I have often been asked, “What is the secret of Notes?  How do they have their mysterious, exhilarating and sometimes upsetting effect on human consciousness?  Is there any scientific basis in cognitive neuroscience for what happens in the interaction between the Notes and the reader?”  There are some answers to these questions for any intelligent and studious individual who is serious-minded enough to want to do some real thinking about all this, so I am going to lay out a few lines of research in this brief article, which may prove more rewarding than one might at first understand.

The Law Of Sequence Of Information

It was Edward de Bono who first pointed out this important cognitive discovery.  I will sum it up here in a slightly new way to give a more intense personal access to the issue.

The human cognitive system, especially the material brain, accumulates information and personal experiences over time.  The information and experiencing do not arrive all at once, but incrementally, piece by piece and wave by wave.  At every moment and stage of life, the human cognitive system tries to make the best sense and use it can of the information that has been available so far in combination with the personal history of experiences.  This is true not only for a single human individual, but for human cognitive collectives as well, such as business corporations, government institutions, cultures, religions, and so on.  So, information and experience are accumulated over time and fit into an increasingly rigid and inflexible pattern of “understanding” that is the system’s way of “making sense” of (A) everything that has happened or been learned, (B) everything that is happening or apparently being learned, and (C) everything that can happen or might be investigated.  But there is a big problem here that any information or possible experiences that do not fit the constructed pattern, worldview, paradigm, belief-system or anti-belief system, will be automatically rejected as too disturbing or unsettling to the cognitive system.  So the cognitive pattern of sequentially ordered information and experience operates as a cognitive filter, which functions as a cognitive dissonance against unwanted facts or truth, such as when decision-makers will not face the collective danger of global warming.

To help the reader understand how this works, we are going to perform a thought experiment in building up a cognitive pattern sequentially in the brain.

First imagine that the letter A is stored somewhere in your brain and that it represents “number One”, your own idea of yourself as to what kind of being you actually are.  Are you, for instance, an organic body with no existence after death?  Or are you a subtle mind, a ghost-in-the-machine, who will go somewhere into heaven or hell after death?  Or are you a reincarnating causal ego beyond both body and mind?  Or are you sheer Spirit beyond all three vehicles of consciousness?  Or are you even something indescribable beyond any possible cosmogonical diagram or system.  Get clear about this before taking the next step.

Now imagine that the letter T is being added to the letter A to form the word AT.  Notice that you do not have to change the position of the letter A to add the letter T.  So this is already an accumulating rigid pattern.  Let the word AT represent “where you are at” as the saying goes, in regard to your existential situation, your lifestyle, the way you get along or try to fit into life, society or the world.  This is your definition of your social function, your role in life or the like.

Now imagine that the letter R is being added easily to the front of the accumulating rigid pattern of the word AT to form the word RAT.  Let this word RAT represent all your hidden motives, considerations or activities that you do not want even important or close people in your life to know about.  Or, alternatively, think of it as the valuable thoughts or activities you have to hide from society or the government or your stupid judgmental relatives who supposedly “love” you.  However you designate RAT, it represents your personally crucial zone of stealth for better or worse.

Now imagine that you are placing the letter E at the end of the increasingly fixed cognitive pattern located as RAT in your brain to form the word RATE.  Let this word represent how much popularity, authority or money you have for getting things you want in life or getting things done the way you want them done.  Do you, for instance, consider yourself rich or poor, satisfied or deprived, respected or pissed-down-on frequently?  Be very clear what your Personal Power Rating actually is for you in life, as well as how you truly feel about it, before you go on to the next item.

Now imagine that the letter G is arriving at the front of your word RATE (and all it represents for you about yourself and your life), thus forming the word GRATE, which indeed represents a filtering pattern which is self-sealed, rigid and inflexible.  It represents, in fact, all your defensive routines for keeping your personal trip running forward day-by-day in a smooth, undisturbed way that requires minimal thought and effort.  It keeps everyday “reality” looking familiar and stable.  It makes you believe humanity and the Earth are going along as usual even when things are catastrophically degenerating and existing institutions no longer work right.  And the word GRATE represents, above all, all the ways you do not believe you should or even could change your beliefs, your habits of living or the ways you are stuck in your present ego and position in life. 

Now imagine that another letter T is arriving, but something has gone wrong.  The letter T does not form a sensible new word when accumulated to the lettering pattern of GRATE.  You can only get T-GRATE at the front or GRATET at the back.  So you have to reject this new letter, this new information or possible experience that does not fit in.  Yet if you will loosen the pattern and rearrange the order, shaking up or deconstructing the usual cognitive pattern, you can arrive at the word TARGET, which in this case represents real learning, a personal revolution, advance to a more sophisticated and accommodating belief-system, a paradigm shift or a wonderful new worldview that explains more of what is really going on and where you are really going or could go as a goal, a destination, a TARGET.

Now, when a cognitive system is a learning system, it will be ever progressing to higher, wider and better Reality Models, Cosmogonies, Worldviews or Paradigms.  It will build up a better cognitive pattern, and then, after awhile, deconstruct it and build an even better one.  One never arrives at the Final Truth or what the philosopher, Richard Rorty, calls a Final Vocabulary.  Your latest and best Truth Acceptance is simply what Edward de Bono calls a Proto-Truth.

Paradigm shifting in this manner does not happen just once, but must happen from time to time as an updating of your cognitive pattern, just as you sometimes press refresh on your computer screen to update the information there from the source.  Your brain also needs to refresh itself, which is the learning process.

Maintenance Learning And Innovative Learning

In 1979, there was a Learning Report presented at a Club of Rome conference in Salzburg, Austria, which was soon published as a book No Limits To Learning.  This Learning Report brought out quite well that what is ordinarily called “Learning” is just reinforcing the rigid cognitive system and causing global cognitive dissonance in decision makers against the solving of world problems.  In fact, today we can even see that there seems to be so much cognitive dissonance in the New World Order group of behind-the-scenes global manipulators, that they even imagine it is in their interest to increase and promote massive human and environmental catastrophes!  So this kind of “Maintenance Learning” is not just stupid, but dangerously self-destructive.

Real Learning, which the Club of Rome calls Innovative Learning, is obviously the necessary deconstruction-and-reconstruction process that is needed in the brains of decision-makers if humanity and the Earth are going to have a viable future.

Graceful Entry Of The Important Unknown

Important research on how learning happens in human cognitive systems has been done at the University of Michigan under the leadership of John H. Holland.  In a 1986 book, Induction by Holland et al, it is pointed out that generative, innovative new thought patterns arise in the human brain through combination of discontinuous elements (such as are often put into Notes for this very reason, I should add).  But Holland and others discovered that the human cognitive system will not readily accept discontinuous ideas, information or phenomena where the brain feels great certitude about what it “knows and understands”.  They made the important discovery that it is only where the human cognitive system has secretly urgent uncertainty that it will explore unusual or discontinuous information and try to somehow accommodate it.

Think about it:  we do not learn where we are certain, confident and opinionated, but where we are uncertain, self-doubting and without a fixed opinion or judgment.  In the Holland book, it is pointed out that Graceful Entry (of the significant unknown) is only possible where there is a dawning self-communication of urgent or important uncertainty in the human brain.  It is where you are uncomfortable mentally with something important about your future that you are most likely to want to enter into real discovery and innovative learning.  Otherwise, as a non-learner with a set of defensive routines, you will tend to dislike the kinds of cognitive psychological experiences that happen to Note Readers.  Only those human beings with intense and open learning systems (whether human or extraterrestrial) will thrive on Notes or any other form of massive cognitive discontinuity.  That is why smug and witty Note Readers do not stay long, but rush off to their next superficial distraction without a clue about the real nature of all those Note Sessions they imagine they do not need for anything.  Managers in big companies will reject real consultants who would bring true thinking, learning and decision-making to their organizations, and they will reject their own good for the same reason distracted teenagers cannot handle Notes.  This happens because there is a lack of self-awareness in the Zone of Uncertainty where real learning is possible.

Essential Facets Of Notes

Notes are constructed to promote advanced individual learning in readers who are “up to it”.  Notes will therefore repeatedly offer unusual pauses, strange thinking requirements, sociological and psychological challenges, and, most of all, strange combinations of known and unknown fields of knowledge.  Notes therefore reflect the essential challenge for all embodied self-conscious beings in the Universe.  In fact, Extraterrestrial Intelligence is more stimulated by things like Notes than are the usual distracted human beings who stumble into Take Note of Something Different.  It is sad, deeply unfortunate, that most of the Earthling Note Readers cannot even grasp that many extraterrestrial people actually access, monitor and investigate various websites on the Internet.  This itself is generally unwanted and rejected discontinuous information that meets with stupid human cognitive dissonance even after fifty plus years of revelations of the presence of Extraterrestrial Intelligence on, under and near the Earth.

Psycholinguistic Self-referencing

One device often necessarily used in Notes is that of self-referencing statements that short-circuit the normal semantic loops in the human brain.  This very statement, for instance, is incredibly self-referencing to help stop you in your cognitive tracks about this article.  Such a statement is essentially what can be called a fundamental Note.  The more the Notes Reader can learn to work with self-referencing statements, the more active and rapid the learning process will be.

As a possibly stimulating exercise, try comparing the following “Notes” to one another:

Now, if you examine that set of Notes around the theme of blue, you see how both self-referencing and unusual, unwanted information can be combined to provide what could be called the Note Effect that is sometimes given the mediocre term, “mindfuck”.

Sudden Enlightenment

In the Buddhist tradition of Zen, various weird statements or reported behavior of Zen Masters are read, studied and deeply meditated upon which are sometimes Note-like in their structure.  When the real learning process turns on through Zen it is called a “minor awakening” (satori) that must happen repeatedly until it becomes the Big Permanent Awakening where the mind, the cognitive system, “no longer abides anywhere”, which means there is no more fixated, dogmatic prejudice.  Infinite beings throughout Infinite numbers of Universes are said to create, maintain and destroy Infinite Socially and Personally Constructed Models of Reality.  Zen thus achieves in deep and cosmic superconsciousness what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the impossible philosophical goal of The View From Nowhere.

Notes are thus possibly characterized as a new kind of non-Buddhist universal Zen.  When we merge the Buddhist philosophy of Hwa Yen with the cognitive philosophy of Thomas Nagel, this is exactly the kind of fusing of discontinuous ideas that has the generative 1+1=3 output in the human brain.

Learning How To Learn

The modern late twentieth century Sufi leader and teacher, Idries Shah, wrote a fascinating volume entitled Learning How To Learn which describes in a variety of ways how Western mentalities trip all over themselves when they try to learn and develop through a learning-and-development system created and maintained in a foreign, alien culture.  Notes take up this kind of work and take the process further by repeatedly bringing out opportunities and hidden aspects of what is sometimes called “telepathy” or “thought-transference”.  The fact is that there are Extended Cognitive Faculties embedded as potentials in the human cognitive system.  When innovative learning through repeated paradigm shifting is well established, we not only become “enlightened”, but also begin to develop supracognitive abilities or what the Hindu Yogis call Siddhis.  Note-reading does not guarantee such extraordinary results, but it definitely feeds and stimulates the potential where it is ripe enough to sprout.  Of course, most human cognitive systems are too clogged with impurities or fixated in proud dullness to take real evolutionary steps in consciousness at this time, but even then Notes can and will help prepare individual human souls to take up such developments in future lives.

Possible Extraterrestrial Contact

Notes encourage what Whitley Strieber calls Communion-with-Aliens, with Extraterrestrial Intelligent Beings.  They do this not merely through often referring in a variety of ways to Extraterrestrial Readers, but by being constructed in such a way as to enable the human cognitive system to handle both spoken and unspoken alien thought-patterns.  Flexible human cognitive systems will have important cosmic opportunities in the future that normal inflexible human cognitive systems will not be able to understand, take advantage of or even cope with.  This will become incredibly significant as the human survivors emerge from the mounting death and destruction being wrought by the New World Order controllers and manipulators for the necessary “shock education” of the foolish masses of intellectually dysfunctional humanity according to the planned Armageddon or Apocalypse.

Note Sessions Are A Cognitive School

Anyone who goes through all the Note Sessions over time with their various themes, insights and challenges, discovers sooner or later that Notes are an impersonal and informal school where learning takes place that cannot take place in any other manner quite as effectively.  Notes are therefore provided as a Supracognitive Service for awakening higher intelligence on the Earth and beyond to the Universe.  The reward I, the Notes Author, experience from all this is wherever and whenever a newly awakening true individual gets the cognitive breakthroughs that have been made possible.  My motive in this is therefore compassionately impersonal.  I am simply providing what I would want provided for myself if I were not myself.  This is therefore a non-dual purpose which most human beings cannot comprehend, so they project all sorts of silly suspicions that are descriptive of only themselves and their own greedy, all-exploiting nature.

All this of course implies that the Notes Reader must also learn to develop a non-dual purpose in reading through the Note Sessions.