[Drifter]

pls forgive the obvious "verbosity" and so called "machine gunning", [no stone unturned, ever curious soul, further, and not put forth in the spirit of being "testy"]

Thanking you kindly in advance.
D.

" Man's two basic types of operational faculties, reason and feeling, are both inherently unreliable, as our history of precarious individual and collective survival attests. Although we ascribe our actions to reason, man in fact operates primarily out of pattern recognition; the logical arrangement of data serves mainly to enhance a pattern recognition system that then becomes "truth". But nothing is ever "true," except under certain circumstances and then only from a particular viewpoint, characteristically unstated.

As a result thoughtful man deduces that all of his problems arise from the difficulty of "knowing." Ultimately, the mind arrives at epistemology, the branch of philosophy that examines the question of how---and to what degree---man really knows anything. Such philosophical discourse may seem either erudite or irrelevant, but the questions they pose are at the very core of human experience. No matter where we start in an examination of human knowledge, we always end up looking at the phenomena of awareness and the nature of human consciousness. And we eventually come to the same realization: Ant further advance in man's condition requires a verifiable basis for knowing, upon which we may place our trust.

The main obstacle to man's development, then, is his lack of self knowledge, about the nature of consciousness itself. If we look within ourselves at the instant-by-instant processes of our minds, we'll soon notice that the mind acts much more rapidly than it would acknowledge. It becomes apparent that the notion that our actions are based on thoughtful decisions is a grand illusion. The decision making process is a function of consciousness itself; the mind makes choices based on millions of pieces of data and their correlations and projections, far beyond conscious comprehension, and with enormous rapidity. This is a global function dominated by energy patterns that the new science of non-linear dynamics terms attractors.

Consciousness automatically chooses what it deems from moment to moment because that ultimately is the only function of which it is capable. The relative weight and merit given to certain data are determined by a predominant attractor pattern operating in the individual or in a collective group of minds. These patterns can be identified, described, and calibrated; out of that information arises a totally new understanding of human behavior, history, and the destiny of mankind. And as we explore the nature of man's problems, it becomes clear that there has never been a reliable experimental yardstick with which to measure and interpret man's motivations and experiences over the course of his history. " [Until now]