About this time last year, staying in my brother’s batch near Queenstown enjoying the snow and the skiing, I started working with a little book called The Abundance Book.

In the book was a ‘40 day prosperity plan’ that consisted of phrases for reflection each day. I as still using the plan a year later. Today’s affirmation is:

“I am conscious of this inner presence as my lavish abundance. I am conscious of the constant activity of this mind of infinite prosperity. Therefore my consciousness dwells in the light of truth.”

Now that may not be exact because I committed to affirmations to memory a long time ago, but I hope it is still close.

John Randolf Price’s book has meant a lot to me in my exploration of what it means to be human. I remember a year ago working with the book and realising how self-righteous I have been all my life. I had spend my life in self-justification and self-denial having convinced myself that this is the way ‘God’ wanted me to live. The experience of coming out of that belief was like a dragon sinking its claws into my skin and ripping off all that had protected me from…from what? Myself?

In this post I would like to continue the exploration of the idea that we are ‘reality generators driven by intention’. I want to make the following points:

* We use our intention all the time - it is our primary activity.

* Using intention is a skill that needs to be learned and mastered with practise.

We use our intention all the time -

Unless you believe that the mind is the brain then we have, from our very first breath, begun the journey of mastering what it means to be human by learning how our intention affects the physical world. We have learned how to suck at our mother’s breast, discovered that we can control our hands and feet to push ourselves up, crawl and eventually walk. We have learned to imitate the noises of our parents and give meaning to these auditory symbols as we learn to talk. Some of us, take this mastery of the physical body even further, being able to relax ourselves through affirmation, control our heart rate, release the tension that causes migraine etc. All these acts are the development of human intention. It is so much part of who we are that we for the most part completely ignore the - little understood - way we learn to affect the physical world.

Control over our physical body is totally accepted as part of what it means to be human. We don’t question it, and for most of us we leave it at that. A consequence of this is that many people have difficulty accepting that some people have extended their mastery of intention beyond their physical bodies into other aspects of the physical world. There is overwhelming scientific evidence for the ability of the human intention to effect random event generators, send distant healing, move physical objects at a distance etc. When one realises that this is really only an extension of the power of intent to master the physical body these abilities take their proper place in the repertoire of what it means to be human. Then the interesting question becomes, not, ‘Does this kind of thing really happen?’ but ‘Just how far can human intention go?’.

I don’t know the answer to that question but it brings me to my second point - the exercise of human intention is a skill that can be trained and mastered. None of us expect our children to be able to crawl, walk, read without practise. We also have no problem recognising that some children (especially if they are our own) are more talented that others at certain abilities. Beyond the specifics of the skill (reading, walking, needlework…) each is also a step in the further mastery of human intention - our ability to effect physical reality with our intent. Perhaps to keep things in perspective and remember that each skill we learn is another facet of the power of our intent we should initiate a stepped intention mastery process, like the belt system in Karate. If we did it may look something like this:

While Belt - Competence over the physical body, including speech and writing

Yellow Belt - Competence in the para-sympathetic nervous system with ability to control heart rate, breathing, dilation of blood vessels and peristalsis

Orange Belt - Competence is tele-kinesis (moving objects at a distance), distant healing, and ESP

I hope you get the idea. I am going to leave the Green and Black belt definitions to later posts. The point here is that human intention is our Primary Ability, and that it is a skill that has to be mastered as we journey through life if we are to live what it fully means to be human.

As you may have guessed from these blog posts, I read while I am travel. I am again on my way home to New Zealand – at present somewhere over the Mid-western United States - and I have had the privilege to be reading the 1970’s classic Beyond Biofeedback by Elmer and Alyce Green. Their discussion of their experience of ordinary people gaining control over involuntary physiological functions through the use of biofeedback machines has inspired me to suggest a redefinition of what it means to be human.

I would like to suggest the human beings are:

Reality generators driven by intention.

By this I mean that the purpose of being human is to master our ability to create reality through our intent. The extent to which we have conscious control over this process is the extent to which we fulfill our potential as humans.

If you have children you’ll remember the excitement of your child’s early achievements – the time they first crawled, said their first words, took their first steps. These are big achievements – the child has mastered control over what until that moment were involuntary processes – the co-ordination of arms and feet and vocal expressions.

As most people grow older they seem to accept a certain degree of control over their world and leave it at that. The Green’s however spent their careers demonstrating that ordinary people could quickly and easily extend their conscious control over generally considered involuntary or unconscious process through the use of a machine which would amplify signals below the usual level of perception and feed them back to the person. In this way thousands, if not millions, of people have learned to release tension, control migraine, warm hands and feet, through processes that require the activity of the sympathetic and para-sympathic nervous systems – parts of human physiology generally considered outside conscious, voluntary control.

The Greens also wired up ‘adepts’ in the United States and in India who were able to demonstrate more advanced physiological control such as the cessation of heart beat and control of the intestine. Others still were able to demonstrate psychokinesis – the ability to alter physical objects outside the body.

There are several things that interest me about this research:

• Every conscious act of intent, such as typing these words on my Mac, demonstrate the mastery of mind over matter that each of us has a high degree of competence in already – we have already spent much of our lives training ourselves in this ability. Mind over matter is not a point of debate – each of us demonstrates its reality every waking minute.
• Feedback is the key to learning. In childhood our parents and teachers encourage us and give us feedback that enables us to walk, spell and communicate. The Greens demonstrated that control over our lives can be extended through the use of machines that can measure minute changes in skin temperature, muscle contraction etc. that are usually below our conscious threshold.
• There is no theoretical limit to the ability of human beings to gain conscious control over their world through the conscious application of their intent. Control over other ‘inside the body’ functions is only a subset of the domain in which conscious intent has been demonstrated to be active. Lynn McTaggart in her book The Intention Experiment has mapped a great deal of the definitive research of intention acting ‘outside the body’ coming out of institutions such as Princeton and Stanford. Last year VortexDNA demonstrated human intent could be used to improve Google Search results.

So this comes back to the redefinition of what it means to be human. It seems to me that we are at a state of technology where we can feedback more and more subtle changes in our environment to our conscious minds. This gives our minds greater control over this environment through the further development of our intent.

Will we some day be able to order a pizza just by thinking about it? The work of the Greens suggest that there are two key components to our further progress:

1. Machines that can feedback to us more subtle changes in the environment.
2. (Something I have not yet mentioned) a relaxed state of mind. Intention appears to work through the unconscious. The roll of the conscious is to relax, visualize and then let go of the intent so that the unconscious mind can do its work. The Greens found most people, for example through Autogenic Training methods, could easily learn this state.

With these two components – biofeedback equipment now costing less than $100 and relaxation techniques easily accessible and assimilated, I feel the time is ripe for the expansion of what it means to be human. What do you think?

On the way to San Francisco last week from New Zealand I watched Beowulf the Movie, by Rober Zemeckis and staring Ray Winstone and Angelina Jolie. It so struck me that I watched it again on the way home! It seemed to me that the story describes the way human beings experience the power of their own intention. In a later blog post I will share you the same model of the universe but in the language of science – perhaps more useful but not as exciting. For now, let’s dive into the world of myth and see what it says.

It says that the Source of all that you desire is already within you. When you are connected to that Source it is the most beautiful, ecstatic, erotic, and blissful experience you can ever possibly have. Not only that, but that Source will grant you anything that you desire, with this simple caveat, it will manifest your EVERY desire, including what you believe about yourself.

In the movie the Source is represented by the ‘water demon’ Gendel’s Mother (Angelina Jolie). No man can resist her beauty. Both Hrothgar and Beowulf experience union with her. In return they are granted their desires – kingship, power, wealth. And she bears each of them children in their own image. Hrothgar is father to Grendal, the monster that lays waste to his mead hall. Beowulf fathers a dragon who attacks his kingdom. In both cases, the Source is true to its word – it manifests all that their heart desires. It’s Hrothgar’s and Beowulf’s image of themselves that limits the good that comes to them. Inside they believe themselves as monsters. Consequently the Source bears them monsters.

The caveat is unavoidable. The nature of the Source is all giving – the raw energy or power to manifest. Scientists speak of the Zero Point Field, with enough energy in a square metre to boil the oceans of the world. The Source makes no distinction as to which of our desires are manifest. Whatever we believe or desire becomes reality because both are simply statements of our intent. Hrothgar and Beowulf, once they have contacted the Source, have no choice in the matter – all their intentions manifest.

A clue to this is given at the end. Hrothgar is not able to stand living with his own self-image and kills himself. Beowulf on the other hand is able to face himself more honestly - he asks his wife to remember him not so much as a hero or a king but as a man who was fallible and who made mistakes. It is only after this act of self-awareness and, in part, self-forgiveness, that Beowulf is able to overcome the dragon (his own inner beliefs made manifest) and save his wife, mistress and kingdom.

From a historical perspective it is also interesting how Beowulf stands at the end of the age of heros and at the beginning of the age of Christianity, with the figure of Christ as ‘Love’. Love and forgiveness appear to be the way in which we are able to re-connect to the Source, when the self-judgement of the belief systems we carry – conscious or unconscious – separate ourselves from all that we truly desire. Maybe the last 2000 years have been for the human race the opportunity to increase our capacity to love and forgive oursleves so that we carry fewer demons of self-belief in our intention field.

Speaking as a male I think Angelina Jolie did a fantastic job of representing the erotic nature of the Source – it is all that we could possibly desire!! Women may experience the Source as male, like Eros in the myth of Psyche and Eros. In whatever form we experience it, it is simply all-giving nature of the universe. It’s full beauty, abundance and splendour is accessible to the extent to which we clear our intention field so that are intentions are for the highest good of ourselves and all concerned. When we fail due to the stresses of limited self-belief then forgiveness and unconditional love are the route back to the Source and our every desire.

Well done screen writers, Neil Gaimon and Roger Avary. For me you got back to the mythic truth behind the story.

People appear to be evolving their ability to influence the physical world around them through the power of their intent. Evidence from fields as diverse as clinical drug trials and the stock market indicate a profound shift has begun, transforming people’s ability to affect the material world through their thinking. Some believe this shift in human capability will eventually lead to the development of mind/matter technologies capable of taking humankind to the stars (Tiller 2007 page: xvii)

MarketsDNA, the New Zealand sister company to VortexDNA, noticed this shift while researching the returns of the S&P Depository Receipts Fund (SPY) that tracks the S&P500 group of companies in the United States. Researchers found that since 1993 SPY has increasingly produced returns during times when the market was coherent (MarketsDNA White Paper). Coherence is a key sign that a system is ‘conscious’ in the sense that it is self-organising. Before 1993 the odds of SPY producing returns during coherent periods was no better than chance. But by 2007 a simple, market-beating strategy could be developed based on the degree to which the market is coherent. This appears the suggest that the stock market is no longer the ‘random walk’ considered by many, but is increasingly displaying the attributes of a conscious, living system.

A similar shift appears to be taking place in the arena of human health. In the mid 1980’s the placebo effect in trials testing drugs for obsessive-compulsive disorder were negligible relative to the treatment response (less than 20%). However, by 1998 the placebo effect accounted for 75% of the effect of real drugs (M. Enserink, (1999) “Can the Placebo be the Cure?”, Science 284, 238.) This evidence is suggesting that, for some drug treatments at least, the power of people’s intention is becoming more powerful than the drug itself.

Scientific research coming out of institutions such as Stanford and Princeton, supporting these findings has been well documented by Lynne McTaggart and William A. Tiller in their publications. What interests me is the implications of this evidence on what it means to be human. Are we making a giant evolutionary leap as great as when our ancestors stood up and walked? What are the implications for us in terms of what it means to be fully human? I feel we need to stretch our imaginations to begin to grasp, not what we were, but what we are becoming.

My DNA tag cloud is looking better.

Last week Kaila Colbin and I had the opportunity to create a podcast hosted by Paul Miller at Talis. You may be interested at having a look.

If you have a VortexDNA profile you can now share this with people on your blog or website by pasting a small snipp of code in exactly the same way you embedd YouTube videos. This helps like minded people to find you and learn a bit about you.

Here’s mine in Beta:

Large size

Medium

Small

A couple of days ago Kaila Colbin, VortexDNA’s dream blogger, asked me how I saw the future of search. I’m not the only one with a view on this and I hope you will make a contribution as well. I say that not just to be polite but because the one thing I have learnt since I last wrote about search is the power of mass collaboration.

Two weeks ago I bought a book called Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. William. On the flight back to New Zealand from San Francisco I read the first 100 pages (it had been a long week). It certainly changed - or rather confirmed - everything my awareness has been inching towards.

Mass Collaboration is the reason why Marc Andersson can write:

No single closed service, no matter how good, and no matter how big, could compete with the diversity of thousands and then millions of web sites that were customized to every conceivable user interest and need.

However brilliant the engineers are at Google, or Hadar Shemtov and his Natural Language team at Yahoo! are (and they ARE BRILLIANT), there is no way of outsurpassing the creative brilliance of millions of people collaborating to create a better search.

When I read something I believe there does not seem to be any point continuing in the old mode any longer. As soon as I got off the plane we opened up the next generation of the MyWebDNA browser extension to the world. If VortexDNA is in the market to provided a more relevant Web - a totally personalised Web - there is now in my mind only one way to make that happen - by harnessing you and me and you and you… Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia has known this for a long time. He has just recieved $10 million from Amazon to build the next search on these principles. I believe, any serious contender to be the next Google has to embrace the power of mass collaboration. To my mind there is no other way. What do you think?

This is a long post so here is a snapshot – A systems view of the Web suggests that the Web as we know it is likely to rapidly and radically change as users thirst for relevance. But although Google has played a key role in providing the machinery for the last iteration of the Web, it looks more are more likely that the next big leap forward will be driven by users doing it for themselves. We can already see this change in the social self-organisation present in Wikipedia, Del.icio.us and the Blog phenomena. Is the evolution of the Web the biggest democracy movement the world has ever seen? Where does it leave today’s dominant players like Google?

If you are still reading…here is the full version.

How is the web evolving? How can we predict what is going to happen next? Unfortunately I don’t have a crystal ball. But what if instead we look at the Web as a system? The great thing about systems is their self-similarity – systems as far apart as sun spots and the Internet may share common attributes purely from the fact that they both function as systems.

Actually, sun spots and the Web both function as special kinds of systems - those that display the ability to self-organise – they are able to re-order the configuration of their parts in order to increase their efficiency.

Technically, systems of this kind are called ‘dissipative structures’. They are called this because they can re-organise themselves to dissipate energy faster – they becme more efficient. Its the drive for efficiency that creates their new structure.

In the case of sun spots, the spots are the new structure that forms when the heat of the sun is so intense that the molecules need to find more efficient ways of dissipating the heat to the surface. To do this they self-organise to create vortices of current which enables the super-heated molecules to reach the sun’s surface faster.

We can also see this self-organisation on the Web. The entire personalization push towards the ‘Semantic Web’ is about efficiency - making Web content more relevant to each individual person. When I only have to do one search to find the site I want, or perform one click to book my vacation, that is the Web becoming more efficient.

There is no question that Google’s algorithm has played a key role in making information more relevant and useful to people. As an organisation they have definitely fulfilled their purpose. Before Google it was much harder to find what you wanted. That’s why most users switched to Google – page ranking made a difference.

However, while Google provided the mechanism for the web to become more efficient, the energy behind the quest came from users. It is because you and I wanted a better way of finding things that fuelled the evolution of the Web to where it is today. This is important, because the energy driving efficiency on the Web is the user’s search for relevance. The rise of Google as a dominant node on the Web is due to the fact that until now it has provided the best efficiency solution for us. But will that last?

There are reasons to believe that the current status quo on the Web may not last. From a systems perspective, the evolution of dissipative structures is non-linear – there is no gradual emergence of a new structure for the system. Instead the system generally reaches a crisis point (called a ‘bifurcation point’) where it rapidly self-organises into a new structure that is more efficient than the last. All that’s need to perform the trick is an increased energy supply.

A quick browse of Digg.com or TechCrunch demonstrates that there is no let up in the insatiable desire of users to get more from the Web, and more easily, than ever before. So the energy for the continued evolution of the Web is clearly there. That means, from a systems perspective, there are good reasons to believe that the Web will:

• Re-organise itself to be more efficient
• It’s going to be non-linear
• It’s not going to look like how it looks today.

So what will it look like? This is not as hard to predict as it might seem. The rise of the Blog and the social network phenomenon demonstrate that people are doing it themselves. Whatever else is happening in the world to erode human rights and human freedoms, democracy is alive and kicking on the Web. (Living proof is the fact that I can publish this and you can read it when just a few years ago I would have to be a journalist contributing to a publication before I could share thoughts with you.)

Democracy – the collective decision of millions of people to take the initiative themselves to re-create the Web as they want it, is likely to be the both the driving force (energy) that fuels the evolution of the Web, and the process by which the Web re-invents itself.

I find this tremendously exciting. It speaks for the empowerment of the individual and the ability of the individual to exercise their right and freedom to create the Web they want.

It’s also bad news for Google, Yahoo! and every other current hub in the Network. For the current system is basically paternalistic. Until now Google has provided us with technology that has improved our search experience. But now people are saying they want to do it for themselves. Del.icio.us may be a book marking service, but it is also a search engine created by the collective marking up of million of pages.

From a systems perspective, there is no reason to believe the current status quo on the Web is its final iteration. All the signals are that people still want it better. With that drive, we could see another massive re-structuring take place very quickly.

For all who want to be part of the next iteration, the signs are that the way the Web is getting better is NOT by Google improving its algorithm. The Web is self-organising by millions of people literally creating the Web they want. This is democracy at its best. Long may it last. What do you think?

In my last post I outlined the results the VortexDNA predictive search technology has been able to achieve. There has been some confusion here - primarily in my own thinking. It took my friend Grant Ryan from http://swicki.eurekster.com to point out my fuzzy thinking over lunch yesterday. Thank you Grant.

So, to get clear, VortexDNA technology has proven its ability to increase the relevance of search results by up to 14% - this is what we reported and stands. But this translates into an increase in click rate of up to 3% - not 14% as I suggested. The reason is that the 14% improvement is a relative score “14% more than the link is already being clicked on.” To figure out what that means in terms of revenue for a search engine like Google, you have to turn that into an absolute figure - hence the 3%.

It’s the same as if interest rates are raised from 1% to 2%. Reporters can say either that the interest rate has doubled, or that it has gone up by 1%.

So I apologize, not least to Peter Norvig at Google, for my own fuzzy thinking, and I hope this clarifies matters. I have edited the previous post to make things clearer.