difference between Consciousness, Awareness and Emptiness..'Enlightenment comes with the liberation of Awareness.'

Russel Williams - 'Looking Through The Horse's Eyes' - Interview by Iain McNay.

Russel was born in 1921 in a very poor family. He was orphaned at 11 and came close to death many times. In the second world war he took part in the Dunkirk evacuation and lived through the Blitz. He was never afraid. He joined a circus after the war and worked with the animals. It was here that he suddenly became aware that, 'I am the horses, dogs, the lion, the trees - everything is true nature.' He hasn't had any unwanted thoughts since he was 29 years old. 'The only way to attain experience is to come to complete emptiness; that is to come to the end of the thought mind. But you will find that the emptiness was never empty because it is a potential for all that may come to be. We enter into an area of extremely fine aspects of consciousness that dissolves into itself and loses duality. And then there is only 'that.' Everything leads back to this emptiness. No form of understanding can connect you to this. It has to be seen within itself. The peace that passes all understanding that is emptiness. It is completely fulfilling in itself. You can just BE instead of think.'Russel has a book available written with Steve Taylor, 'Not I, Not Other Than I: The Life and Teachings of Russel Williams'.

Ravi Ravindra - 'A Voice Without A Form' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of many books including 'Science and the Sacred,' 'Krishnamurti - Two Birds On One Three' and 'Heart Without Measure. - Gurdjieff work with Madam de Salzmann.' Ravi was born in India in 1939. As a teenager he found himself reading the works of Swami Vivekananda and being 'pulled by a longing to understand the mystery and significance of life. He was struck by one particular statement: 'I am a voice without a form.' It opened a door to a new dimension for him. He talks about his time with Krishnamurti, 'Silence was a special delight to both of us, it was easy to understand each other's thoughts and feelings.' And then his 10 years with Madame De Salzmann who was head of the Gurdjieff work since the latter's death in 1949. She stressed, 'attention is all that we have, that is to say, attention is all that we can bring. The rest is out of our control. A higher energy is there. The purpose of man's existence on Earth is to allow the exchange of energy between the earth and higher levels of existence.'

Arjuna Ardagh - 'Waking Up and Changing the World' - Interview by Iain McNay

Author of 'The Translucent Revolution - How People Just Like you are waking up and changing the world,' Better Than Sex - The Ecstatic Art of Awakening Coaching' and 'How About Now' talks about his life and work. In 1991, after returning to India for a prolonged period of meditation, Arjuna met H.W.L. Poonja, a direct student of Ramana Maharshi. With Poonja's help, Ardagh went through a radical shift of perspective. Rather than attaining what he had imagined, he had the profound realization that what he had been seeking for was what he already was, and always had been. He realized that it was in the abandonment of all seeking and wanting that the heart found its fulfillment. In 1992 Ardagh to return to the West to "share this secret with his friends." He returned to Seattle and began to work with people one-on-one and in groups, facilitating a dramatic shift in awareness with thousands of people throughout the United States and Europe. He quickly discovered that this same realization was easily accessible to anyone who was willing to look in the right place, and that this had a profound effect on simple day-to-day life.

Reggie Ray - 'Finding Realization In The Body' - Interview by Renate McNay

Dr. Reginald "Reggie" Ray is the Founder and Spiritual Director of the Dharma Ocean Foundation. He met Chgyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1970, a few weeks after his arrival in the US, and became one of his first American students. After spending time in India he moved to Colorado where he became the first full-time faculty member and chair of the Buddhist Studies. From the beginning of his study with Trungpa Rinpoche, Reggie held many roles in Rinpoche's lineage - student, scholar, meditation instructor, and teacher. Reggie has always combined his study and teaching with a strong meditation practice, including daily practice and annual solitary retreats of 1-3 months each year. He has accumulated some 6-7 years in solitary retreat, in which he has explored all of Trungpa Rinpoche's practice teachings. He has also explored somatic teachings east and west, traditional and modern, such as Yoga and Qi Gung (which he practices today) and traditions such as the work of Gerda Alexander, Rolfing, and Hakomi therapy and therapeutic techniques. He now incorporates much of the wisdom of these earth-based lineages and traditions into his teaching, because, as he says, Vajrayana is essentially an earth-based tradition already. Reggie has written extensively and is the author of several books including "Indestructible Truth", "Secret of the Vajra World" and "Touching Enlightenment - Finding Realization in the Body." "To be awake, to be enlightened, is to be fully and completely embodied. To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are, in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation."

Rory O'Connor - 'I Can't Do This Anymore' - Interview by Iain McNay

Rory was the youngest of 8 children and raised in the Catholic tradition. 'I remember looking at my parent's life and thinking that it seemed like a kind of hell, a trap that they 'believed' they could not get out of. From where I stood, frustration seemed to dog their lives.' He became a drummer in a heavy metal band but became very depressed and stopped playing music. But he kept searching, reading, started TM, and openings started to appear. 'At some point in my late thirties I had a real moment of clarity, a paradigm shift. I realised that what I understood of quantum science and the eastern traditions was essentially describing the same thing ie. the concept of everything appearing out of nothing through the observer. From then on 'reality' seemed a lot less 'solid'. 'Concurrent events in my personal life had also conspired to create an actual 'breakdown' moment where the pain of trying to keep everything 'together' caused me to smash the kitchen table to pieces with my bare hands only to find myself sitting in the rubble saying repeatedly "I can't do this anymore". It may not sound like it but this 'moment of surrender' was the best thing that ever happened to me.' 'When you know that you know nothing then you are free to consider anything and believe nothing. It doesn't matter how you describe it or label it life simply is what it is and the description/label is meaningless'

Heath Thompson - 'Returning To The Source Is Stillness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Heath's spirituality began by joining a Buddhist practice under the teachings of the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hahn. He joined a two-year distance learning course called Foundation of Buddhism but quit believing that if there is an Absolute Truth it would be simple and not require academic discussion to find it. His Realisation occurred over two, perhaps three 'moments'; the first happened the day he quit the course, 'I was sitting in the garden absent-mindedly watching bees and insects flying around while drinking tea and I suddenly noticed a feeling appear in my stomach that vanished the moment I witnessed it, and an inner voice said to me "you will never feel that again." So he decided to simply sit without a real reason and just be silent and see if it returns - and it did, long enough for him to realise what was being expressed; an endless pool of stillness. 'My life totally changed a month later when getting out of bed I glanced through the window at the sky and saw, felt, heard the same Presence I had felt on the inside and I knew at once all is One, there is no inside or outside, no here or there, no birth or death, nowhere to go, nothing to do - all is as it is. I laughed at myself for even though I suspected the Truth to be simple I had not expected it to be ablaze wherever I looked. This happened in October 2009 and I spent until February 2011 feeling unable to express what I knew as my sangha had people with over 20 years experience of practice who didn't like my attempts to question some of the teachings. In the end I decided to leave and spend my time learning from nature.'

Debra Wilkinson - 'Awake And Ready' - Interview by Iain McNay

Debra was the child of an alcoholic Mother who started seeking because she could not live with her mind's conditioning anymore. She was a mass of anxiety, hurt and plagued by the past and terrified by the future. She started to meditate which helped to lift the heavy energies she had acquired. She developed a very painful nerve condition and learnt to be with the pain. Found that a dreadful curse became a true blessing. She would spend 5 hours a day in meditation and got to the point where, 'I was done.' 'I thought I knew who I was but suddenly I wasn't that anymore. So I sat with it and asked 'Who Am I?' 'Who or what is that?' And the answer came 'I am God!' I realised in that moment I am God in expression and now my mind was free. Now there is just me and God and me knowing that I am God.'

Linda Clair - 'I Am Enlightened' - Interview by Renate McNay

Linda was born in Sydney in 1958. She had virtually no interest in meditation or spiritual matters until the age of 37, when she was introduced to Peter Jones, who became her first teacher. This meeting was an intense experience for her. There was a depth to the communication she had never experienced before, and it triggered a search for freedom, which was soon the major focus of her life. At this time she had two teenage children and was running a small business, but she managed to make time for intensive meditation. In 1997 she had a profound awakening during a ten-day retreat in northern New South Wales. She later described the experience as 'deeper than bliss'.There was a marked change in her after the awakening, which was really a very strong glimpse of enlightenment. She knew now what was possible, and she also knew that she would not be satisfied until that state became permanent. She maintained the humble attitude of a student and continued to practice.During this time she met the Japanese Zen Master, Hogen Yamahata, who also impressed her with his deeply enlightened presence and humility.In 2004 she travelled to Japan and spent six weeks at a Zen monastery with Hogen-san's Master, Harada Tangen Roshi, known as Roshi Sama. Her time with him was intense. She sensed she was close to the culmination of her journey. She returned to Australia in a deeply detached, peaceful state. Roshi Sama gave her the name Dai'an Jishin, which translates as 'deep peace, compassionate heart/mind'. Her search ended during a ten-day retreat with Hogen-san at Springbrook, in the mountains behind the Gold Coast in Queensland.'Everything changed. All fear disappeared. I was left with nothing and nothing to lose. The depth of peace and satisfaction overwhelmed me, and it continues to deepen every day. Life is immediate. There is no desire for anything more or different. This is enough.'

Francis Bennett - 'The Key To Happiness' - Interview by Iain McNay

Francis Bennett was a Roman Catholic, Trappist monk for a number of years. He lived in two monasteries of the Trappist Order in the US and was also a member of an urban, contemplative monastic community originally founded in Paris, France in 1975. He has lived in France at several monasteries, and in Canada at a small monastic community in Montreal Quebec. He received a five and a half year monastic/spiritual formation with the Trappists before he made his vows as a monk at Gethsemani Abbey in 1983. He has worked in ministry in the area of spiritual Care in the hospice movement, as a hospital chaplain and in spiritual care of the sick and dying in parish settings. In 2010, while in the middle of a Church Service in his monastery in Montreal, Francis suddenly experienced what he has come to call, "a radical perceptual shift in consciousness", in which he discovered the ever present presence of spacious, pure awareness. He came to see that this awareness is actually the unchanging essence of who he really is and always has been; the Supreme Self. He also came to see simultaneously, that this vast, infinite sense of presence at the center of his being (and at the center of the being of everyone else on the planet) is actually not at all separate from the presence of God, which he had been looking for during his many years as a monk and spiritual seeker.

Jah Wobble - 'Riding The Sonic Boom To Heaven' - Interview by Iain McNay

Jah Wobble was the original bass player in the band, Public Image Limited (PIL), which was formed by former Sex-pistols singer John Lydon (Rotten). He was 17 when he joined the band. He came from a tough and at times violent East London background. When he was young he developed a taste for short wave radio oscillations; they put him into a stat...e of trance and he could sleep better. 'It felt like listening to infinity.' From an early age he had strong spiritual bent, he discovered the Upanishads and was captivated by ancient teachings. Music, especially the bass guitar and his spiritual life became indelibly intertwined. 'When you truly accept the bass as an emanation of God as the ground of existence you make a friend of impermanence, a state of flux, therefore the fear of losing what you have diminishes.you truly ride the rhythm - you will reside in the residence of 'OM' you can ride the sonic boom to heaven.' 'My bass playing relies first and foremost on intuition - it is necessary to remain innocent - intuition is directed from the solar plexus - the knowing sun in the guts.' After years on the road with bands he became an alcoholic, 'Whenever I drank all the fear disappeared and the tension left my body' but he couldn't go on like that and became completely burnt out. His Marriage broke up and he was left with crushing sense of failure. After joining AA and finding a real depth in his spiritual path life, 'I found I was grateful for every drink and drug I had taken because it was because of them I now had a beautiful and stable life which in turn led to a great productivity. I felt really alive and sensitised, I had simply grasped what it is to be human. Everything in life was sort of emptying out and becoming simpler. I was now at the stage of developing a meditative mind. There came a point where there was no difference between making music and spirituality - the world might have been getting crazier but I was getting better.'

Jenny Boyd - 'Staring Into The Face Of God' - Interview by Iain McNay

Jenny Boyd is the author of 'It's Not only Rock 'n' Roll' a book where she presents interviews with 75 musicians about how their creativity functions. Jenny works as a psychologist and addictions consultant in London. She wanted to understand how the minds and souls of these artist could create such great music. Her own spiritual awakening first started when she was 18. 'A tingling sensation rippled through my body, everything appearing crystal clear. I felt like a channel for the deeper parts of myself, as if I was watching myself from above. There was also a feeling of unity. My search for enlightenment had begun, I was now on a path from which I would often swerve but never leave.' In 1967 she travelled with the Beatles to India to spend time with Maharishi Maheshi Yogi (her sister Pattie was going out with - and later married - George Harrison at the time)

Here she learnt to meditate. She became a successful model in London, and later married Mick Fleetwood the drummer in Fleetwood Mac. 'After many years of being involved with everything that went along with rock 'n' roll I decided to go to college and study psychology.' She talks about her own journey as well as the fascinating process she discovered about musicians creativity. 'Peak experience can happen when the artist is totally in the here and now. A time of complete concentration that overtakes the mundane - the experience of eternity right here and now - by completely concentrating on the music they are able to open themselves up - the result can be songs that come from nowhere.'

Nicholas Hagger - '+A+-A = The Great Nothing' - Interview by Iain McNay

Nicholas Hagger is a poet, cultural historian and philosopher and is the author of more than 35 books including his two latest just released, 'My Double life 1 - This Dark Wood' and 'My Double Life 2 - A Rainbow Over the Hills.' In this interview he talks about his life, his spiritual awakenings and how they have changed the way he sees reality. 'I asked Japanese poet Junzabuto Nishwaki in 1965 for a distillation of the wisdom of the East - he wrote on a business card +A+-A=0. The Great Nothing. He explained that the Universe is a unity that reconciles all contradictions, that the One combines day and night, life or death.'

'Libya accelerated my drastic purgation and remaking of myself. I was on the universal mystic way without realising it - I didn't know that my dark night of the senses would help me back onto the right path of detachments, illumination and transformations - I would have to traverse hell before I could reach inner serenity - I now felt more intensely than ever that I had lost my way in a dark wood and was I still searching for my right path.' 'This was my first glimpse of the celebrated golden flower, the centre and the source of my being. White light flowing upwards... a spring opened up inside me... visions wobbled inside me... I saw a fountain of light .Finally I said to myself , 'I surrender' and I was drunk with flowing light.'

Giles Hutchins - The Illusion Of Separation - Interview by Iain McNay

Giles has written two books, The Illusion of Separation and The Nature of Business. He says, "Our patterns of thinking and learning are all based on a world of things which we are encouraged to think of as separate building. The dominant world view allows us to count and measure objects without their having any relational value for us.... It provides for neat definitions and a sense of control over life yet projects a logic that sets humans apart from each other and from Nature itself. Yet the deeper we look into nature the more we realise that nothing in life is separate; everything is a dynamic interplay. Life is essentially co-creative, fluid and connective. Separateness is an illusion we have created which has fast become a dangerous delusion infecting how we think and relate in business politics and beyond. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the critical problem facing our planet cannot be resolved with the same thinking that created the problems in the first place. In Devon, my daily meditations and yoga were supplemented with sitting against trees I got to know intimately. I learnt a Druidic tree meditation and healing practice which I practiced daily with the trees. I also started writing short articles while sitting next to trees, blogs for a personal website. Then the Guardian newspaper offered to pay for me to write blogs for them and soon after that a publisher approached me about writing a book on business inspired by nature. 'Leaving corporate life was all contrary to my conditioning of security, career, status, financial income, etc. and while my earnings have been pathetic in comparison since, it is with no regrets. I gave myself the vital space and time to deepen my inner psychic connection to Nature and also to recover from years of shell-shocking global travel, stress, burning the candle at both ends. I underwent something of a metamorphosis from 2012 to 2014, gradually healing while letting go of old mentalities, going through a 'dark night of the soul', embracing the unconscious depths of my imaginal realm and making friends once again with the stillness within."

Kristiina Helin - Seeing Is Seeing Itself - Interview by Renate McNay

Kristiina is a Finnish Music Stage Director and a mother. As a child she had strong energy and Out of Body experiences which left her terrified. Having also had a violent upbringing she realized the need for relaxing and releasing emotional stress was essential. In her twenties she entered an Acting School in London where she explored her senses and radically questioned her perception and reality. Coincidentally she found out about Japanese Butoh Dance and travelled to Japan to study its philosophy. The most important exercise was Bisoku movement which is extremely slow. Dancing for example to the smell of a flower or to different images, becoming one with whatever caught her attention; a blade of grass, a tree. Back in Holland she entered a long period of silence where she took action to the zero and fell into a deep depression. At a gathering with Rupert Spira in Amsterdam she had a profound shift in her perception, looking into a mirror she was neither in her body nor in the mirror, she had disappeared.

Adrian Rides and John Flaherty - 'Addiction and Awakening' - Interview by Iain McNay

John is author of the book, 'Addiction Unplugged - How To Be Free and has worked in the field of addiction for 25 years. He was previously a Catholic Priest but left when he was 35 having felt he had handed his life over to the Church. At this point he felt physically, mentally and emotionally drained and he knew it was time to move on. Adrian started drinking heavily at an early age to avoid feelings of intense anxiety and reached the point where his marriage had broken down and he was in a deep depression. He discovered meditation and his life started to change. Shortly afterwards he had an experience, 'I realised that now is all that there is and that the past and future were simply torments of my mind. I realised that I was alive, that my aliveness was not separate from the aliveness in everything, I realised that I was life itself and that I had found myself.' He also works in the field of addiction and teaches mindfulness in London. Adrian's website is:www.lovelifelivenow.com and John's is http://www.beawarebealive.com

Eimear Moran - 'A Feather On The Breath Of God' - Interview by Renate McNay

Eimear Moran is the Author of the book, 'The Garden Path Home to Eden - A new Way of seeing Love, Self and the Garden.' Eimear could always see the Divine in Nature and when her life seemed to fall apart she could only allow this total "free Fall" in the safe place of her Garden where she would sit with all her pain and loneliness. One day she sat in her Garden looking at a Hawthorn Tree; it was a grey, cold day and miserable. The tree looked poor and barren and she thought: "I must look as barren to this tree as he to me." In this moment she woke up and realized her true Nature. An amazing feeling of love came over her, it was a reality of heavenly perfection and she knew she had met God. Eimear can be contacted at:eimearmoran@eircom.net

Prajna Ginty - 'The Edge Of Grace' - Interview by Renate McNay

Prajna is a Mother, Spiritual Teacher and Author of the book, 'Edge of Grace - A Seeker's Path to the Heart of Liberation.' She was on top of the 'Enlightenment Mountain' and spent 7 years in Samadhi when she was thrown by spirit into a cauldron of transmuting fire. A long walk in the dark night began where she felt she cannot live this life anymore. One night she went close to the Cliff and began jumping when something picked her up saying, 'this is your purpose and the life to live,.you're staying, go home.' Prajna explains: 'I want everyone to know that regardless of their circumstances they can directly experience wholeness, return to the deepest peace and live in freedom'.

Bart Marshall - 'Only This Emptiness' - Interview by Iain McNay

In the Vietnam War a mortar landed nearby that blew Bart into a clear and brilliant blackness that, "Felt like home. I would have gladly stayed in that blackness, but instead I was brought back into a world I could no longer view in the same way." When he returned in 1968 he experimented with LSD, read everything he could find that might offer clues to what had happened to him, studied meditation and attended workshops. After 20 years he hit a wall as a seeker and then met the teacher Richard Rose whom he studied with for 5 years. It was after a weekend with Douglas Harding that a breakthrough finally happened. "Being the source of everything that is nothing - everything and nothing, only this emptiness."

Deborah Westmoreland - 'Being Knowing Being' - Interview by Renate McNay

Deborah Westmoreland is a poet, a spiritual teacher and the author of Being Knowing Being, which is an upcoming book of spiritual essays. After several tragedies her big question was, "How can I end suffering?" She was sick and tired of Deborah. Her mind was too busy to sit in meditation so she started doing running meditations finding the moment. Never got ahead of her breath, nor behind. She disconnected from all her belief structures and attachments till she awakened one day, and realized that she had always been in Heaven. She says, "You have to become disinterested in the character, not interested in the story. Suffering is optional it's self-imposed." She never had a spiritual teacher, nor followed any teaching.

Ocke de Boer - 'Higher Being Bodies' - Interview by Iain McNay

Ocke is the author of the book, Higher being Bodies, which is based on a non-dualistic approach to the Fourth Way. Ever since hearing the song, 'Why Are We Sleeping' by Kevin Ayers when he was a teenager, Ocke realized that reality was different to what he had learnt and wanted to wake up. He became a sailor when he was 16, worked in a youth prison when he was 20, and then started to read Ouspensky and Gurdjieff. "This was like coming home," he says. In this interview, he talks about applying sacred ideas and explains 'coating,' the dual-nature of human beings. We have a physical body composed of material from the Earth and a Kesdjan body which is composed of matter from the solar system. "I am the absence of my presence and I am the absence of the presence of my presence."

Thomas Mueller - 'The Matrix Of Silence' - Interview by Renate McNay

Thomas Mueller is the author of The Natural Health Matrix: Eastern Wisdom for Western Minds. He is an Ayurvedic Practitioner, Meditation and Yoga Teacher and the Founder of AYUWAVE. In this interview he tells us his journey for health and peace and his path to waking up. He spent 10 years in the Ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Vedic University in Holland and taught hundreds of students around the globe Ayurvedic therapies, meditation and yoga. The biggest thing he learnt was TRUST, and listening to the Song of Silence became the Matrix leading him to an incredible source of energy and peace.

Christine Jensen - 'Trauma and Awakening' - Interview by Renate McNay

Christine specializes in 'Trauma Resolution Work' which was originally pioneered by American psychologist, Peter Levine. She was brought up in the outbacks of Australia very connected to nature, the stars and the earth and sees today the importance of it for regulation and harmony of our nervous system. She talks about trauma in spirituality and why trauma is in the way to fully Awaken. "Everything we experience is registered in the body and it has to be felt there so that the nervous system can release the blocked energy of the trauma, shock and stress, and heal. Our whole human system from psyche to cell wants to heal and move towards greater wholeness."

Faisal Muqaddam - 'The Essential Enneagram as a Spiritual Path to Awakening' - Interview by Eleonora Gilbert

Faisal Muqaddam is the originator of the Diamond Logos teachings. He is a psycho-spiritual teacher and a trained Reichan and bioenergetics therapist. He has been teaching for the last 35 years in the USA, Middle East and Europe. In this interview we explore the concept of 'the family hole' and how the child develops his personality structure based on what's psychologically 'missing' in the family. Also we explore the essential states of each type and which organs in our body are related to its ennea-type.

Faisal Muqaddam - 'The Glory Of The Human Being.' - Interview by Renate McNay

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Conscious TV - Homepage

It is officially time to prepare for this years Nights Of Fire: A Conscious Evolution. Hosted by Spun Out Productions, the annual music festival kicks off on Thursday, August 17, and runs through the morning of Monday, August 21. Located at The Woods at Bear Creek, a glampingglamorous campingground in Franklinville, NY, Nights of Fire will offer its patrons an educational exploration through fire dancing, art, live music, and workshops.

As eloquently described on the Nights Of Fire Event Page:Nights Of Fire is a FIRE, Art, Music, & EDUCATIONAL RETREAT. We invite all likeminded individuals and those who seek to learn and do more to improve themselves and the world around US. NIGHTS OF FIRE is an educational retreat where YOU can come study many different forms of FIRE SPINNING, FLOW, DANCE, DRUMMING, PAINTING and much more. Evolve with us at night as we will teach you how to celebrate life and simply being alive through song and dance with live music.

Pre-sales for the festival are no longer online, however, you can pick up a $75 ticket thru a ticket rep, or grab one for $100 at the gate! The ticket includes camping and parking.

Take a peek below and click the play button. Youll find a Rochester Groovecast podcast episode. This episode is a preview of the upcoming Nights Of Fire Music Festival. During the episode, youll listen to Roots of Creation, Freekbass, The Mantras, Madam Bliss, Dixons Violin, Stereo Nest, Subsoil, Space Junk, Haewa, and Flux Capacitor. All of these artists are performing at this years Nights Of Fire Music Festival.

If you peek even farther below, youll find an episode timestamp, and Nights Of Fires daily schedule.

Enjoy!

Timestamp:00:00: Roots Of Creation- Different04:12: Episode Introduction09:56: Roots Of Creation- Row Jimmy15:23: Freekbass- Put It In A Letter18:42: Freekbass- Milkhunt23:25: The Mantras- Here We Go29:27: The Mantras- Dirt Nap35:26: Madam Bliss Remix- Notorious BIG Dead Wrong39:15: Madam Bliss Remix- Erykah Badu On And On44:10: Dixons Violin- Ignition (Correction! Jade Dragon is the album name)!46:31: Dixons Violin- Night Spirit50:56: Stereo Nest- Gradient Peak55:03: Stereo Nest- Elder Ladder59:39: Subsoil- Joe Rogan1:03:24: Subsoil- Great Unknown1:07:34: Space Junk- Ascension1:14:31: Haewa- Chem De-Vision1:18:15: Haewa- Swampin1:23:35: Episode Closing Comments1:26:46: Flux Capacitor- Big Bad1:36:29: Flux Capacitor- Unite

Read more:
Nights Of Fire: A Conscious Evolution Festival Preview - NYSMusic

Finland isin the top five of the most digitally advancedcountries in the world, according to the Digital Evolution Index.

The world is rapidly moving towards digitalisation and automation in all areas of society. Yet some of the most digitally advanced economies in the world are struggling to sustain digital growth and innovation Finland being one of them. This years Digital Evolution Indexplaces Finland in the Stall Out Zone; a category for digitally advanced countries that have reached so-called digital plateaus of slowing momentum in terms of digital growth.

Moving past these digital plateaus will require a conscious effort by these countries to reinvent themselves, to bet on a rising digital technology in which it has leadership, and to eliminate impediments to innovation, the researchers behind the Digital Evolution Index suggest. The states in the Stall Out category among them all Nordic nations seem to suffer from issues on both the supply and demand sides of digital growth; past digitalisation is not translating into future innovation because of market saturation and a lacking start-up culture.

Yet, compared to its Nordic neighbours, Finland has fared quite well in adding fresh fuel to its digital innovation engine to keep it running. The past years have been a turbulent time for Finnish business, with a long economic recession following the decline of Nokias mobile phone production, yet Finlands digital sector is now evolving faster than those in any other Nordic countries. In fact, Finland is not far away from being included in the Stand Out zone for digitally advanced countries with a fast-paced digital evolution.

Nevertheless, the road from the stall out category to the stand out zone is a slippery one, and as noted in the Harvard Business Review, all countries need to continuously generate new demand to avoid stalling out. Countries in the Break Out zone, with China in the forefront, are evolving rapidly and have the potential to become the leaders of digital business and technology in a matter of years. China has gone from almost no digital innovation at the turn of the century to having a population of 730 million Internet users today. This rapid development has made China the country with the largest number of Internet users in the entire world, and thus a lucrative market for e-commerce.

If Finland wants to remain at the vanguard of digitalisation, it should look to countries with a similar population size but with a faster digital evolution. Examples of such countries are Estonia, Singapore and New Zealand. Estonia is, of course, a particularly interesting example not only because of its geographical proximity to Finland, but also because of its leading position in e-government.

As the data used to measure each countrys pace of digital evolution in this years Digital Evolution Index was gathered between 2008 and 2015, it is worth keeping in mind that Finland only declared its recessionary era to be over as recently as last year. Digital evolution in Finland is thus likely to pick up speed in the coming few years, if it has not already done so. A promising example for Finlands digital future is Slush a phenomenally successful start-up event that brings together the global tech scene in the winter darkness of Helsinki.

Nicole BerglundHelsinki Times

Originally posted here:
Finland in the Stall Out zone for digital evolution? - Helsinki Times

New book brims with insights how readers can traverse endure The Long Journey Home'

HOUSTON, TX (PRWEB) August 17, 2017

In the "The Long Journey Home" (published by Balboa Press), author Sheila Gautreaux offers a fresh look at one of the most powerful parables in the Biblethe Prodigal Sonas man's personal journey of evolution in consciousness. This book revolves around its central theme that forgiveness holds the key to reawakening love, peace and connection for all humanity.

"The Long Journey Home" takes a fresh look at one of the most widely-recognized and most frequently interpreted of the many parables taught by Jesus during his ministry. Using the process of metaphysical interpretation, along with the concepts of conscious evolution and quantum science, the Prodigal Son emerges from a great story about coming home and forgiveness to an exploration into how life experiences are valuable teaching points and may provide powerful catalysts for quantum shifts in consciousness.

The book helps readers make sense of the challenges, struggles and detours that define people's paths as they attempt to live and grow in a world that appears to keep them from finding the safe haven they seek from birth that inner sense of "home." What it seeks to highlight is that, "our painful experiences do not have to destroy us; that they are not happening "to" us but are happening "for" us to awaken us to the tremendous power within us to heal our lives."

An excerpt from the book:"The key to successfully living in this world of polar opposites is remembering that God exists within the light and the dark; that there is only God, only Truth, and all else is but a hoax perpetrated by our ego for its own glorification. Awareness is focused attention to the details of lifethe messages, spiritual meaning and lessons within everything around us and everything that happens to us. By recognizing that everything happens for a reasonhappens not to us but for uswe use life as a tool for conscious evolution and the route to home."

"The Long Journey Home"By Sheila GautreauxSoftcover | 6 x 9in | 162 pages | ISBN 9781504368704E-Book | 162 pages | ISBN 9781504368797Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the AuthorSheila Gautreaux calls herself a "Spiritual Activist" and passionately carries the message of healing people and the planet through forgiveness. She is a Unity Minister, Licensed Unity Teacher, Certified Radical Forgiveness Coach and a 30-year student of "A Course in Miracles," and a 38-year student of Unity principles. She has written two books: "Praying Through a Storm" and "Messages." She is in demand as a highly-praised, exciting speaker who, as a retired Opera Singer, adds her vocal gift to her message. She has three children and four grandchildren.

Balboa Press, a division of Hay House, Inc. a leading provider in publishing products that specialize in self-help and the mind, body, and spirit genres. Through an alliance with indie book publishing leader Author Solutions, LLC, authors benefit from the leadership of Hay House Publishing and the speed-to-market advantages of the self-publishing model. For more information, visit balboapress.com. To start publishing your book with Balboa Press, call 877-407-4847 today. For the latest, follow @balboapress on Twitter.

For the original version on PRWeb visit: http://www.prweb.com/releases/SheilaGautreaux/TheLongJourneyHome/prweb14610518.htm

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Sheila Gautreaux Highlights Importance of Forgiveness - Benzinga

The rise in popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) and a consumer desire to access valuable data on various devices has led to network security becoming increasingly complicated for financial services providers.

As financial institutions transition their network security strategies to meet these consumer demands and grant greater individual access to their networks, they must also be conscious of the ever-evolving threat landscape. The cyberattacks of today are constantly becoming more sophisticated in order to outwit traditional network security measures. In addition, increased access to the network by IoT devices (such as mobile phones, and tablets) has resulted in an increase of possible attack vectors. As such, the need for evolved network security is further emphasised by the attention it has garnered from government regulators, who are shining a spotlight on compliance and security at financial institutions of all sizes.

The Challenge

Strong network security revolves around two key factors: speed and service. Network experience is typically judged by how quickly bits of information get from point A to point B, and how quickly applications are able to respond to queries. In finance in particular, rapid communication and effective security is vital, and neither can come at the expense of the other. Furthermore, consumers have come to expect access and the ability to edit information stored within the network through the web. This ability is integral to staying competitive, with more than 60 per cent of financial institutions currently developing cloud strategies as a result.

Network security strategies are having to change and adapt to meet this increase in demand for real-time, on-demand services. Data must now be more secure, travel faster, and be more readily available across devices, all of this in spite of being constantly under attack from sophisticated threats.

Looking ahead, financial services firms will be forced to respond to new attack vectors that threaten their core functions. And as these trends persist, robust network security strategies need to evolve to include the following tactics:

Detection

In order to adapt to meet these new challenges requires moving away from the traditional tactic of simply focusing your security efforts at your network perimeter whats required is something much more comprehensive. As todays perimeters are become more dynamic and increasingly temporary, rendering edge-based protection less and less relevant. Whats more, security professionals have come to understand that it is simply impossible to stop every attack. The reality is, an organisation will be breached, and security needs to be designed with this in mind.

Effective security strategies have had to transition from simply relying on intrusion protection to intrusion detection as well. Intrusion detection systems operate on the assumption that an attack will breach network perimeter defences. They are able to scan the network for abnormal behaviour in order to detect live attacks that have evaded the perimeter in order to reduce the time security teams are kept in the dark, because the longer an intruder or malware resides undetected within the network, the higher the probability it will be able to find and steal valuable information. The goal is to detect and mitigate the threat before data loss occurs.

This expansion from perimeter-based protection to include security measures at network segmentation demarcation points, deep in the core of the network marks, and out to the cloud are an important strategic shift in network security as financial services firms navigate todays threat landscape with the digital evolution of the modern workforce.

Response

With intrusion detection systems in place, incident response is the next logical step in ensuring attacks are mitigated quickly and effectively once detected. With todays new threats, incident response is required to go beyond having a list of procedures to follow in the event of an attack. A response needs to include integrated tools that provide full visibility into the security posture of the network. It should also include automated solutions that are able to identify and respond to the abnormal activity, and the forensic tools to analyse and ensure similar threats are thwarted in the future. Once malware is detected, its important to have an integrated security structure in place across your entire extended network to mitigate its impact before it can further compromise your network.

Intelligence

Once a threat has been mitigated, the incident response team needs to assess the threat to ensure that protocols are updated to keep similar threats from being successful in the future. Threat research is just as important as intrusion prevention and incident response. Teams study critical areas such as malware, botnets, and zero-day attacks in order to identify device or network vulnerabilities, uncover weak threat vectors, and create mitigation signatures, putting your organisation in the best possible footing to face down threats in the future. In doing so, the broader network security is hardened, and updated with abnormalities to look out for, and enhanced with the tools needed to stop them from causing damage. Solid threat intelligence is key to keepings your network steps ahead of attackers by establishing protocols for both known and unknown vulnerabilities.

Four key changes have made it necessary for financial institutions to re-evaluate their approach to network security: cloud-based infrastructure and services, the rise of IoT, the ever-increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, and stricter government regulations. As the internal network interacts more with the cloud, and attacks become more grandiose, it is inevitable that an attack will successfully breach the network. Which is why it is critical that an organisations security focus shift in order to ensure that once malware has made it into the network, it can be detected and remediation efforts can begin as quickly as possible to ensure the least possible damage and reduce the chance of recurrence.

Continued here:
The evolution of network security strategies being adopted by the financial services sector. - Finextra (blog)

Getty Images/Television Critics AssociationRic Flair in July 2017

Legendary pro wrestler Ric Nature Boy Flair would be the first to tell you that the jobs demands on ones body, mind and personal life are, in a word, brutal. Throw in a passion for self-promotion and an epic good time and you have the makings of potential disaster.

Flair of whom Ive been a fan since I watched AWAs All-Star Wrestlingbroadcasts with my dad as a kid and sat down with me at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in late July to talk all things Richard Fliehr, pro wrestling and his upcoming ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Nature Boy, which will premiere Nov. 7 at 10/9c. The 68-year-old athlete looked tanned, fit and characteristically dapper, and was in an amiable, almost introspective mood until the films director Rory Karpf (I Hate Christian Leitner) and 30 for 30 executive producer John Dahl joined the conversation and spurred Flair into sharing some tales from the wilder side of his iconic and over-the-top career.

Still, what came through in the half hour I spent with the Nature Boy was a thoughtful guy and proud dad who owns his active role in abusing his body and his culpability in his childrens rancor, and is intent on making the most of now a happy life with his fiance and former WCW manager Wendy Barlow and basking in the great pleasure of watching his daughter Ashley (ring name, Charlotte) take the wrestling world by storm. Making all the more poignant the news that the Memphis born star was felled this week by what his current PR team labeled tough medical issues, from which he is now reportedly recovering.

Though were saving much of the chat for its real purpose telling you about the unflinching documentary of which Flair is so proud some of what he shared about life in- and outside the ring seems insightful right now as he fights to regain control of the body that made him an icon of the sport for four decades.

How far back in your story does the documentary go and did you set any boundaries? Because it sounds like you are allowing the whole of your life to be out there.Ric Flair: You know, theres a sadness in it like everything. Theres always the downside, and thats part of it, too. Its just hard to be a wrestler and stay married Ive been married four times. And Ive been wrestling 42 years, so there were times when I wasnt home, where I would go out on the road for six months and never come home. So I didnt see my older kids at all which, to this day, they still resent it. Theyve never gotten over the fact that the younger ones got more attention, right? So its interesting, when I watch it, to hear what they all had to say. And they all cracked on me pretty hard. But thats OK. I deserved it. But it wasnt cause I was neglecting them; I just worked every day. Believe it or not, for about ten years, I wrestled 300 hour-long matches a year. Twice on Saturdays. People are gonna see that and I think theyre gonna be shocked that I literally wrestled that much, that I was gone that much.

What made you remarry? Was there a part of you that craved stability, that wanted a home life even though you knew you had a career that didnt sync up with that?Well, the way this comes out is that I didnt like to be alone. And I dont know if thats true or not. Im a very social person. Heres an example. You would never see me drink at home. Maybe a beer. But I like to go out. I like people. And thats the way my life has always been. So Id wrestle till eleven oclock at night and then Id be out all night until the bars closed, depending on which city it was in. Then get up the next morning, work out and fly to the next town or, when I was younger drive. We were driving 3,000 miles a week in the old days, in the 70s.

Was your Nature Boy persona the dirtiest player in the game a conscious, marketing sort of decision or a natural evolution of your personality and your style of wrestling?The whole thing is in the film, from when I crashed in an airplane in 1975 and broke my back. I broke it in three places and they didnt think Id wrestle again. Well, I just wasnt going to accept that. And then the promoter there, when they felt like I was going to be OK, starting pushing the Buddy Rogers thing on me. Then I just took the Buddy Rogers persona and, as Harley Race would say, I just took it to a whole different level.

Embed from Getty Images

Youve been at the forefront of the evolution of pro-wrestling, through the regional leagues, WCW, WWE/WWF and have watched the wrestling industry blur rosters and international borders, and evolve into a worldwide entertainment spectacle. Give me your impressions.Well, wrestling was taken somewhat more seriously when I started. All the way till probably,the mid-nineties. Now its perceived pretty much exclusively as entertainment. Its always been somewhat choreographed but its still very physical and very physically demanding. But when I started, nobody cared I mean, about anything. And you had to literally fight sometimes to stay alive in the ring. Because a big tough guy would try to eat you up if you didnt like what the promoter told you to do.

And there were some really big, tough guys.A lot of them, yeah! I just saw Baron von Raschke by the way.

Get out! I was so afraid of him.I hadnt seen him in years. Hes doing great. A great guy, he lives in Mankato, Minnesota, now. He and his wife Bonnie, still together!

But, anyway it was just a different deal back then you know, and its changed. When I went through my training camp to get in, the guys in our business today, none of them could do that. They wouldnt want to. I quit twice. It was that hard.

Because of physical reasons or mental and emotional reasons or a combo?It was mentally and physically too, too demanding. I wasnt in shape for that, cause I was looking at The Crusher and The Bruiser, and I got up to 300 pounds. I hadnt run a mile since I was a freshman in college. Run two miles outdoors in November in Minnesota, and then do 500 free squats and 200 push ups are you kidding me? This is brutal. For 300 pounds? I quit twice. But Verne Gagne and thank God for him he came and got me and wouldnt let me.

Can you tell me about a time where you look back on it and wonder, How did I survive that and live to wrestle the next day? Or is your whole life kind of like that?My whole life has been like that. Ive been hit by lighting twice. Crashed in an airplane. Just going out every night.

One of the great stories its not in the film and people have a hard time believing this but, I had been wrestling down in Florida for a whole week and it was in the 80s. Youre in Orlando one night, then Tampa, Miami, Fort Lauderdale. Its hard to go to bed, so I was out all night, every night, and wrestling an hour-long match every night, and the next day I had to fly to Tokyo. So I was driving back home from Orlando, and I called my dad who was a doctor, and I said, Dad, man, my hearts skipping beats. What do you think? He said, When was the last time you had any sleep? I said I hadnt had much, he said, Well, get some sleep and youll feel fine. But I was cracked, knowing I had to fly all the way to Tokyo and then I had to wrestle three-hour matches, consecutive days, against guys I didnt like to wrestle. So I drank all the way there, for twelve-and-a-half hours. This was back when we had paper tickets, and I said to myself, Im just not gonna do it. There was a flight going to Seattle, and I said Can I put this toward Seattle and get back to Charlotte. The guy said, Yeah. I just left my bags, got on the plane, flew all the way back to Seattle.

I was so cracked, so I started talking to the guy next to me. I said, Can I talk to you? He said, Yeah, whats up? and I said Youre not gonna believe it. I drank all the way to Seattle with him, and then I slept going to Chicago, and then I got back to Charlotte and the promoter in Charlotte was waiting for me at the airport. Made me get back on a plane and fly all the way back to Tokyo and wrestle. I made it by an hour for that match.

And howd that match go?It was good, once I broke a sweat and got going. If Ive been wrestling Ricky Steamboat, I would have said no problem, but I had to wrestle Jumbo Tsuruta, Genichiro Tenryu and some other guy. Guys that were really tough.

And after the match? A nice long nap?I went and partied all night in Tokyo. [Laughs] Tokyo is the best. I never got tired. I remember we bought a big jar of horseradish, brought it on the plane and the flight attendants made Bloody Marys for us with the horseradish all the way over. Different times flying back then, huh? [Laughs]

The flight attendants were great back then. Ive taken more flight attendants to another town with me. They didnt even go home to their husbands. One time, we flew back from Tokyo and instead of going to Fort Meyers, [the attendant] asked where I was going. I said, Im gonna go to St. Louis, wrestle and then Im gonna party there and have a good time. Shes like, Can I go with you? Ill bring my friend too. So I brought two of them to St. Louis. I just bought them tickets. So, like three years later, I was in Fort Meyers wrestling and Tony Garea, the agent, came and got me and said, Theres a girl out here, a woman with three kids and her husband, that says she flew with you from Tokyo to St. Louis and partied with you. So I went out and I remember shaking her husbands hand. [Laughs]

Rory Karpf: I thought you were gonna say you were worried the kids look like you. They had platinum blonde hair.No, no, no! I never had that problem, thank God. Of course when I was sixteen, I was a Water Safety Instructor this isnt in the book either. I was teaching these little kids how to swim and the mom liked me. She was 33, I was 16, and thats where it all started. Then I go off to boarding school, my parents put me in boarding school in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. So Im in school one day, and they came and got me and said, Your aunt Carolyn is here to take you off campus for the day and night. So I walked in the headmasters office and there [the woman] is. She told them she was my aunt! She drove all the way from Minneapolis! And then she had a nervous breakdown and went to see her doctor and guess who her doctors partner was? My dad. So my dad brought me home and made me apologize to her husband and all that. He was like, What have you done?

Ten thousand women. Did that offend you? Two-hundred-and-eighty women a year for 35 years.

Er, I guess Im just glad youre still here. So, how about a different take on women and wrestling? Tell me about watching your own daughters Charlotte especially be so much a part of the revolution in womens wrestling.Thats been the most rewarding thing of my career. Its been just fabulous to see Charlotte and, in such a short period of time!

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30 for 30:Nature Boy premieresNov. 7 at 10/9c on ESPN. Check back for info and more of our chat with Flair.

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'Nature Boy' Ric Flair on the Hard Knocks, Hard Partying and Hard Lessons of a Pro Wrestling Life - Channel Guide Magazine

Alexander de Cadenets series of bronze and silver sculpturesfeaturing consumables contain a deeper spiritual message. This includes his Life-Burger hamburgersculptures and Creation a large scale shinybronze apple with three bites taken from it two adult bites and baby bite inbetween.Creation explores the mysterious process ofcreativity of how both a human being and an artwork come into existence. Alexstates, In Genesis, we weretold by God not to take a bite from the apple, yetit was by taking a bite that we became self-conscious and self-consciousnessis what is necessary formakingart.

Art is way of exploring what gives life a deeper meaning and evolves in relation to my own life journey Alexander de Cadenet

The Life-Burger sculptures explore therelationship between the spiritual dimension of art and consumerism and, attheir root, are an exploration of whatgives life meaning. Art historian EdwardLucie-Smith has written, The Life-Burgers offer a sharp critique of thesociety we live in and yet simultaneously theyare luxury objects in their ownright.

L.A. art critic Peter Frank takes a similarline when he writes, Were at a moment in modern history where the excesshas gotten staggeringly wretched.Oligarchs worldwide shock us and shamethemselves with their conspicuous consumption a consumption that extends tothe rest of us, as consumed noless thanas consumers. Alexander de Cadenetencapsulates this emerging neo-feudal order in his gilded and multi-deckedburgers. For the mega-rich, theworld is their fast food joint, and theirappetite insatiable. Over 3.6 billion sold!

In October Alex will exhibit Creation and aselection of Life-Burgers at St Stephen Walbrook, where we will also host a conference,organised in partnershipwith Alex and Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine, thatwill explore the relationship between art and the spiritual dimension. Theconference takes wordsspoken by Eckhart Tolle in an interview with Alex asinspiration, True art can play an important part in the awakening ofhumanity.

Alex has said that Being an artist is abouthaving a voice in the world, a pure and authentic voice in a challenging world.It is a way of sharing personalinsights and encounters with the world, ofexploring the mysteries of our existence and our place in the grand scheme. Artis the intersection between theformlessdimension and the world of form; itembodies our connection to nature or the intelligence that is responsible forour existences.

He has recently founded Awakened Artists; aplatform to showcase specially invited artists whose work accesses a deeperspiritual dimension. AwakenedArtists is an international community of visualartists who believe that the production of art is a spiritual act andcontributes towards the evolvingconsciousnessof those that create it and alsothose that experience it. On the back of these initiatives, I wanted tofind out more about his understanding of art as a way of exploring what giveslife a deeper meaning and how thishas evolved in relation to his own lifejourney.

Alexander de cadenet creation

JE: Your recent works playfully critique consumer and celebrityculture while using elements of those cultures to do so. To what extent do yousee yourself as aninsider or an outsider to those cultures?

ADC: I grew up exposed to these values and it hasbeen valuable for me in some ways as a yardstick by which to compare thingsto and also given me insights intothe darker aspects of it.

JE: What we consume and how we do so seem major preoccupations of the LifeBurgers and of Creation. What seems problematic about consumer culture?

ADC: Whats problematic is the desire to consumeand accumulate for the sake of it often to run away from pain or discomfort beauty and pleasure can at somepoint become quite warped and grotesque withoutlimits, where even the original value gets lost or diluted within excess. Ithink its become more and moreprevalent in the world today and its also verymuch part of the art world system too in the way that artworks are commoditizedand their original beauty canget lost in the transformation into statussymbols.

JE: You have been called a playful moralist. What does that phrase meanto you?

ADC: am conscious of my own ambivalentrelationship to morality so hopefully any moralizing is not done withself-righteousness but more as a way to exploreand express the inherentparadoxes and richness of life.

JC: You reference the Genesis creation stories in your Meteoritesculpture series and the Memento Mori tradition with your Life Burgers. Whatinfluence has theBible and Christianity had on your art?

ADC: Yes, I grew up with a close relationship withJesus. I have sometimes referenced stories from the Bible with my artworks overthe years. E.g. The Eye of theNeedle model, 30 Pieces of Silver or morerecently the on-going series of apple sculptures. The Bible is part of auniversal sub-conscious is deeply infusedwith meaning, its a powerful,established language of spiritual symbolism that one can reference tocommunicate and express certain thoughts and feelings.

JE: You performed a singing bowl meditation before photographing your DesertFlower series of photographs. What part does meditation play in your creativeprocess?

ADC: In one sense, my artwork reflects theevolution of my own consciousness and the sorts of statements Id like to sharein the world. Meditation is a process ofconnecting to a deeper dimension ofexistence a way of tuning into the deeper reality of our connection toNature. Sometimes it can get you into aharmonious zone that is reflected in thework you produce while in a meditative state.

JE: You have begun a series of interviews with artists exploring thespiritual dimension in art. What would you say that you have learned from thoseinterviews todate?

ADC: The process of interviewing others can enhanceones own connection to that dimension, it also has a strong social element asense of kindred spirit withthose who are interested in similar aspects oflife.

JE: Have you been surprised by the number of artists for whom thespiritual dimension features strongly in their practice?

ADC: I think the earliest art forms had a reallyfundamental and deeply significant meaning for those that created them. Theearliest cave paintings and bone orstone statuettes were infused with deepmeaning for the societies that made them. It seems that there are a growingnumber of artists and creatives that wishtomake something beyond being justsurface decoration and something that can bring a deeper consciousness orawareness into peoples lives.

JE: You interviewed Eckhart Tolle as part of that series, which was aparticular thrill for you personally. What has impressed you about Tolleswritings and whatstood out for you from the experience of meeting him?

ADC: Despite what he has achieved in the world,having status and success is not what drives him. That is a by-product ofhis work. He certainly does not wantpower over others. He desires to share hisexperience of life, in order for others to become more aware, conscious and to connectto beauty and the joy ofexistence. There was a particular moment when I sawmyself reflected in his eyes and I believe he saw himself reflected in mine. Itis rare to be able to go to aplace of such openness and acceptance like that,especially with an enlightened being and it touched my life.

JE: You will be exhibiting at St Stephen Walbrook in the autumn. Whydo you think a church is an appropriate location to show your work?

ADC: This is a particularly beautiful space and itswonderful to show ones art in this environment. This church also has a richhistory of contemporary art. As thisseries of artworks offers reflection onlife and being, I feel they have an affinity with what the church is all about.

JE: You are planning a conference on art and the spiritual dimensionwith the title Art awakening humanity, a phrase taken from Eckhart Tolle, andhave begun anew grouping of artists called Awakened Artists. In what ways canart awaken humanity and why do you think humanity needsawakening?

ADC: Eckhart also said that The true function ofart is to awaken others and I agree with that. You can invest into an artworka deeper spiritual message that iswhat the artists in the Awakened Artists groupwish to achieve. Yes, there are a lot of problems at the moment in our societywith deeply ingrained ignorantand even dangerous viewpoints that can causesuffering and harm to the planet and its occupants. As an artist, you have avoice to talk about the things thatmatter to you a chance to have your say. Drawingthings to peoples attention or offering insights can be helpful in combattingthese behaviours.

JE: What do you hope the Awakened Artists group can achieve?

ADC: Id like that it is a platform to bringtogether artists who would like to contribute to a shared vision of art assomething that brings awareness and a deeperconsciousness into those thatexperience it.

JE: How can art offer access to a deeper dimension of existence andcontribute towards the evolution of consciousness?

ADC: Either experientially like for example encounteringthe phenomenon of a James Turrell light installation or by offering insightsinto the issues we face todayin such a way that genuinely moves people.

JE: Tell me a little about the work of David C. Greene, the firstmember of Awakened Artists. What is there about his work that fits the brieffor this new group?

ADC: I find Davids work exceptionally authentic.I dont know of any artist on the planet today who focuses on the beauty of thedesert landscape at night and thephenomena that can be encountered there. Isee his work is part of the heritage and tradition of Edward Hopper meets a bitof Georgia OKeeffe its abouthispersonal life but has a deep connection tothe beauty of nature. David Greenes night time landscapes absorb you you gettransported there and cannotremain unaffected by the experience. LikeEckharts photos, his landscapes open our eyes to what is already there.

JE: The desert features in your work and that of David C. Greene. Whatpart does the desert play in your spirituality?

ADC: One of my favourite lines in Eckharts The Power of Now reads: Presence isneeded to become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of nature.Have you ever gazed up into the infinity of space on a clear night, awestruckby the absolute stillness and inconceivable vastness of it? This says a lot tomeand ifa piece of art can give a sense of this or be a signpost to look inthis direction, I believe it has a great value to humanity, not just for peopletoday but Ithink also for future generations.

Words By Revd Jonathan Evens Priest-in-charge St Stephen Walbrook London

Creations by Alexander de Cadenet, St Stephen Walbrook from 3 Octoberuntil 3 November 2017.

Art Awakening Humanity, 25 October, St Stephen Walbrook https://ssw.churchsuite.co.uk/events/standzg2.

Awakened Artists https://www.awakenedartists.com/.

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Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed By Revd Jonathan Evens - ArtLyst

Now going into eighth grade, she's setting her sights on a topic a bit more complicated than the cookie business: cybersecurity.

The 12-year-old from Palmdale, Calif., is one of 1.8 million Girl Scouts nationwide who will have the opportunity starting in 2018 to adorn their vests, tunics and sashes with merit badges for information security, an addition announced in June.

And last week, Girl Scouts of the USA introduced another 23 new badges in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) and the outdoors.

"Girl Scouts will be able to design robots and racecars, go on environmentally conscious camping trips, create algorithms, collect data in the great outdoors, try their hand at engineering," the Girl Scouts said when announcing the badges.

The moves illustrate the ongoing evolution of the 105-year-old organization, which in recent years has expanded its merit badges beyond those associated with traditionally feminine skills - think "babysitter" or "dinner party."

It's a shift Lewelling appreciates.

"I'll definitely be trying to get cybersecurity badges," she said. "I'm going into eighth grade now and we use technology for everything so I want to know how I can protect myself online."

The 18 cybersecurity badges - earned by mastering online safety, dealing with cyberbullies and coding, among other skills - are the result of a multiyear partnership between the Girl Scouts and Palo Alto Networks, a security company in California's Silicon Valley.

It's not the first technology-and-Scouting collaboration. Girl Scouts of the USA recently partnered with Google to offer coding activities.

Young Daisies and Brownies won't be fending off cyberattacks from hackers and rogue nation states - there's an age-appropriate curriculum designed with help from Palo Alto Networks that includes basic computer skills, techniques for staying safe online, and practice in keeping private information private.

All of the new badges join an increasingly contemporary array of insignias ("computer expert," "inventor," "product designer" and "website designer" were all added in recent years), though the organization has not purged longstanding badges or themes.

The badges will be available to troops across the country, though local chapters can supplement them with additional patches and programs.

The expansion of science and technology-related badges and programs marks "a real transitional moment for the Girl Scouts," said Kathleen Denny, adjunct professor of sociology at Trinity University, who has researched the Girl Scouts.

"A historian writing about the Girl Scouts once said the organization was looking to develop a traditional, up-to-date woman," Denny said. "They've always had that progressive, feminist impulse - but never losing sight of the preparation for more traditional roles of wives and mothers."

The new badges could help young women see a place for themselves in the technology industry - a booming sector, but one known for its gender gap.

A study by research firm Frost & Sullivan found that women hold only 11 percent of information security jobs globally.

EducationHuman InterestLifestylePublic SafetyTechnology

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Girl Scouts step up with badges tied to STEM, cybersecurity - NewHampshire.com

Tasmanian devils have been decimated in recent years, this is what it takes to make sure they survive.

Jodie Elmer and Drew Lee checking on a trapped devil.

HEALTHY: A Save the Tasmanian Devil team check over a devil in the North East. Pictures: Neil Richardson

Save the Tasmanian Devil manager David Pemberton using a VHS tracker to locate released devils.

Road signs are part of a strategy to reduce devil deaths due to road traffic.

A sample of blood is taken from each devil to use for testing.

David Pemberton points out a devil den.

These virtual fences have proved effective at reducing devil deaths on the roads.

This is a chip tag reader, which scans devils on the way in to eat food left inside retrieving a range of information recorded on it.

Jodie Elmer loves her job on the Save the Tasmanian Devil team.

The VHS tracker emits beeps when near a devil.

David Pemberton explains the extensive range of devils, who love water and the beach.

These white traps are much less stressful for Tasmanian devils than traditional wire traps.

The yellow dots mark the movements of one of the released devils over a vast area.

This chip monitoring station has proved a great success.

Loading up ready to start the days work checking traps.

Microchipping a devil the team hasn't encountered before.

Weighing the devil (7 kilograms).

Traps ready for loading.

Collars like these are placed on the released devils initially to provide data on their movements.

Dr Pemberton explains how much devil populations have declined in the Wukalina/Mount William area.

The virtual fences are activated by headlights striking them.

"Osprey" ready for a check-up.

Taking blood and microchipping allows the team to keep track of devils.

Nice clean fangs.

Baby Tasmanian devils discovered in the pouch.

Open wide.

The program is vital to the continuation of devils in the wild.

With casuarina trees whipping in the wind above him David Pemberton pointedtowards a spread of grey-coloured animal scats, filled with little white shards of bone.

This is a Tasmanian Devil latrine, theSave the Tasmanian Devil manager explained.

It is where many devils come to deposit their scats, actinglike a visitor book of sorts letting devils know who else has come by in the night.

Its a key lesson or example of how socially conscious [devils] are, they want to know who else is around, Dr Pemberton said.

"Osprey" the Tasmanian devil getting a check-up. Pictures: Neil Richardson

Since the release of 33 devils in the North Eastin May there has been a team fromSave the Tasmanian Devil permanently stationed at the Parks and Wildlife house in Mount William National Park.

They have been monitoring the released devils daily using a range of technologies and methods, including GPS tracking, bush cameras, VHS tracking and setting traps.

As part of the relocation of the devils, which were from Maria Island, the team laid their scats at the latrines, to introduce them to the incumbent devils.

Since researchers first came to the Wukalina/Mount William area 20 years ago the population of devils has nose-dived to just 10 to 20 per cent of original numbers.

Where once the population of devils numberedaround 200, it now sits at around 20.

The rapid decline in the population is due to the rise of the deadly Devil Facial Tumor Disease, Dr Pembertonsaid.

Dr Pemberton said the disease is now a part of the devils ecology, and is something that needs to be managed into the future.

The Wild Devil Recovery Trial is working to ensure Tasmanian devils continue to survive outside captivity.

Teams are learning the bestmethods to translocate devils back to the wild.

Dr Pemberton said a wild population of devilsis important for two reasons: genetic diversity and ecosystem impact.

Ensuring genetic diversity in devils is vital in avoiding in-breeding and giving the animals the best chance of success.

We cant eradicate [DFTD], evolution might. To give evolution a chance you want genetic diversity and you want numbers, with those two in tandem then who knows what can evolve, Dr Pemberton said.

The other key work of the trial is to reduce the impacts the loss of devils has on the entire ecosystem.

The loss of such a large chunk of the devil population affects much morethan just the animals themselves, it has ripple effects right down the chain.

Such an example is the brush-tailed possum, a favourite food of devils, which has seen population booms following devil decline.

Where once possums in the open werevulnerable to attack, Dr Pemberton said in recent times he has gone into a paddock and seen a possum on every fence post.

The simplest way to treatthat conundrum and that problem is to get [devil] numbers back up in the wild and let devils do what theyre designed to do.

The post-release monitoring of the devils has shown they are settling in well.

Each time devils are released, the team gathers important information about whichmethods secure the best results, and this has paid off in the most recent release.

White cylindrical traps are loaded on the back of a ute, the final preparations for the team heading out to check the monitoring traps.

With the slamming of doors and the growl of an engine they are off to see if they caught any devils overnight.

Just an hour later the call comes through, theyve got a devil at Cape Portland, 45 minutes away.

Tasmanian devils have an extensive range, they can travel up to 20 kilometres in a night, and tracking has shown many of the released devils have roamed far.

Just as people do, in their travels devils use roads as the most efficient means of getting from A to B, which puts them at risk of becoming road kill.

At key points along the road, small plastic boxes about the size of a glasses caseare fixed to posts. They arevirtual fences that emit a blue light and loud noise when car headlights land on them, warning devils about the oncoming traffic.

These have been overwhelmingly effective, with none of the recently released devils succumbing to roadkill so far.

At Cape Portland wildlife biologist Drew Lee workedwith Jodie Elmer to carefully transfer the caught devil into a brown hessian bag.

Mr Lee said they use the white tubular traps as they are less stressful for the animals than traditional wire traps.

The white traps are less stressful for devils than traditional wire traps.

They found devils in wire traps would try to bite their way out, often causing damage and even losing their teeth.

In contrast, devils are usually curled up asleep in the end of the modern traps, he said.

Mr Lee attacheda set of scales to the hessian bag, lifting it devil and all into the air.

Seven point zero kilograms, he read to Mrs Elmer who was takingnotes on a clipboard.

Sitting down Mr Lee placedthe bag on his lap, opening it just enough to reveal the top of the devils head.

It was a new devil to the team, not one they have released or trapped before. Thats exciting.

Mr Lee then took a blood sample for testing while he explained, The only way we can pick up a tumor is when we see it.

As DFTD doesnt ignite an immune response in the devilsthey are not able to test for this in the blood, making early detection difficult.

A microchip was then attached to the devil, so researchers know when they come across it again.

Next a pair of calipers were used to measure the devils head width, whichreveal its sex and age.

A check over of Osprey shows a devil in good health.

The prognosis is a one-year-old female.

Pulling her snout out of the bag a check of her teeth revealedan impressive set of ivory fangs bedded in pink gums.

Mr Lee then flippedher over, her spiky black tail poking out of the bag, and checkedher pouch for babies.

One, two, threefour, he countedout as he spottedthe little pink young.

Three little pouch young are discovered in Osprey's pouch.

Devils are able to reach sexual maturity in their first year, and their ability to breed while still so young is helping the species continue.

[Tasmanian devils] arepersisting ... they are tough and tenacious and they are breeding young and that's what's making this happen, Dr Pemberton said.

DFTDkills them, but some of the mums weantheir young before they die and those young breed.

Because they can breed young they are surviving in the wild.

All that was left was to name the young mum, theyre running with the theme of birds.

Osprey.

Devil populations have plummeted, here Save the Tasmanian Devil manager David Pemberton points out a devil den.

The check-up was a success; a young female devil with four babies (the maximum a devil can support) who was in excellent health.

Because theres such a surplus of food its a great place to be a devil out here, Mr Lee said.

Kneeling, Mr Lee openedthe bag. Osprey tooka few tentative steps out of the hessian sack before making a break for it.

Running into the bush, she was gone.

While the rise of DFTD has had a significant impact on Tasmanian devil populations, the evidence is they continue to persist.

This can in large part be credited to the work of an international team, who all work to improve our understanding of the disease, develop vaccines and create insurance populations.

People like the very dedicated Save the Tasmanian Devil team, who get up at 5am in the dark and cold to translocate devils to a new home and then spend weeks tirelessly monitoring their progress.

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Fighting for the Tasmanian devil: photos, video - Ararat Advertiser