Text and Photography by Harvey Lloyd

This blog is part of a series entitled Secrets of Eternal Youth.

Secrets of Eternal Youth

The Blog of Everything
From a Globe Circling Forever Youthful Adventurer, Artist/Photographer
.Who Hangs Out of Helicopters & Flies “The Dead Man[s Curve” Over Every Continent

With The Newest Studies On How to Keep Your Brain Young & Healthy

Secrets of Eternal Youth is a Kerouacian road trip through the mental universe with a merry prankster at the wheel. Lloyd is Coyote, the Trickster, who brings us the fire of imagination that is able to see the quantum foam of the universe in the dancing of Jackson Pollack—that allows us to feel the wild excitement of being alive. Secrets is an explosion of metaphor that reprograms our synapses, stretches our minds, and reminds us that we are all youthful poets.

 

OUR QUANTUM SPEED BRAINS:

Computer models are many orders of magnitude slower than needed to account for the speed of thought. A Neurologist has calculated that if the brain was a standard serial or a parallel computer, it would take more time than the age of the universe to perform all the necessary calculations associated with just one perceptual event. But if the brain were a quantum computer, it would try out all the various possible combinations of data arrangement at once, and thus, unify its experience. So, in essence, the brain operates very similar to how science theorizes a quantum computer to work even though quantum computers do not yet exist. (source online)

Eternal Youths, guys and gals, SECRETS is an “out of the box” anarchistic freedom manifesto, filled with adventures encountered during adventures around the globe with my cameras. It is bursts out with many friendly, heartwarming encounters with indigenous peoples around the world . It explodes with the wise works and words of creative and original writers, artists and poets . It rambles from continent to continent, from shamans and magicians to artists, poets, physicists, alchemists and metaphysics. This is not, a “how to book” Eternal youths, sisters and brothers and sister, because the only way to stay young is to just do it!

All of the myriad arts and sciences, sports, industry and politics are grist for our perpetual motion mill. We will cruise through all of mankind’s and cosmic knowledge like a baleen whale whose huge mouth’s fills with water and krill as it swims. The baleen (sieve) lowers to hold the food and spills out the water, while the whale dines on several tons of krill. We eternal youths will sieve in all or most of human and universal knowledge on our voyage and we will dine in abundance to live long and strong., The stars are our books. the galaxies and the cosmos our libraries. We will learn to see “What isn’t there.”

Vision is not about looking, as we were taught to believe, but about seeing. They may seem synonymous, but looking is selective, while seeing means to be enlightened to the truth. That is why our eyes are designed to respond to a single photon of light within a few quadrillions of a second; we were meant to be drawn by that which requires our vision. From an early age, however, most of us were taught not to see what we see — blurring our vision in the process.
Improving our vision, is to expand our awareness. In Zen Buddhism, this awakening is called a satori (or “kick in the third eye”), referring to “the eye of contemplation” that looks within to see God. When such an awakening occurs, the eyes appear unusually bright, becoming potent projectors, rather than just receptors, of light. In this state, one sees without looking, opening the door to greater vision, heightened awareness, and even precognition.
CAROLEE JOHNSON, Quantum Techniques

All images made in single exposures in a digital camera by Harvey Lloyd

Sphinx from Egyptian Air Force Chopper

“Make it distant, difficult and dangerous,” was the motto of Cooper Schoedsack Productions who made the original King Kong movie. It has been my motto as well for over a million and a half miles of adventure that will never end. Secrets of Eternal Youth is a shout to shake the world, a treasure house, a virtual cosmic library and colorful tirade about everything you can encounter in this life. It is food for our plastic brains which will keep them forever young.

Kathakali Dancer, India

Ayers Rock

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” said Heraklites. The world changes and we must change with it. That is a secret of eternal youth. Resisting change wrinkles your face and withers your body. Eternal youths, we embrace change, seek what we do not know, dine on the new, strange and mysterious.

Glacier Bay, Alaska

The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the Laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is fair, just and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

—THOMAS HUXLEY

The wild curiosity and passion of eternal youth that knows no danger or obstacle in its grand voyage into life’s mysteries never ends. Eternal youth will be served because the tide of nature’s growth in the young and in the young in heart is a towering white capped tsunami that overwhelms continents of mind sets.

Barong Dancers, Bali

All quotes from SECRETS OF ETERNAL YOUTH: www.harveylloyd.com

Suez Canal, RV Sun, from chopper

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library, whose wall are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.
–ALBERT EINSTEIN

It is a famous quote. Einstein spent much of his life trying to defend it because the theory of quantum mechanics says that there is no “definite plan,” That is Werner Heisenberg’s law of indeterminacy in the universe. Einstein famously said, “God does not play dice.” Neils Bohr replied, “Einstein, who are you to tell God what to do/ Eternal youths, guys and gals, we will spend some time with these strange ideas, as much of our digital civilization is run by the enigmatic, “queer” laws of quantum physics and metaphysics.

Without quantum mechanics there would be no transistor, and hence no personal computer; no laser, and hence no Blue-ray players. Einstein could not change or disprove the quantum laws of quantum indeterminacy in the universe and finally wrote, “All these fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no nearer to the answer to the question, ‘What are light quanta?”

We savor a fragrant delectable bouillabaisse concocted from the sometimes humorous, sometime provocative, but always new ideas adding to the myriad gardens of wild flowers of our knowledge. We roam these Elysian Fields like Olympians, bowing to the gods and never showing disrespect.

The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which there would be no boundary to space- time and so there would be no need to specify the behaviour at the boundary. There would be no singularities at which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.
—STEPHEN W. HAWKING

Just be! That’s a life. We will celebrate the long and strong life of eternal youth and the strong scientific likelihood of forever youthful immortality in our quantum holographic universe of which much more later. Enjoy, use to the fullest and exercise your brain and your curiosity as seven league boots to traverse the world . You joyfully encounter a host of new ideas, arts and sciences, everything from the Internet to the entire world. To live long and strong, to experience eternal youth is the gift without price that you alone can bestow on yourself. It is a prodigious, endless voyage of ten, a thousand or ten thousand lifetimes. C’mon aboard!

New Brains for Everyone

Recent scientific studies of our human brains show that we can add new neurons all of our lives and keep our brains eternally young. To do this, we must constantly exercise our brains by adding new information. That grows great masses of new neurons. Using our brains on repetitive subjects such as sitcom TV shows and endless social media causes those areas of our brains to shrink. That leads to brains diseases, Alzheimer’s and other mental conditions. An active brain remains a young brain. An active brain is our magic carpet to eternal youth. Like a beehive, it buzzes with activity.

Susan Barry, neurobiologist, writes in Psychology Today:

Scientific studies on neurogenesis reveal . . . We can learn new things throughout life. A person in their eighties still grows new neurons but to harness the potential of these newborn cells, we need to keep challenging ourselves, explore new things, exercise, and see the proverbial cup, not as half empty, but as half full.

Your brain – every brain – is a work in progress.
It is ‘plastic.’ From the day we’re born to the day we die, it continuously revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining, as a function of how we use it.
–MICHAEL MERZERNICH

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
–RICHARD FEYNMAN, Quantum Physicist

Eternal youths, brothers and sisters, we study everything. Our brains are a vast network of spinning interwoven galaxies, colossal cauldrons, fiery exploding clusters of knowledge filled with myriad masses of information from the beginning of time. The most advanced neuroscientists understand little of the intricate processes by which hundreds or thousands of billions of neurons in our brains, connected by a virtually impenetrable wiring maze of axons and synapses. The possible connections are virtually infinite; they communicate with each other almost instantaneously and make us conscious.

Our brains, “chemically influenced self-tuning neural networks,” never repeat their paths. They rewire constantly like gigantic immortal spiders spinning labyrinths of glittering webs to span the heavens.
To brain scientists, what causes human consciousness “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” as Churchill described Russia in 1939. The enigma is wrapped in quantum mechanics, mysteries, the TAO, physics and metaphysics.

The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say,if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning. 

-RODOLFO R. LLINAS

In an article titled “Consciousness, Our Third Eye,” Bharati Sarkar wrote “Our present state of consciousness may be likened to the tip of the iceberg of potential human awareness, of itself and of the universe.” He goes on:

Canadian psychologist Richard M. Burke, in his book Cosmic Consciousness, coined this term. It is a transpersonal mode of consciousness, an awareness of the universal mind and one’s unity with it. Its prime characteristic is a consciousness of the life and order in the universe. An individual who attains this state is often described as ‘Enlightened’ and such a person is also said to have a sense of immortality, not of attaining it but of already having it.

Burke saw this state of consciousness as the next stage in human evolution, very much as spiritualists have always seen it . . . Spiritually, consciousness is as vast as the universe, both known and unknown. The potential power of this level of consciousness has been merely touched upon and that too by a few mystics. Consciousness at this level becomes capable of magical powers, defying accepted scientific physical laws and giving us a glimpse of probable future developments in, among other things, quantum physics.

(The above on Bharati and Consciousness from Life Positive, online.)

We will land again and again on the mist shrouded, dark, mysterious and magical shores of quantum mechanics. It was the discovery of quanta or photons that led to the theory of quantum physics and metaphysics and to the subtly growing embrace of Eastern philosophy and Western physics. In the quantum world as in the TAO and Eastern world, there is no division between humans and the universal web of consciousness. We are the intelligent designers of the cosmos and eternal youths are the light of the world.

Eternal youths have endless patience to investigate every trail, smell the flowers and inhale new, often strange fragrances of knowledge that feeds our plastic brains. The Internet world, like the great flocks of snow geese, contains whirling patterns of constant new information, reformatting the virtual trillions of strands of spider webs of axons in our brains every split-second or less. If we diverge and peer into the enigmas of quantum mechanics, our brains and the similar virtual brains of the conscious Internet work in femtoseconds, million trillionths of a second.

At quantum scale, time and space as we know it vanishes.
A trillionth of a second may be a lifetime to a photon which at its Einsteinian speed of light knows no time. The much sought-after quantum computer will function in femtoseconds and perform calculations in split seconds that our current computers cannot complete in our lifetimes, even in the lifetime of the universe. The door to infinity cracks open.

The connections of the hundreds or thousand of billions of neurons in our brains exceed the still rising number of connections of the Internet. We humans are quantum computers with the oversize brains that evolution and Gaia created over aeons since the earth was born five billion years ago. We are the light that informs the universe. Cogito, ergo, sum, I think, therefore I am the universe. Eternal youths, guys and gals, our consciousness is infinite.

Harvey Lloyd

Laughter is the fountain of youth

Images copyright © 2016 Harvey Lloyd