Evolver NYC Spore: Thought For Food and the Healing Journey

Just wanted to let everyone know that Eliott Edge will be at the event, leading an opening meditation based on his "Outside Mind" project. More about his work:
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The meditative music of outside mind
By Eliott Edge

What is outside mind?
The musical project dubbed ‘outside mind’(OM) is a meditative electro-drone audio sound-scape (described by some as a,“brain massage”) created with the intent to encourage interest in meditation within communities that have no interest in the subject or are otherwise misapplying the central concept behind meditation (wholly to observe without thought).
OM can be enjoyed as a free-standing audio instillation, possibly accompanied byfluxus-style performance art, or in conjunction with various visual elements including those with a strobe effect set to induce theta brainwave states, or used as music to put a twist on community zanzen/yogic exercises, perhaps even surrounding a single polished rock. Though the best state for a beginner is in silent darkness, deeply relaxed, listened through a headset.
OM came about spontaneously, an unexpected brainchild resulting from several years of street-level research and experimentation into brainwave responses/technologiesinvolving noise, tone, and frequency (neuro/psychoacoustics) as well as communicating over the net with PhD pioneers of the field. Combine this data with a habit of performing improvisational noise music (Untitled 87) and crafting soundtracks for avant-garde shorts (Odd Edges), OM is an oddity of music, and it only takes fifteen-minute listen in silent darkness to fully appreciate(the average time needed to bask in another brainwave state for a good bit).
Binaural beats have been studied and utilized to induce deeply meditative states of awareness for decades[7][5][2]. The benefit of such audio aides is in the phenomenon of brain-entrainment(biofeedback), in that once one becomes familiar with the states of awarenessfacilitated by the audio, one can then learn to cultivate the ability to ‘click’ into those states experienced without a dependency of the audio or any other meditative activity (i.e. counting breaths, repeating sounds like “Mitsubishi”). Akin to learning the muscle-memory needed to play Mozart; all that is required patience, practice, and interest.
This is merely an evolution of what the genre of music Goa Trance has done since the early Nineties:the incorporation psychoacoustic neurological data (beta wave frequencies in Goa’s case) into evocative musical experiences. The difference between OM and Goa is, as Goa stimulates the brain into a slap-happy-dance-crazy euphoric beta state, OM stimulates the brain into the deeper, slower, more introspective regions. OM was made to be ideal for doing nothing (meditation). Prior to the advances made in the field of neuro/psychoacoustics it was assumed that ‘clicking’ into ‘higher’ states of awareness could only be accomplished after normally decades of sitting[6][3][2] or upon consumption of certain pharmacological,interdimensionally prone molecules.

Purpose
In a group setting, ‘outside mind’is expected to act, as all performances do, as kind of campfire (a phenomenamade “centerpiece” for the observers); an agent of excitation that narrows attention of the collective upon itself, and thus upon consciousness.As one presses into one’s personal apprehension of the experience, the experience falls deeper into that which itselfapprehends(consciousness). Our ancestorsshared a gaze upon the still mysterious,undulating plasma, the campfire, and slowly they realized collectively that what was truly shared and exchanged between them was the very capacity to apprehend experientially the very phenomenon (unexplainable as it stands) thatwas occurring right before them! In other words, the “external” process lends way to an examination of the “internal” mechanism that so experiences the “external” phenomena.
Group experience of OMis hoped to do likewise, to encourage a sharing of the same phenomenon between many discrete yet fundamentally interconnected units of nonphysical consciousness [4]. It is the same reason why we watch a campfire together, or a film, or a concert, or a conversation, or any social, sexual, spiritual, intellectual, or psychedelicadventure—to share likened internal states of awareness brought upon via external stimuli. To feel the same as others do, and thus try to bridge the psychological gap created by linguistically reinforced, yet scientifically false, subject/object associations. As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, “…I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.”The result of the shared experience is observable; in said group, individual participants begin to experience similar, if not interchangeable,even identical states of awareness brought on by the shared external stimuli (we collectively ‘jump’ during the shocker part of the schlockathon).
OM is an object. It is something for the light of consciousness to wash upon. Thus OM, is not “about the music” as much as it is about the consciousness observing the music. One closes their eyes, and watches consciousness watching ‘outside mind’. This is what creates the meditative state. In meditation one gives attention to a singular object (dharana), which leads one to fall into a completely, unified absorption in it (samadhi). OM is the object to be absorbed and designed to be fun to do too. OM is just another meaningless statue, another candle, another wisp of smoke, another flower, another mandala, another penetrating horizon, another mantra, another rock to absorb until the absorber realizes the utterly, utterly obvious (wink).
Meditators are supposed to be encouraged to have a rapport with their own conscious awareness (as is the purpose of meditation,‘outside mind’ included), it is probable that given the novelty of the activity of listening in a group to OM, the sheer “music” itself, and the reports of individuals that have thus experienced OM through use of headphones, one may find that paying attention to attention, being conscious of consciousness, over the frequencies of OM,that a novel approach to the psycho-social-neurological exchange within the participants may emerge (likely similar to those that practice yoga or zanzen together). Just for fun.
the sole purpose of meditation can be summed up in the analogy of the signal-to-noise ratio: to ‘tune’ one’s awareness, one’s consciousness, closer towards the ‘signal’ end of the signal-to-noise spectrum and away form the ‘noise’.
The signal is characterized by: consciousness, mind, reality, that which is, the bigger picture, the unknown, the undiscovered, the unconditioned.
The noise is characterized by:mental chatter, analysis, intellectualization, conceptualization, chatter, fear, thought, expectation, belief, assumption, ego, dogma, panic, drama.
Individuals, more often than not, fetishize the tools used to achieve alternative operational conscious awareness states (i.e. “the mantra sound is a sacred sound!”, “The mushroom is a sacred mushroom!”), and get lost in the layer upon layer of myth associated with that tool. The imagination kicks in (antithetical to meditation) and we assume we’ve had a spiritual experience. One can have a spiritual insight though meditation (that’s part of the point) but it will not be because of the special tool we used to get there—it will be because we have encountered consciousness, the larger reality. However if that spiritual insight doesn’t crush your ego or belief systems—one is encouraged to keep trying.
The problem of mediation fetishization (meditation tools made sacred in the mind, literally a screwdriver enthroned and deified) is the propensity it has for creating belief systems. Meditation, as pointed out quite accurately by the author of The End of Your World,“Enlightenment has nothing to do with what you add unto yourself or whether you're more or less happy. Enlightenment is, in the best sense of things, a destructive process.” [1] Deep meditative insight dismantles conditioning, sometimes piece-by-piece, other times whole chunks are slide away.That which is destroyed is fear, ego, belief, assumption, expectation, judgment, thought, conditioning, and all that does is free up room so consciousness, exploration, and love can enter the panorama of experience more easily.
It is through the operational state of consciousness referred to as meditation that not only one can reduce stress, boost general physical and psychological orderliness; one may also literally explore one’s extra dimensional nature, including all the similarly nonlocal phenomenon documented by psi, psychotronic, and consciousness exploration and research.
Personal statement
Regardless of listing off the numerous studies and reiterating the now wholly recognized fact within the medical and psychological literature of the Western world of the benefits of the state of operation that has so been referred to as mediation, as well as the revelation brought upon by the publishing of articles relating to decades upon decades of research funded by nearly every branch of the United States governmental military intelligence agencies, other MI groups from around the world, as well as other sectors within the private, public, non-profit, and university level, all of which conducted exhausting experiments under a litany of various protocol; the subject of psychotronics or psi phenomena is met by the status quo as a fringe, irrelevant, taboo, hokum, or otherwise largely unknown field of experience. Despite these now thousands of pages of published and declassified materials, millions of dollars in funding within all mentioned sectors, popular science literature, and the personal testimony of not only the 39th President of the United States, former Army Intelligence officers, but more appropriately dozens of PhDs including NASA nuclear physicists, SRI based physicists, Lockheed laser physicists, psychologists, neurophysiologists, folks at Princeton Engineering Anomalies labs, and so on, meditation and applications of nonlocal, nonphysical consciousness within this reality and other realities [4] remains an unpopular, often misunderstood, assumed profitless hobby—despite the fact that the activities are paradigm-shifting actions of consciousness (“self”).
The problem of our era is simply the direction with which we have chosen to aim our attention. We observe the stars rather than that which observes the stars, which is,suffices it to say, the origin of those stars.Physicist Dr. Thomas Campbell, NASA employee, author, and consciousness pioneer has appropriately pointed out the words of Noble Prize Winner Eugene Wigner which appeared in a paper called The Place of Consciousness in Modern Physics(1972), “…the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality.”
It is this “ultimate universal reality” that demands our immediate attention. For it is the origin of all our behavior, understanding, and experience. It is the very horizon the,information stream that we have referred to as humanness.We are a naturally curious,exploratory mammal, we have only missed the point that is worth deep investigation. It is not the “external” reality but sheer sentience that begs to be unveiled from the ignorant cloak of assumption and myth.
How deeply can we touch this moment? Not mystically speaking, but in terms of conscious apprehension. How deeply can we touch the experience of sentient awareness and to what unknown does it lead?
The stalwart Terrence McKenna once said something akin to: Once a species develops the capacity to destroy its home planet many times over it outlives the privilege of having a subconscious—it is an artifact of a juvenile sentience that must move onto themost beneficial evolutionary trajectory: towards deeper, more aware, less disordered states of continual consciousness. This has been called the transcendental.
Science, mediation, spirituality (consciousness evolution/the Larger Reality/unconditional love), and sheer sentience itself are a waste of hot air if the intent isn’t directed towards a shift towards the unknown. The unknown seems to naturally result in the above-mentioned states: destruction of conditioning, inflowing of consciousness. It is our state of mind that got us into this mess. It is our state of mind that will get us out.
To begin it is suggested that one simply have a practice that occupies the mind enough to “clear one’s vision,” to help see reality/consciousness un-warped by the obscuration of culture, thought, assumption, belief, expectation, fear, and ego. We think neurotically, all day long, from the first moment we get up. How about just starting off by taking a little time out of day to shut up long enough to allow for that hidden guest named consciousness to actually explain for itself what it is though its sheer un-judged, un-intellectualized, un-conceptualized, unnamed naked presence. This is the alternative to telling consciousness what it is all day long—as we conditionally do, as others conditionally do for us. The question remains for society: what is literally outside mind, outside our conditioned awareness?
Think amore.

Few Quotes:
“Although each of us obviously inhabits a separate physical body, the laboratory data from a hundred years of parapsychology research strongly indicate that there is no separation in consciousness.” –Russell Targ.

"Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. This is what quantum physics teaches." –Terrence McKenna

"Your belief systems limit your reality to a sub-set of the solution space that does not contain the answer."–Thomas Campbell

“You should really forget the word meditation. That word has been corrupted. The ordinary meaning of that word - to ponder over, to consider, to think about - is rather trivial and ordinary. If you want to understand the nature of meditation you should really forget the word because you cannot possibly measure with words that which is not measurable, that which is beyond all measure. No words can convey it, nor any systems, modes of thought, practice or discipline. Meditation - or rather if we could find another word which has not been so mutilated, made so ordinary, corrupt, which has become the means of earning a great deal of money - if you can put aside the word, then you begin quietly and gently to feel a movement that is not of time. Again, the word movement implies time - what is meant is a movement that has no beginning or end. A movement in the sense of a wave: wave upon wave, starting from nowhere and with no beach to crash upon. It is an endless wave.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!'” —Uncle Al
References:
[1] Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment. Sounds True, Incorporated. 2009
[2] Atwater, F. “Accessing Anomalous States of Consciousness with a Binaural Beat Technology.” Journal of Scientific ExplorationVol.1 1, No.3, pp. 263-274, 1997.
[3] Austin, J. Zen and the Brain. MIT Press. 5th ed. 2000.
[4] T. Campbell. My Big TOE: A Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics, and Metaphysics. Lighting Strike Books. 2003.

[5] Karino, S. (et al) “Neuromagnetic Responses to Binaural Beat inHuman Cerebral Cortex”Journal of NeurophysiologyJune 2006.
[6] Pearce,M. “Ultimate Journey—A Book Report”
[7] Sornson, R. “Using Binaural Beats to Enhance Attention.” The Monroe Institute. Fall 1999.

Grok the album A New Product for the Brain at: http://g.ho.st/public/users/~DA107BE6E9E748780551B4D865FF91F4/files/SDB_...
Visit myspace.com/outsidemindmusic for more outside mind related fun.
For the dopest data, Google: Tom Campbell author of My Big TOE. Videos lectures/interviews available at http://www.youtube.com/twcjr44 author’s website http://www.my-big-toe.com

outside mind music (c) Eliott Edge 2009