Virtual reality in medicine and health will deepen our access to Spirit

Virtual reality in medicine and health will augment and expand our sense of reality – yet it’s only a harbinger of deeper access to consciousness. 

E is out, Cognitive is In

Virtual reality in medicine and health will deepen our access to Spirit, and 2016 will be known as the year that virtual reality penetrated mainstream use.

Costs will continue to decrease as virtual reality becomes more widely adopted.

The Internet will be available on a contact lens, and for many, physical reality will be indistinguishable from virtual reality.  (Except for lattes and brownies … or maybe not).

Also, virtual reality in medicine and health (AI) will be part of our lives. The tools we use today – the very ones I played with this morning – will seem primitive.

Cognitive tools will be here.

By the way: “Cognitive” is the word being used by IBM Watson for machines that learn and think.  There’s now cognitive banking, cognitive finance, cognitive business in general, cognitive products and services, cognitive engagement; cognitive Retail,Health, travel, talent hiring, cooking, R&D … you name it, “e” is out and cognitive is in.

Cognitive lawyering … well for now, I will be writing the blog posts…..

FDA Legal Issues and the new Virtual Reality

As a healthcare and FDA lawyer, I am seeing more innovators come up with virtual reality solutions to healthcare problems.

From a legal perspective, there are issues with claims and intended use – just as there have been with mobile medical apps.

FDA will regulate some as medical devices, while others will be outside the bounds of FDA enforcement discretion and simply be tools to increase self-perception, self-healing, self-knowledge, or maybe in some other categories such as toys.

Some will be medical, others for healing; we will have, for example, virtual reality headsets to treat PTSD, versus those that encourage, stimulate, or enhance meditation.

The line between “medicine,” which is regulated (in FDA terms, intended for diagnosis and treatment), and wellness (or healing or general health) is increasingly tenuous.

Whatever the use, whatever the legal box, virtual reality will start shaping our lives in 2016.

Are We Living Inside a Simulation

Many people have wondered whether we are living inside a simulation.  This was popularized in The Matrix.

Once we start using virtual reality products, we’ll be living parts of our lives within our own created simulations.

Are we a simulation of consciousness?

We must be real because we have these physical lives.

Part of the journey of consciousness for me has been living simultaneously in the body and out of the body.  Once we have virtual reality, it won’t sound so unusual to talk about out-of-body experiences.  Most people are living a great deal of time “online” anyway.

But what about the part of mystical experience that is connected to feelings of love, oneness, unity consciousness, compassion?

Not just “the data.”

Utopian or dystopian?

I spent some of 2015 thinking about dystopian futures.  The warnings of Nick Bostrom on the academic side, and Elon Musk on the corporate side, about runaway artificial intelligence.

There is a bright side, though.

Artificial intelligence – I believe we will plug in the “data” of all of our humanity, all of our love, and thus we will build something in our image, worthy and spectacular and grand and filled with compassion, empathy, and overflowing with unimaginable tenderness toward all of creation.

Mystical experiences keep coming

Life continues to be miraculous.

Everyone is talking about tech – and yet consciousness permeates my being, fills me with Light.

I would like to talk to IBM Watson about the kundalini energy, What is happening to my physical body when I have these intense inner experiences, which I feel both as out-of-the-body journeys and in the body?

Figure Eights

Last night, I received guidance to do a meditation, holding arms and hands in a figure Eight, with someone close to me. I was told that this would ground the energy between us – the Shakti infuses her from the otherworldly places I visit when I meditate or sleep, and she in turn grounds me. We form a circuit.

I was told to regard her as the Divine Goddess in human form.

Yes, human souls come clothed in personalities, and there are disagreements and squabbles. However, I was told to see all these in the context of the Light – as training for enlightenment. All challenges are food for consciousness – like the sand that irritates the oyster to produce the pearl. We are shaped by divine love. Regard your significant other as an embodiment of feminine energy, with all the power and beauty that this carries.

I could see the golden-white column of light, crowned by the sparkling Blue Peal, radiant and shimmering in Eternal no-space and all-space, cascading into the vortex of peace created by our loving figure Eight, symbol of infinity.

As a healthcare lawyer I represent healers.

I am also a healer myself.  I studied with Barbara Brennan for four years.

Today I gave counsel to a client who is a qigong healer, on telemedicine issues.  I could literally feel the client’s qi coming through the phone – it had a rich, nurturing quality.

Of course, she can’t make medical claims.  And yet the power of Spirit is enormous.

We think everything is physical, yet even string theory tells us that there are universes within universes.

Or, to cite one of the greatest philosophical works ever written:

Horton Hears a Who.

Playing

Another mystical experience that came through this morning.

I had the grace to enter the thought-free state.

I was watching everything from the many eyes of consciousness.

Everything was imbued with presence.

The Internet of Things was here sans Internet – call it the aliveness of everything. I see shimmering dots of energy in the physical plane.

If we are a simulation, then IOT is a metaphor, anyway.  Everything has deeper significance.

I am reminded that before enlightenment, mountains are just mountains and rivers are just rivers.  During enlightenment, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers.  After enlightenment, mountains are just mountains and rivers are just rivers.

The Virtual Year

2016 is the year that virtual reality will come on the market in sufficient significance to alter humanity’s perception of the power of choice-based awareness. (I am writing in a certain way because these chunks of information are coming to me like this.)

And chunks of reality get downloaded through consciousness, if you follow the metaphor.

We have access to a much greater world of intelligence than our primitive drives. Those drives are still part of our heritage, valued and valuable. There is a “me” and an “I” and there is a collective intelligence, and there are collective archetypes and memory and ancestral wisdom and soul knowledge.

There is a story about Baba Muktananda who once had someone asking him about the meaning of life. Baby took a long time and gazed into the man’s eyes. Baba had a piece of grass under his bare foot. Finally, the man asked him: “what are you thinking?” Baba said something like this: “I am not thinking. I am experiencing the bliss of my toe making contact with this blade of grass.”

It’s like one of those Zen stories or haikus where you enter a fresh perception of reality by attuning to the deliciousness that sensory contact with the physical world brings. Ahh, this is more than neuro-stimulation virtually.

Muktananda said:

Through intense deep meditation you reach a state that is beyond thought, beyond change, beyond imagination, beyond differences and duality. Once you can stay in that state for a while and come out of it without losing any of it, then the inner divine love will begin to pour through you. You will not see people as different, separate individuals. You will see your own Self in everyone around you. Then the flow of love from within you will be constant and unbroken….