(satsang-maarssen.nl and satsang-darshan.nl all redirect to the same page being: www.eraofenlightenment.com/SATSANG. The old webpage location was soonyata.home.xs4all.nl/index.html)

We hope you will enjoy all the energies and blessings of the masters, temples, crystals, herbs and tools found on this site. If you like, you are always welcome to join us in meditation at our home in Maarssen. Our meditations are in the form of Dzogchen Buddhism and Satsangs / Darshans in silence.

Lets look at this axiom more carefully

Who am I ?

Who you think you are and who you feel you are is not who you truly are, it is an illusion created by the brain.

You are not thinking itself (in other words, you are not what you think). Thinking is separate from you otherwise you could not listen to the thoughts. Also most of "your" thought are not even yours as you have not created them. Just sit in silence for a couple of minutes not creating any thought and you will find all kinds of thoughts still happening.

You are also not who you feel you are because feeling is separate from you otherwise you could not feel. Feelings are happening outside of you and you are sensing them. How can you feel pain if you are it?

You are also not the body, you have a body. When you are dreaming you are completely unaware of the physical body, yet you still are.

You are also not the sum of all your experiences and learnings. These are all things you do and have done, hence are all exterior from you. You can say I made it my own but anything you learn or experience you can also loose like in Alzheimer. But you still are, with or without memory. You can also say I am not the same without my experiences or past learnings. Well things like 'I am a father or mother' or 'I am a scholar' or 'I am a good tennis player' etc. are all descriptions of what you do or what has happened to you - not who you are. The 'I am' is you and the next thing is what you do or what has happened to you - 'I am eating' - 'I am a woman' - 'I am not the same'.

You are also not the brain because when the brain dies, structurally everything remains the same. The only difference is that the neurons are not communicating with each other anymore - no more electrical activity and no more synapsis. But structurally everything remains the same.

So are you the electrical activity in the brain?

Well most of the electrical activity taking place inside the brain you are completely unaware of. For example:

The cerebrum, the large, outer part of the brain, controls reading, thinking, learning, speech, emotions and planned muscle movements like walking. It also controls vision, hearing and other senses. Again all things you can do or abilities you have but not who you are. You are completely unaware of why you understand a language or how movement happens - it all takes place automatically. You are not the automatic understanding of the English language.

The cerebellum, in the back of the brain, controls balance, coordination and fine muscle control (e.g., walking). It also functions to maintain posture and equilibrium and in 2017 scientists have found a connection with the reward response in the cerebellum as well but the whole cerebellum does not posses awareness. Again body balance and movement (and even the award response) are things that are happening to you automatically. It is not who you are. You can say it defines me but then you are identifying your body with who you are as the body is influenced not you.

The brain stem, at the bottom of the brain, connects the cerebrum with the spinal cord. It includes the midbrain, the pons, and the medulla. It controls fundamental body functions such as breathing, eye movements, blood pressure, heartbeat, and swallowing. Again it is not you that is doing this but the brain.

But it also means many things that you think you are causing or doing is not you but the brain. Most people belief they have a free will, but studying Akinetic mutism (patients tending neither to move nor speak) and Alien hand syndrome (AHS - a condition in which a person experiences their limbs acting seemingly on their own, without control over the actions) a team of medical examiners from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center found that this is all coordinated in the Precuneus and Cortex cingularis anterior area of the brain and that free will is but a feeling or idea without ground. The brain decides, not the mind nor you.

So are you the mind?

Well is there a mind without thought? It depends on how you want to define the mind, but generally the mind is defined as the collection of thoughts and memories one has. You have a mind because you have thought and memories. You are not thought or memories. Think about the expression "I have lost my mind" and you see the whole thing is exterior from who you are.

So what about awareness, are you awareness ?

Awareness comes into existence when the brain is turned on, similar to turning on a computer and the operating system comes alive. When somebody is in deep general anesthesia (medically induced coma) the brain is almost off and when the anesthesia wears off, it is like turning on the computer. Also awareness can change depending on what parts of the brain are turned on and how much (with the exception of the cerebellum - no awareness). These different levels of awareness can be easily observed in deep sleep versus the awake state and the different states of altered awareness due to drugs.

It would seem that when the brain is turned off, awareness is gone, so you are no more - hence you are a product of the brain. But lets look at this more carefully...

Awareness is the ability to perceive and experience. Without perceptions (including the perception of time and thought - or what I belief time is a thought) there is no such thing as awareness - similar to deep general anesthesia. Do not just read this sentence but proof it for yourself. If you are outside this universe, nothing to see or hear, are you aware? Yes you are because you can think. But if thinking is just another perception and that also disappears are you aware? Not anymore but you still are. To go a step deeper, what happens if you remove time as a perception ?

So when you turn off the computer, you actually turn off the ability to perceive - but do you turn off the you as well ?

To answer this, lets look at what is consciousness

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
( It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, 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. )

Being aware of external objects has nothing to do with who you are. External objects do not define you.
Being aware of something within oneself is a perception and is not who you are and does not define you. Anything within you is not you.
The executive control system of the mind is the brain, not you.

The ability to experience or to feel - sentience - a sense of selfhood - sense of beingness. This is getting closer to the answer but not yet. The ability to experience or to feel is a brain ability. Without a nervous system or brain activity the ability is gone. Beingness is a feeling and you are not a feeling. Sentience is even closer to the answer but sentience is a doingness in the brain and you are not doingness. In deep meditation seeing becomes being and there is no sentience or recognizing what you see.

But awareness, consciousness and sentience cannot happen without you.

So this You that can be aware, is conscious of the world and that can sense things, is that also a brain product?

The neurobiologist Roger Sperry discovered that one side of the brain wasn't aware of what the other side was seeing when the corpus callosum was damaged (a bundle of fibers connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain). The right eye that is partially connected to the left and right brain hemisphere cannot see images, but conceptually understands them and can talk about them. The left eye really sees the images but cannot conceptually talk about them.
In an experiment, patients could describe only images that reached the left side of the brain, because the ability to speak is located on that side. However, they seemed unaware of images that reached only the right side of the brain. Yet if they were asked to use their left hand (controlled by the right side of the brain) to indicate the image that had just been shown to the right side of the brain, they could do so. So on an unconscious level they had access to information that reached the right side. The left side of the brain then made up a story combining the information from both sides of the brain. The story was logical to the patients but completely incomprehensible to their surroundings.

When the right side of the brain registered a written instruction to stand up and walk away, a patient obeyed. When asked why he did so, he didn't say, "You just asked me to," because he hadn't consciously registered the instruction. So he made up a reason to explain his behavior: "I'm just going to get some hot chocolate."

In other words if you separate the left and right hemisphere of the brain, you separate consciousness into 2 parts - One being you that can actually sense the world and the other you that can conceptually understand the world. Now this is interesting because sensing something and understanding something seems to be one and the same thing in consciousness, but it is not.

So there cannot be a you that can be cut in two parts suddenly and not being aware of each other.

What is possible is that awareness / consciousness not not individual at all but actually universal, like gravity. The brains create this duality of you versus the outside world. But this is jumping ahead of the story. let me backtrack a bit first.

We said who you are can be turned off and on like a computer. In deep general anesthesia or in deep sleep the you is no more or so it seems. So is it awareness / consciousness or is it you that is turned off ?

When really close to deep sleep (or just coming out of general anesthesia or under the influence of heavy drugs) you are still aware of inputs from the outside world or dreams but the awareness is minimal. So the question here is, are you less there or are the signals less.

You will find that who you truely are is not influenced by awareness. The understanding is influenced and all the other brain stuff as well, but not you.

From brain scans it would seem that there is less activity (going into delta brain waves and below) and surely less awareness.
But who you are cannot be proven nor refuted in this manner. If the brain does not produce signals in the form of time / perceptions / thought there is no way to know if there is still a you or not. So this approach leads to a dead end.

Why a dead end, because in general anesthesia there is no time or awareness whatsoever. So it seems you are no more. But as previously noted, if there is no perception or thought, including time, how would you know you still are.

What you can proof with all this evidence is that there is no such thing as a soul. But not to worry, this is a spiritual website, not a soul website :)

Are you just a software program in the brains ?

So does the brain create a 'digital you' alongside the perceptions that make up awareness ? In other words is the you just an illusion created by a software program running in the brains?

All the digital codes running in the brain

Another way of asking this question is: can a software program really 'see' ?

Anyone who knows a bit about programming knows this is impossible to program. A program can only compute, compare data to other data but actually sensing stuff it cannot. But can we actually sense stuff or is that also an illusion ? Keep in mind that we are not really seeing but actually receiving a digital code from the eyes and other sense organs that flow into our brains.

To get these answers we have to turn to quantum physics to see what perceiving / measuring really is.

In quantum physics it has been irrefutably shown that the observer collapses the wave function, which basically means without an observer, nothing exists and when an observation happens a pure methematical wave collapses into form. A software program first of all cannot really observe and second surely cannot collapse a wave function that would make the world appear out of nothing as it is. Yet we do...

But where does observation or measurement take place? It are the brain cells that measure, not you - or is it ? The eyes rods and cones measure, not you. But you can say the rods and cones in the eye do not see. So where does "seeing" take place? Well is there seeing in the first place as there is only digital code? In other words, are you seeing the digital code or are you seeing the world? Truth is that you cannot see the world (because there are only digital signals running through neurons and not the image itself) AND you cannot "see" digital code because it has no meaning.

So it would seem that somewhere in the brain a translation of the world is happening with the idea (software program) of a separate you seeing it.

But how can a brain (software) translation or code "see" and this seeing also makes the outside world real?

What about if there is no real outside world? Seeing is being - perceiving is the world - no separation, no individual self - all is one, all is empty yet all is.

Well let me tell you my realization.

You are light itself.
You are not the source of light, you are not identified as light, you are not a light being, you do not emit light, you do not perceive light - no, you are light itself. Even the separate perceptions melt into light where hearing, seeing, smelling etc. all become one - something beyond synesthesia.

All that is perceived is a reflection of you.

In deep deep meditation when self-inquiry came to an end (no more feeling or sensing of a self - the self absolutely and permanently dissolved) the truth reveiled itself that can best be described as light going through a lens and out the other side. The lens is the brain, the light is you as awareness. I was not aware of light but light itself was I. This realization is permanent after self-inquiry comes to an end. This is not something I know or read, but I live it.

You are not inside nor outside this universe and you do not have a location in it. You are not part of time, you are not subjected to birth nor death. You cannot be influenced by anything in the universe yet you are the universe itself as without you there is no observation making the universe possible and you are time and thought itself.

A deeper look into the 'You'

This Ego program (who you think you are) shows up in awareness (operating system) as thought, creating the illusion that it is real and that it can do things, have things and be things. Yet all thought and perceptions are digitalized when it enters the brain so no smell, sight, sound, touch, taste or even thought travel through neurons, only the digital translation of it. So even if there was a real you floating around in your brain, there is nothing to "see" - only digital code.

Sheila Nirenberg, Cornell University - expert in the field of neural coding

As of 2021 our Dutch brain institude spearheaded by Pieter Roelfsema goes a step further and makes it possible to see again without the use of the eyes or artificial eyes or the optical nerve but directly from the brain.

Research has shown us that all these digitalized (electrochemical) senses come together in a place called the angular gyrus, a section of the brain below the crown chakra, that produces a viewpoint. When this part of the brain gets damaged or lacks oxygen, you end up experiencing yourself floating outside the body (exteriorization, also known as out of body experience) and other viewpoint distortions - so nobody exteriorizes, it is just the brain computing differently.

Awareness on the other hand arises throughout the whole brain without any specific location and is extremely flexible. When neurologist Lionel Feuillet from Marseille received a 44 year old patient who was missing 90% of his brain he was amazed at the fact that this man was living a normal life - this shook up the medical world quite deeply. Also Brandon and Brittany Buell had an amazing story of their newborn child in 2014 that was missing most of his brain but otherwise functioned normal and even speaks nowadays. So this shows you the brain is also extremely flexible and re-programmable.
Earlier research from Luc van Loon from the Medical university in Maastricht already showed that the amount of muscle protein produced can potentially renew muscle cells within 6 to 8 weeks time. Well, in February 2018, he found that in the brain the generation of protein is 3 to 4 times higher then in muscles, potentially rewiring the entire brain at incredible speeds - this is just unbelievable. It was previously understood that neurons in the cerebral cortex, for example, are not replaced at all when they die, well this might be completely misunderstood. A product from among other strawberries called Fisetin for example has already been shown to produce new nerve cells in the hippocampus and a herb from Gabon called Iboga has been shown to create new brain cells in the dopamine center among other so there is much more to learn here. (Journal of Neurochemistry article from Sagara Y, Vanhnasy J and Maher P.) 

However this viewpoint or You is not real, it is just a computer / brain program. The moment when you hold onto the YOU feeling in meditation, you will see that it starts to dissolve and disappear. It is just a feeling and feeling is just a perception and perceiving / sensing is just awareness of... The only thing happening here are thoughts and perceptions mixing around in awareness and when thought ceases, pure awareness and pure perceiving remains and the person is happy and joyful without reason. It is the identification of the mind with all the garbage in the brain that creates the illusion of an ego / a feeling of self / that in turn brings up all the misery and despair in one's life. In other words the moment thinking starts, the I is born and when thinking ceases, pure awareness as oneness remains.

Because awareness is just a brain product, it is the rewiring of the brain that produces the higher states of awareness. The less interference and programs there are messing with perceptions / thought the more clear 'you' shine through.

Click here to see the different levels of realizations in meditation (different levels of higher awareness)

One of the best and most effective methods of achieving nirvana (the realization that you are not an individual or separate from anything - the end of the cycle of life and death) is the Buddhistic meditation called Trekchod (pointing to the truth like this website) and Togal (all the e meditation techniques to dissolve the mind and self identification) in combination with a powerful energy called the kundalini (basically raising the sexual energy into the brain and rewiring the brain with this energy), but as Jill Bolte showed, a brain stroke can bring you to nirvana as well, showing you that it is the rewiring of the brain that brings forth the state of nirvana.

Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight

Similar to Jill Bolte is the experiences of Lauren Marks aneurysm hitting the language center.

A deeper look into Quantum physics

Is the moon there when nobody looks?

This was the question Albert Einstein asked Abraham Pais during a walk regarding quantum theory and the nature of reality.

Einstein was convinced that there were good philosophical grounds for local realism, and he considered it a foundational principle of science. After his death, however, it was shown that local realism, as he described it in his famous EPR paper, is not compatible with the predictions of quantum mechanics, or with physical experiments. If he had lived to see them, it would be fascinating to know how Einstein would have modified his views in light of these results.

Out of all this uncertainty in Quantum Mechanics (QM) came the philosophy known as the Copenhagen school (after the great Dane, Niels Bohr) which states, to put it simply, that nothing happens until someone looks. If all we have in QM are mathematical probabilities that such-and-such will be observed, then until the observation is made, we can only talk about probabilities. As to reality, we must give up hope of understanding it. This was too much for Einstein and Schrödinger to swallow. Can it be that nothing really happens, that there are only probabilities, until someone looks? As Einstein lampooned, “Is the moon only there when we look at it?”

Also John von Neumann concluded that eventually it is you as consciousness making reality.

Let's look at this more deeply and see how strange it gets.

To go back to the moon, you never really see the moon, only the light of the sun bouncing off the moon and into your eyes to be translated into a digital code when it enters the optical nerve and eventually into the brain and the collapse of the wave function (making local reality) happens somewhere in the brain but even there scientists are not sure. It is sentience that collapses the wave function and sentience happens way deeper than the initial measurement of light in the rods and cones of the eye.

The problem here is that the moon is never seen, only the sun's light reflected of the surface and into our eyes. The moon itself can be compressed into nothingness as can be seen in black holes that are millions of times heavier then our sun but have collapsed into a point of nothing (A Schwarzschild black hole). Another problem here is that sentience must have happened before the eyes pick up the light, because nothing happens until someone looks. What came first, the tool to measure or the measurement that made the tool

So what is measurement?

As mentioned earlier, you do not measure, but the nerve cells and brain cells do. You do not see as there is only digital code. You do not translate the digital code into a visual 3d mirror world - it is the brain that does this. But the brain is not displaying a 3d world for you anywhere to 'see'  yet without consciously observing the world, nothing exists.

Food for thought when sentience causes the wave function to collapse:

A1) You cannot see or be aware without a brain. The awareness brain switch video should be proof enough for this. Also out of body experiences earlier on this webpage should be proof enough it is not real but just a dream.
If a spiritual being would exist it would not absorb light or measure it by any means like the brain does. So how would a spiritual being know or see a photon? If you say it goes through him, well through what and how is it being measured? If you say he absorbs it, with what and how does seeing happen? And this what, how can it reflect? All the answers will lead you to things outside of you and again is not who you are.

A2) Quantum physics have shown that observing makes local reality. Without observation, it does not exist.

B1) However, when you are dreaming, you also "see" but it will do nothing to local realism even though the optic nerve is active (as seen in Rapid eye Movement REM sleep). But while in the dream, for you local realism happens, be it on a different level. So the wave function did collapse.
Also hallucinations are real for the person who is awake (he observes them) but does not create local realism for others, plus it means that what is being observed can be influenced by chemicals in the brain. Hypnotism goes even further, making people see things (or make them disappear) and sense them like eating a lemon while there is no lemon. Again local realism has happened but is not the general realism for everyone.

B2) If someone is born blind (or became blind before the age of 5), they do not dream visually like we do and they do not observe like we do, yet local reality remains for them in the form of other senses. If past lifes were real or you as a spiritual being separate from the body were real, dreams would occur visually, but they do not. Helen Keller is a great example of someone who turned blind and deaf at the age of 9 month and not only dreams without visuals but also without sound. With this combination people like Helen do not know what thoughts or emotions are. The only emotion they can feel is fear and happiness - all other emotions do not exist - hence all other emotions are thought based. This also means that happiness can be seen as the opposite of fear, but to be more correct, gratitude is the opposite of fear. If you feel fear, just shift the energy into gratitude and the fear will disappear.

So observing does not make local reality as can be seen with the blind and deaf or the hallucinations.

Well this point has also been proven by Massimiliano Proietti at HeriotWatt University in Edinburgh that there is no objective / local reality as was proposed by quantum physicist Wigner and thought out by Caslav Brukner from Vienna. This also means there is no such thing as freedom of choice or the idea of locality.

So lets go deeper.

C1) The brain does not see. A digital code cannot see. If you are the digital code it also means you are the outside world as that is what the digital code represents. But a digital code cannot see and there is no extra code that looks at the digital code. A digital code cannot be aware.

C2) Sentience is an activity (a doingness) in the mind (brain). This can be clearly seen and felt in deep meditation. When this activity ceases, seeing becomes being.

Looking at all these points, how can A and B and C all be correct ?

What if the idea of a you that is seeing is incorrect? What if there is no seeing at all as we know it - something that seems to be second nature to us. So not only is there no you but there is also no real seeing or perceiving.

So basically only information in emptiness.

Can you artificially produce awareness ?

If awareness is a brain product, it is mechanical and you should be able to artificially duplicate it ...
Well, it is already done:

Just take a look at google photo: https://photos.google.com

Or even more fun, help googles neural network by engaging in quick draw: https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com

Here google's deep mind neural network is actually understanding the image and not just working with the name of the file. In google photo the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) can find people and things in your photo collection. If you ask to find all the photo's containing a cat, it will do so even if it is just a tail. It actually "sees" the images.

Take a look at the images below from Google's deep dream Artificial Neural Network (ANN). It almost seems like Google's deep dream is on a DMT trip (actually consciously dreaming). In this example below the ANN is given a static white noise image and is asked to look for life forms:

Well is the same happening in our brains? Is consciousness nothing more then computational understanding of the neural code entering the brain with another program making you belief - You - can actually see them?

Stop sleeping for a week and hallucinations will mix with reality and you will not know what is real and not anymore (just watch the movie fightclub to get an idea of this).

But you cannot say an ANN is aware because it cannot sense nor is it conscious of anything.

Sentience and phenomenological consciousness

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively, something an ANN cannot do. Phenomenological consciousness refers to you undergoing an experience like when you are consciously perceiving the world or for example feeling sad, thirst, pain etc. ANN's cannot do this.

Science has not figured out how to create artificial sentience or phenomenological consciousness yet, but are working on it. The closest they have come is a project called CDP4 - visuo-motor integration. But imagine a robot telling you that he sees the world. If you say I do not belief you, can you prove it ? - What will happen ? Is it not the same with us ?

See the video below about a NAO robot seeing images using IBM True North neural network:

This makes one wonder if perceiving is not just another illusion brought up by the deep neural network.

What about QNN's ?

Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are neural network models that are based on the principles of quantum mechanics. There are two different approaches to QNN research, one exploiting quantum information processing to improve existing neural network models (sometimes also vice versa), and the other one searching for potential quantum effects in the brain.

It seems the brain is not just a set of wires creating a neural network but also taps into the power of quantum computing. Prof. Matthew Fisher from Santa Barbara is spearheading this research showing you that room temperature calcium phosphates (apatite crystals) can produce quantum states in the human brain.

Penrose and Hameroff think that microtubules in the brain are quantum devices that are orchestrating our conscious awareness. This theory is not appreciated by everyone in the scientific community, with many critics saying the brain is too “warm, wet, and noisy" and cannot sustain a quantum process.

Now why are QNN's possibly the answer to artificial sentience ?

You see and perceive the world but when you meditate deeply you find seeing becomes being. This is very similar to quantum entanglement and would make it possible for a QNN to become aware.

Microsof QDK Quantum computer with a topological circuit and the next-generation quantum annealing chip from D-Wave and Sycamore from Google and IBM Q System one are the leaders at the moment in quantum computers.

In 2015 Duke University laboratory had succesfully hooked up 4 rat brains to create what they called a Brainet. In 2018 LiveScience reported that scientists have succeeded in nurturing the growth of blood vessels in minibrains that were developed from human stem cells, and they grew both the minibrain and the blood vessels from stem cells that originated from the same patient. (Scientists also found out it only took 1 gene - ARHGAP11B - that separated us from monkeys and every other life form in intelligence and brain size)

In 2019 the Spinnaker neuromorphic computer based in Manchester UK has reached a milestone of a million core artificial spiking neural network, reaching 1% of our human brain possibilities and they are working on SpiNNaker 2 right now.

Also IBM True North is doing amazing things right now. Also at the end of 2019 a new DNA cutter has been developed by David Liu called prime editing (the improved version of CRISPR-CAS9 editing). CRISPR–Cas9 and prime editing both work by cutting DNA at a specific point in the genome and then relies on the cell’s own repair system to patch the damage and make the edits, but prime editing only cuts one leg at a time and not the whole DNA, so is more accurate and safer.

In 2020 UCLA scientists James Gimzewski and Adam Stieg created an experimental device that exhibited characteristics analogous to certain behaviors of the brain —learning, memorization, forgetting, wakefulness and sleep. The paper, published in Scientific Reports, describes a network in a state of continuous flux.

In other words it is really crazy how fast new technologies are emerging and it will not take long until Ray Kurzweil predictions will come true...

Just take a look at the Frontier supercomputer or OLCF-5 that will be finished in 2021. It will be located in Tennessee, near Knoxville and will be the first exascale supercomputer - it will have 1.5 ExaFlops computing power (that is 1.5 quintillion calculations per second.) - just insane... If you look at the graphs you will find a 1000x increase in flops every 10 years.

Now combining the brain (modified with prime editing where needed) with artificial spiking neural networks may be a way to get closer to the answer of where is awareness arising, but will still not answer what it really is. But artificial life with full awareness will happen - with the same questionmarks we have now.

These worlds of biological neural networks (brains) connnecting to computers and neuromorphic computing together with QNN's is what is known as Heterogenous Architecture and will shake the world as we know it, making the differentiation between human and robot less and less. Spearheading this research is a project called Human Brain Project. Just look at the old movie Bicentennial Man from 1999 to get an idea where it is all going... The prediction by Ray Kurzweil (Google's leading AI researcher) is that by the year 2040 we have copied succesfully a complete human brain and by the year 2045 there will be a technological singularity - a hypothetical future point at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization - nobody knows what will happen after this event...

Tesla Optimus
- The most advanced robot that will be available to us in the near future

What about life energy ?

Life energy and the digital code are one and the same thing. Reiki, kundalini, Qigong and all other spiritual energies are a form of this life energy. Life energy in physiology is called an action potential and is a short-lasting event in which the electrical membrane potential of a neuron cell rapidly rises and falls, following a consistent trajectory to provide cell-to-cell communication. A neuron that emits an action potential is often said to "fire" :

Action Potential in a neuron (life energy)

When large numbers of neurons synchronize their "fire", it will give rise to neural oscillations, otherwise called brainwaves. This can be measured using EEG.

Upper Gamma and Epsilon waves seem to be connected and give rise to the highest and strongest healing and spiritual energies in the world. One of the highest and most powerful upper Gamma waves ever detected was on Matthieu Ricard, a french Buddhistic monk known as the most happy man in the world:

Research of consciousness trainer Judith Pennington also revealed some very interesting relationships on reiki masters and their brainwaves:

Rens Hendriks (Our spiritual teacher (SatGuru) from the Netherlands since 2002)

Not that long ago Rens Hendriks accepted a medical team to measure his brain activity during a healing session. To their amazement his brain activity was flatlined (below Delta), something not possible except in deep coma. But Rens functioned without trouble in this state.

Life energy takes place throughout the whole body, not just the brain.

Brainwaves and life energy is not only isolated to the brain. About 1% of the total neurons we have is located in our guts (hence the importance of a good gut flora), all connected to the brain and many more in and around our heart and other places around our body. And not only that, research has shown that even slime molds form oscillations where there is no neural network available - meaning that also in our body, cell by cell energy transmission is possible. Just see how a plant senses the sun direction and adjust its growth towards the sun.

The best and most effective way to have the whole neural network fire in sync is to awaken the kundalini. Kundalini is the sexual energy moving up the spine and entering the brain, basically performing brain surgery to remove all energetic blockages to allow the whole neural network to work in sync. The herb called Iboga is the most powerful and fastest way to accomplish this but also Darshans, shaktipath, tantra and many other methods have been used in the past to accomplish this with the ultimate goal of enlightenment and beyond where the whole body starts to radiate visible light and eventually dissolve into light - otherwise called the rainbow body of great transference (ja lus powa chenpo)

Kundalini image showing the vagus nerve as the 2 snakes (ida and pingala) and the spinal cord (sushumna) as the center pillar and the wings being the awakened brain.

But this life energy also takes place outside the body as can be easily shown on fMRI scans. Research from Wagner Alegretti shows images of an fMRI scan where activity is shown outside of the body.

This would mean there is more going on then mere action potentials.

New Experiments from 2016 also show consciousness affects matter ~ Dean Radin, PhD

In other research from Beverly Rubik, Ph.D., and Harry Jabs, M.S. show that life energy effects the biophoton transmission out of the body.

So is it life energy or pure life causing energy / effecting matter. It would seem the latter, but what is life ?

So what about life?

Life is a set of biological interrelated activities (chemical interactions) that interact to achieve a result, such as survival. This biological process can also be synthesized in a lab such as artificial but living bacteria from Craig Venter's lab, showing that DNA can be booted up (by giving it an electrical shock) just like turning on a computer to start and support life.

Syn 3.0

On March 25, 2016 Crag Venter reported the creation of Syn 3.0, a synthetic genome having the fewest genes of any freely living organism (in other words, the smallest life form on earth, having 473 genes). Their aim was to strip away all nonessential genes, leaving only the minimal set necessary to support life and by doing so finding the key elements in the genes that make life possible. In 2020 Sam Kriegman and Douglas Blackiston went a step further and designed the xenobot, a synthetic organism designed by computers with a heart and everything. So what makes something alive?

DNA is basically the software that builds and runs the organism, making it alive and making it survive.

In molecular biology and genetics, transcriptional regulation is the means by which a cell regulates the conversion of DNA to RNA (transcription), thereby orchestrating gene activity. This control allows the cell or organism to respond to a variety of intra- and extracellular signals and thus mount a response. In simple terms, gene activity is the interaction (communication) of the cell with its environment.

For a deeper understanding of this click here

This is the official scientific explanation of life, gene activity, but something major is missing - Beingness - that which senses. Without beingness, who the cell is, there is no life. Life is beingness. Beingness is the world. Life is one with the world. The same problem is with the definition of consciousness. It does not define the You, only the things around you. Same for life, it only defines the things around life. Now the argument comes, what if the cell does not sense anything, but is mere action - reaction (gene activity). How can you prove there is more to life than transcriptional regulation ?

In 2015, Marie-Claire Cammaerts and Roger Cammaerts published an article in the Journal of Science that suggests some ants can recognize themselves when looking in a mirror. When viewing other ants through glass, ants didn't divert from their normal behaviors. However, their behavior did change when they were put in front of a mirror. The ants would move slowly, turn their heads back and forth, shake their antennae, and touch the mirror. They’d retreat and re-approach the mirror. Sometimes they would groom themselves.

The ants were next given a classic mirror test. The team of researchers would use blue dots to mark the clypeus of some of the ants, which is a part of their face near their mouths. When in an environment without mirrors, these ants would behave normally, and wouldn’t touch the markings. But this changed when they could see their reflections in a mirror. The ants with blue dots on their face would groom and appear to try to remove the markings.

This experiment shows the ants are aware of themselves. This indicated consciousness and beingness. They can sense the environment.

With machine learning you can also make life-forms that look and behave really alive, but that is not the same as beingness - because there is no such thing as life or consciousness in them.

KITECH robot fish

So lets look at some of the facts. The brain of an ant has about 250.000 neurons, that is about a million times less than we have and about the same amount of transistors as in an old Intel 80386 processor from 1985 (without counting memory and RAM which is included in the ant)

So how far is science now to duplicate an ant brain, well look at the video below:

Combine this with IBM True North (or google's deep mind) and you will find it gets creepy close to a real biological ant. But again in artificial life, nothing senses.

For sentience to show up you need a fully functioning brain and nervous system, or not ?

If all is illusion, like in the matrix, why the need for nerves and brain cells in the first place.

Ashlyn Blocker

Teenager Ashlyn Blocker, who lives with her parents in the US town of Patterson, Georgia, feels no pain and is one of a small number of people in the world who have been diagnosed with congenital insensitivity to pain.

Scientists studying this condition in 11 affected families in Europe and Asia have now identified mutations in a gene called PRDM12 that was already known to be involved in activating genetic switches (switching genes on and off). The tests revealed that Ashlyn had inherited two defective copies of the SCN9A gene which is a gene that belongs to a family of genes that provide instructions for making sodium channels that play a key role in a cell's ability to generate and transmit electrical signals involved in the transmission of nerve impulses in pain-sensing neurons (Nociceptors).

A nociceptor is a type of receptor at the end of a sensory neuron's axon that responds to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending danger signals to the spinal cord and the brain.

The peripheral terminal of the mature nociceptor is where the noxious stimuli (an actually or potentially tissue damaging event) are detected and transduced into electrical energy. When the electrical energy reaches a threshold value, an action potential is induced and driven towards the central nervous system (CNS). This leads to the train of events that allows for the conscious awareness of pain. But the electrical signal itself is not pain, it is just a signal. Giving someone Ziconotide (a strong painkiller) and the nociceptors will not send a signal anymore. An anesthetized brain receives pain signals but does not process them. In deep sleep the brain also receives pain signals but does not process them.

When there are no signals being send into the brain or the brain does not process them, there is no awareness! Hence sentience of pain happens in the brain.

So where does the sentience of pain start ?

It is happening inside the brain, in the Somatosensory area of the brain and the insula and the anterieure cingulate cortex as is found on PET scans (Tor Wagers research). To be more exact, the signal ends there but no one knows how it is sensed.

Somatosensory area

Sentience itself (and awareness in general) cannot be pinpointed as something or somewhere. Pain itself is just a digital signal and does not exist as something real. It is all illusion including the I that senses the pain, however real this may be.

In a fully enlightened person, pain is of no concern.

Ramana Maharshi, who has completely dissolved the sense of I / awareness in meditation had to go under surgery to remove cancer without anesthesia or any other kind of pain killer but it did not bother him.

Quote:

"Towards the end of 1948 a small nodule appeared below the elbow of Ramana's left arm. As it grew in size, the doctor in charge of the Ashram dispensary cut it out. But in a month’s time it reappeared. Surgeons from Madras were called, and they operated. The wound did not heal, and the tumour came again. On further examination it was diagnosed that the affliction was a case of osteosarcoma, an extremely painful form of bone cancer. The doctors suggested amputating the arm above the affected part. Ramana replied with a smile: “There is no need for alarm. The body is itself a disease. Let it have its natural end. Why mutilate it? Simple dressing of the affected part will do.” Two more operations had to be performed, but the tumour appeared again. Indigenous systems of medicine were tried, and homeopathy too. The disease did not yield to treatment. The sage was quite unconcerned and was supremely indifferent to suffering. He sat as a spectator watching the disease waste the body. But his eyes shone as bright as ever and his grace continued to flow towards all beings. Crowds came in large numbers. Ramana insisted that they should be allowed to have his darshan. Devotees profoundly wished that the sage should cure his body through an exercise of supernormal powers. Some of them imagined that they themselves had had the benefit of these powers which they attributed to Ramana. Ramana had compassion for those who grieved over the suffering, and he sought to comfort them by reminding them of the truth that Bhagavan was not the body: “They take this body for Bhagavan and attribute suffering to him. What a pity! They are despondent that Bhagavan is going to leave them and go away – where can he go, and how?”

Nerves and Brain cells are NOT required for awareness, intelligence and sentience:

There are about 200 types of slime molds (like Physarum Polycephalum) that have no brain cells nor do they have any nerves but are able to sense and solve puzzles like in the image below and can transfer (communicate) their knowledge to other slime molds without any neural connection. Only blood vein type channels are made to sense poisons, solving puzzles and transferring information. Well, knowing that these types of molds existed almost 1 billion years ago, way before the first life-form ever produced a nerve cell or brain, makes the theory that you need a brain for sentience (awareness) and intelligence in the first place not true. How amazing is that !

Slime mold (left top) searching through a maze to find food (right bottom)

Did you know that plants can also communicate (using glutamate and electrical signals that travel between cells), recognise their family and are blessed with the ability to learn / memory ? - (research from Monica Gagliano - University of Western Australia's Centre for Evolutionary Biology) plants even have senses to detect danger etc. They are much more alive and sentient than previously understood.

Meet Elowan, a plant hooked up to a computer so it can move itself, a robot plant - yes scary...

Life dissolving the physical body

With the latest research (Luc van Loon, Lionel Feuillet and Sagara Y) showing you the brain is extremely flexible and renewable and with the powerful energy called the kundalini it can be understood that the whole body can be transformed into a spiritual vehicle until the point where the energy is so strong that it actually dissolves structure.

Ramalinga Vallalar was one of the few who not only went through these stages but also clearly documented each step on the way to full enlightenment. It is all written down is a book called Thiru Arutpa that basically disclosed 3 clear stages being Sudha Degam, where the body stops aging and actually reverses in age, Pranava Degam - where light is shining through the body and the body does not even cast a shadow anymore on the ground and Gnana degam - the complete dissolvement of the body into light.

This process seems to ignite auto-senolytics, a process where the immune system eats old (senescent) cells and keeps on doing this until the body starts to shrink and dissolve. More info about senolytics can be found at the Cleara Biotech company from Peter de Keizer.

A more detailed explanation about this dislodgement into light can be found on the rainbow body page.

Lama Achuck in the first stages of pranava Degam (photo taken in 2010)

Satsang, Dzogchen and self-inquiry are all methods to dissolve the ego back into this silent state where it came from and give way for the Sat to enter and flow through the body (called kundalini awakening in India and Tummo in Tibet).

Darshan, Drishti and shaktipath / sivapath are the 3 Buddha dimensions tools to awaken and develop the kundalini and burning the ego and karma on its way. The emptiness you see in the pictures of Buddhists and Hindu saints (the emptiness inside the rings around their body) is the Sat that remains. The flames indicate the kundalini that is burning the mental identifications away in a blissful fire.

Tirthankara (Jainism)

This is what true Enlightenment entails

You are light itself

You are silence itself

You are compassion itself

You are time itself

In this state you have merged with everything

In this state you are everything

All is you, all is silence, all is light

In this state there is no more hope, no more pain and no more desires

In this state there is no more fear, no more meaning

In this state You are finally home...

Our example:

Ramalinga Vallalar
(click here for more info about Vallalar)
Who attained the highest state of realization called the Rainbow body of great transference in the first month of 1875 in Tamil Nadu, south India.

My Dzogchen teacher:

Tsoknyi Rinpoche
(Mingyur Yeshe became my Buddhistic name)

Our satsangs / darshans / Dzogchen meditation are in silence, no talking or teachings and are for free. Everyone is welcome to join but understand you will not be joining a group or movement as we belief absolute freedom is an individual path free from dependency and you should use all the tools available but always remain free from them.

We hope we can spread this joy and freedom to anyone we come in contact with...