A metabelief is a belief about beliefs themselves. It is above or on the next level to the belief under consideration. Thus, a metabelief operator is a concept or a function or an agent that operates on, transforms, or introduces changes into belief systems. The metabelief operator is outside the belief system that it operates upon. It thinks outside the box, or at least it perceives that there is a box. A metabelief operator transforms beliefs, and thereby transforms the perception of reality.

The concept of the metabelief operator is useful in understanding the problems posed by the process of our making facsimiles of the various facets of the realities external and internal. Here the term operator is used in the mathematical sense of something that operates on something else to change or transform it.

The metabelief operator can be weak, strong, or nonexistent. If we are quite content with our facsimiles of inner and outer realities, and content with our life as it occurs, there may be little need for a metabelief operator. We are content with our beliefs with regard to our family, business, religion and politics, and our beliefs work satisfactorily. Our intention is not devoted to questioning and transforming our beliefs.

In this case, the metabelief operator may be so weak as to be insignificant or function only to entertain the self. A crisis, whether physical, mental, or spiritual, can activate a metabelief operator in someone who previously did not have such an operator, or strengthen a weak one. A brush with death, a profound religious experience, a serious accident, a prolonged illness, a financial disaster, or a sudden unexpected confrontation with violence, can generate a need to change beliefs about Self, about external reality, and about internal reality. Here the metabelief operator may appear and function for a time. It may continue its operations or it may become dormant again.

Some people, geniuses of one sort or another, acquire metabelief operators quite early in life and continue to use them throughout their lives or they may let them die. Certain artists, scientists, businessmen, and politicians are creative through such metabelief operators. Once successful, the need for the metabelief operators may become weakened because the beliefs have become satisfied and the need for change has approached zero. Others maintain their metabelief operators throughout their lives. Curiosity and interest in challenging and transforming beliefs may be kept alive for decades and be unaffected by aging.

Consensus reality is that set of beliefs, which includes assumptions, postulates, interpretations, and simulations, that we have learned are real and true in our culture, society, family, school, and so on. Consensus reality is that which is agreed upon to be real and true by a family, a group, a nation, or a group of nations. Some examples are the various human legal structures, like city, county, state, and nation. These are pictures of realities created by media like newspapers and radio, financial realities such as those created by banks, taxes, salaries and wages, and the scientific community’s picture of reality.

It is fairly easy to see consensus reality at work in fanatical cults, yet generally difficult to see their operation in our world. Yet, in a sense, we all live in a cult whose members agree upon what is real and unreal, what is right and wrong, good and bad, possible and impossible.

In other words, consensus reality is a collection of simulations of internal reality and external reality, with which members of a particular group agree or disagree. Most of our sacred beliefs are actually agreed upon simulations of reality. Feedback, positive or negative, from lovers, family, as well as with religious, political, and business groups, generates beliefs and disbeliefs in each of us. Once programmed, beliefs are difficult to unearth because we are generally unaware of their powerful existence and influence on our thinking, doing, and feeling. The degree to which we function from this programming is, in a sense, the degree to which we are biorobots. Humans are distinctly different from robots, however. The human biocomputer can program its Self.

An important subset of the consensus realities is paper realities and their counterpart-film and tape realities. In our society we record on paper our contracts, our marriages, our wills, our financial transactions, our news, our history, our thoughts, our opinions. These records determine our actions, our thinking, and our doing to a large extent.

We live up to, or break, our contracts. We marry one person and live together according to our beliefs as to what is a marriage. We make a will in the expectation that its provisions will be carried out after our death. A checking account works because enough people believe in its paper reality. Otherwise a check for a thousand dollars is nothing more than a worthless piece of paper. We believe or disbelieve stories printed in newspapers and shown in TV newscasts. We tend to believe as true that which we read in books and magazines and what we see in motion pictures and on TV To a large extent, paper reality represents consensus reality. We are immersed in a representation of reality fed to us on paper, on film, on tape.

The metabelief operator can chance beliefs at various rates, from zero to the maximum speed available to the person. During a crisis, the speed of change can be such that the basic beliefs change in a few seconds, hours, or days. By contrast, during slow social change it may take years for beliefs to change.

Consensus reality itself is an aspect of a very large hyperstable multiple individual feedback system. It changes slowly in the absence of war, violence, or catastrophe. metabelief operators derived from consensus reality reflect this slow rate of change characteristic. In fact, fast belief changes are generally suspect by the group at large. The person is considered abnormal, far out, diseased, mentally ill, a fanatic, or unstable. They go from operating at the norm to being deviant, different from the group.

The consensus reality feedback loop keeps belief systems stable, static and unchanging. Getting out of the consensus reality feedback loop is necessary to speed up belief change. But how can we do so when we are quite literally immersed in it? There is only one way, go into the void, a place devoid of sensory stimulation and feedback from the consensus reality.

Benevolence is the expression of kindness and altruism. It has been described as a commitment to achieving the values derivable from life with other people in society, by recognizing their humanity, independence and individuality, and the harmony between their interests and ours. Benevolence represents strength, conviction, and uncompromising good. It is the disposition to do well for the love of mankind, accompanied with a desire to promote happiness.

I composed this piece of music on the weekend before the 2008 presidential election. For me, it represents the celebration of a powerful change of consciousness in the United States that has been witnessed worldwide. I used Digital Performer, Symphonic Instrument, Miroslav Philharmonik and MachFive. All of the percussion samples were downloaded from The Freesound Project.

The self preservation instinct appears to our consciousness under the guise of that deep rooted clinging to life, that desire to live, which characterises every living thing. It is this instinct, functioning simply in simply organised creatures, that leads them to seek food and avoid danger, and also causes that complex organism, a civilised man, to carry out the elaborate activities of “earning a living.”

It is essentially a selfish instinct, for it leads the individual to regard his own welfare alone, and to consider others only so far as their existence is essential to his. For instance, shooting and hunting during the breeding season are forbidden by law, not out of consideration for the hunted creatures, but because the continuation of their species is useful to us.

Its influence, however, is often modified by the two other great instincts whose influence may become so strong under certain circumstances as to induce a man not only to disregard his own interests, but even to lay down his life for others.

In many varieties of animals, however, only two instincts are present, self-preservation and reproduction; but in animals that are associated together into herds or packs, a third instinct is developed, the social instinct. When this occurs, the functioning of the self-preservation instinct is greatly modified; the individual no longer owes his existence solely to his power to cope with his environment, but depends mainly upon his ability to keep his place in the herd; and upon the social organisation devolves the task of adaptation and survival. The strayed sheep is soon hunted down, the solitary wolf starves.

This is equally true of man, who is also a social animal. The misery of Central Europe, in the breakdown of social organisation following upon the war, has shown us the helplessness of the individual human being and his complete dependence upon herd life.

The self-preservation instinct and its ruthless functioning under the law of natural selection has furnished a theme to many moralists and sociologists of the materialistic type, but they are apt to forget that the socialisation of humanity has changed the nature of the problem; the unit of survival is no longer the individual, but the social organisation of which he is a member. The law of self-preservation has given place to the law of group preservation, and the centre of psychic gravity is shifted. The importance of this point cannot be over-estimated in practical psychology.

By some psychologists the instinct of nutrition is distinguished from that of self-preservation, but for all practical purposes they are identical.

It must be borne in mind, in applying the standards of psychology to the human character, that in the more highly developed types of human being the self-preservation instinct is not fulfilled simply by the continuance of physical life; there is self-preservation of the personality as well as of the bodily existence, and unless a man has adequate scope for self-expression and self-development, he will experience that sense of incompleteness and imperfection characteristic of the repression of an instinct.

Gold is a highly prized precious metal, having been used as money, in jewelery, in sculpture, and for ornamentation since the beginning of recorded history. The metal occurs as nuggets or grains in rocks, underground veins and in alluvial deposits. Pure gold is dense, soft, shiny and has a bright yellow color traditionally considered attractive.

It has been known and highly valued since prehistoric times. It may have been the first metal used by humans and was valued for ornamentation and rituals. Egyptian hieroglyphs from as early as 2600 BC describe gold. The earliest known map is known as the Turin papyrus and shows the plan of a gold mine in Nubia together with indications of the local geology. Large mines also occurred across the Red Sea in what is now Saudi Arabia.

The Romans developed new methods for extracting gold on a large scale using hydraulic mining methods. One of their largest mines was in Spain, where seven long aqueducts enabled them to sluice most of a large alluvial deposit. The legend of the golden fleece may refer to the use of fleeces to trap gold dust from placer deposits in the ancient world. 

The Mali Empire in Africa was famed throughout the old world for its large amounts of gold. Mansa Musa, ruler of the empire, gave away so much gold that it took over a decade for the economy across North Africa in 1324 to recover, due to the rapid inflation that it initiated. The European exploration of the Americas was fueled in no small part by reports of the gold ornaments displayed in great profusion by Native American peoples, especially in Central America, Peru, and Colombia.

One main goal of Medieval alchemists was to produce gold from other substances, presumably by the interaction with a mythical substance called the philosopher’s stone. Although they never succeeded in this attempt, the alchemists promoted an interest in what can be done with substances, and this laid a foundation for today’s chemistry.

During the 19th century, gold rushes occurred whenever large gold deposits were discovered. The first documented discovery of gold in the United States was at the Reed Gold Mine near Georgeville, North Carolina in 1803. Further gold rushes occurred in California, Colorado, and Klondike.

Gold is the most malleable and ductile metal. A single gram can be beaten into a sheet of one square meter, or an ounce into 300 square feet. Gold leaf can be beaten thin enough to become translucent. The transmitted light appears greenish blue, because gold strongly reflects yellow and red.

In various countries, gold is used as a standard for monetary exchange. Gold formed the basis for the gold standard of international currency used before the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. Pure gold is too soft for ordinary use as coins and is typically hardened by alloying with copper or other base metals. The gold content of gold alloys is measured in carats (k), pure gold being designated as 24k.

High quality pure metallic gold is tasteless. Some modern esotericists and forms of alternative medicine assign metallic gold a healing power. Gold flake was used by the nobility in Medieval Europe as a decoration in foodstuffs and drinks, either to demonstrate the host’s wealth or in the belief that something that valuable and rare must be beneficial for one’s health. Goldwasser is a traditional herbal liqueur produced in Schwabach, Germany, and contains flakes of gold leaf. 

Gold alloys are used in restorative dentistry, especially in tooth restorations, such as crowns and permanent bridges. The gold alloys’ slight malleability facilitates the creation of a superior molar mating surface with other teeth and produces results that are generally more satisfactory than those produced by the creation of porcelain crowns. The use of gold crowns in more prominent teeth such as incisors is favored in some cultures and discouraged in others.

Because of its historically high value, much of the gold mined throughout history is still in circulation in one form or another. 75% of all gold ever produced has been extracted since 1910. It has been estimated that all the gold in the world that has ever been refined would form a single cube 66 feet wide on each side.

Recent research undertaken by Sir Frank Reith of the Australian National University shows that microbes play an important role in forming gold deposits, transporting and precipitating gold to form grains and nuggets that collect in alluvial deposits.

The Pineapple Express is a non-technical, shorthand term popular in the news media for a meteorological phenomenon which is characterized by a strong and persistent flow of atmospheric moisture and associated heavy rainfall from the waters adjacent to the Hawaiian Islands and extending to the Pacific coast of North America. The Pineapple Express is driven by a strong, southern branch of the Polar jetstream and is usually marked by the presence of a surface frontal boundary which is typically either slow or stationary, with waves of low pressure traveling along its axis. Each of these low pressure systems brings enhanced rainfall.

The conditions are often created by the Madden-Julian oscillation, an equatorial rainfall pattern which feeds its moisture into this pattern. The combination of moisture laden air, atmospheric dynamics, and orographic enhancement resulting from the passage of this air over the mountain ranges of the West Coast causes some of the most torrential rains to occur in the region. Many Pineapple Express events follow or occur simultaneously with major arctic troughs in the Northwestern United States, often leading to major snowmelt flooding with warm, tropical rains falling on frozen, snow laden ground. Examples of this are the December 1964 Pacific Northwest flood and the Willamette Valley Flood of 1996.

The San Francisco Bay Area is occasionally affected by a Pineapple Express. When it visits, the heavy, persistent rainfall typically causes flooding of local streams as well as urban flooding. In the decades before about 1980, the local term for a Pineapple Express was Hawaiian Storm. During the second week of January, 1952, a series of Hawaiian storms swept into Central California, causing widespread flooding around the Bay Area. The same storms brought a blizzard of heavy, wet snow to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The greatest flooding in Northern California since the 1800s occurred in 1955 as a result of a series of Hawaiian storms, with the greatest damage in the Sacramento Valley around Yuba City.

A Pineapple Express battered Southern California from January 7 through January 11, 2005. This storm was the biggest to hit Southern California since the El Niño of 1998. The storm caused mud slides and flooding, with one desert location just north of Morongo Valley receiving about 9 inches of rain, and some locations on south and southwest facing mountain slopes receiving spectacular totals. San Marcos Pass, in Santa Barbara County, received 24.57 inches, and Opid’s Camp in the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles County was deluged with 31.61 inches of rain in the five day period.

The Puget Sound region from Olympia, Washington to Vancouver, BC received several inches of rain per day in November 2006 from a series of successive Pineapple Express storms that caused massive flooding in all major regional rivers and mudslides which closed the mountain passes. These storms included heavy winds which are not usually associated with the phenomenon. Regional dams opened their spillways to 100% as they had reached full capacity due to rain and snowmelt. Officials referred to the storm system as the worst in a decade on November 8, 2006. Portions of Oregon were also affected, including over 14 inches in one day at Lee’s Camp in the Coast Range.

Joy is both the physiological experience of warmth and satisfaction and the cognitive assessment that this is the way things should be. Joy, happiness, pleasure, is its own incentive; it is what makes survival and propagation of the species worthwhile.

Some of the earliest research on happiness was serendipitous. In the 1950s James Olds and Peter Miler, hoping to influence learning, placed an electrode into the hypothalamus of a rat. When the rat pressed a bar connected to the electrode, the hypothalamus was stimulated. The researchers concluded that the rat perceived this sensation as pleasurable because it proceeded to press the bar up to 4,000 times an hour, and would allow itself to starve rather than stop. They had hit upon the pleasure center of the brain. Since then, research with humans has shown that the hypothalamus is just one of several pleasure centers of the brain, among them the septum and the nucleus accumbens.

Neurotransmitters and endorphins play an important role in the perception of pleasure. But dopamine is a key factor, and the one currently getting the most attention. Each of the pleasure centers uses dopamine as a transmitter. If a rat is trained to push a lever for internal stimulation to a pleasure center and is then given a drug such as pimozide or haloperidol that blocks the action of dopamine, the rat will stop pushing the lever. Pleasure is often muted in people who are taking conventional antipsychotic drugs, which block the dopamine receptors. The drugs are used to stop hallucinations and delusions, but often produce a state of joylessness and a lack of motivation and drive. As this can complicate treatment, newer drugs that have less of this effect are being developed to treat psychoses. Meanwhile, drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines work in the brain by increasing dopamine levels. But if dopamine, or any of its artificial substitutes reaches levels that are too high, hypomania or even mania can result.

It is hard to imagine a disorder arising from too much happiness, but there are several that can result from not having enough happiness or enough internal reinforcement and feelings of pleasure. Reward deficiency syndrome, a concept coined by Ken Blum at the University of Texas, is helpful in understanding the complexities of addiction and compulsive behavior. This idea states that a lack of internal rewards leads a person to self-medicate with substances or with behavior thai is rewarding. We see evidence for this in the statistics for conduct disorder and ADD; children who have either of these illnesses are 5 times more likely to be addicted to drugs or alcohol as adults compared with the general population.

While different neurotransmitter systems cascade upon one another in the reward mechanism of the human brain, perhaps the most important interaction is that of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, a group of neurons that have a special relationship to reward and motivation. It is located just beneath the front of the striatum, a part of the basal ganglia which is involved in movement and cognition. If the nucleus accumbens is lesioned in lab rats that normally push a lever to receive addictive drugs such as cocaine, the rats will stop pushing.

Recent research at the University of Cagliari has shown that within the nucleus accumbens there is a further division of function. In a study that supports conclusions about the addictive effect of nicotine, were injected with nicotine directly into the brain and scientists observed corresponding increases of dopamine and activity in the nucleus accumbens. This area of the brain behaves similarly when cocaine, amphetamine, or morphine is administered. An important finding in this study is that a difference was identified between the action of the outer shell of the nucleus accumbens and its inner core. The outer shell seems to be most involved in emotion, motivation, and addiction. This area has direct connections to the limbic system and is part of the extended amygdala, which serves as a link between the brain and the forebrain.

This area is important for learning, in part because it tags information with a signal of intensity that tells the rest of the brain to pay attention. Stimulating this area with an electrode helps rats to learn more quickly and use more extensive areas of the cortex during learning. The extended amygdala’s emotional coloring of learning affects our notions about the rewards and dangers of different stimuli.

There is still much to be learned from research on addiction. A research group at Yale University is examining the different roles that dopamine receptor subtypes play in creating and maintaining addiction. Understanding the processes of addiction and motivation more thoroughly could possibly remove the stigma and improve treatment for disorders ranging from alcoholism and drug abuse to gambling and sex and food addictions.

One of the most intriguing emotions in the spectrum of joy is love. While most of us wax poetic about it, some researchers are breaking it down in typically rigorous laboratory fashion. According to Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University, there are three distinctly different physiological and emotional categories of lovelust, attraction, and attachment, and biologically, at least, they all relate to the ancient drive to mate. Fisher says that each behavior evolved with a different purpose. Lust evolved to get you out looking; attraction evolved to make you focus and expend your energy on one specific individual; and attachment evolved so you would stay with that individual and raise offspring once mating was accomplished.

Using MRI scans that show chemical activity in the brain, Fisher has found that lust is associated primarily with estrogen and androgens. Attraction, however, is associated with elation and a craving for emotional union, which may be linked to the monoamines such as seratonin. The neurotransmitters associated with long-term attachment, a behavior evidenced by close body contact, separation anxiety, and a sense of calm, security, and peace with a to find. Fisher hopes that the results of her ongoing work will show that the stages of love are based at least as much in brain chemistry and physiology as they are in psychology, further evidence backing up the thesis that emotion is not one system in the brain but multiple systems that tie together workings of the brain and the body. We all know this is true: early in our relationships with our current lovers or spouses, our hearts raced when we suddenly heard their voices on the phone; we had butterflies in our stomachs when we prepared to meet them.

These kinds of physical sensations are linked to increased quantities of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepineph rifle in the brain’s pleasure centers, as well as other chemicals such as oxytocin, endorphins, and phenylethylamine (PEA), known as the “love drug.” These brain chemicals are also the ones long associated with various states of euphoria and in particular with the ecstasy caused by drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines, as well as with the high that long-distance runners report experiencing. The chemical compounds in chocolate act like nicotine, causing the release of dopamine in the pleasure centers.

Of course, not all joy is brought on by physiological stimuli. We are happy when we receive praise, find a dollar, or finish a puzzle. When ever I show a picture of my basset hounds to someone, the person inevitably smiles. These stimuli start the pleasure ball rolling by eliciting a small squirt of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in the pleasure centers.

One of the most joyful of emotions is laughter, but the neurochemistry of it is hard to explain. We laugh when something strikes us as funny. But we also laugh when we are nervous and sometimes just because someone else is laughing. Laughter derives from the primary emotion of joy, but it’s a bit confounding because of the many and varied circumstances that trigger it.

Robert Provine, a behavioral neurobiologist at the University of Maryland, studied students on college campuses to find out exactly what made people laugh; 1,200 “laugh episodes” later, he was convinced that most laughter has little to do with jokes or funny stories. Clearly, social context is important; people laugh as noted when they’re nervous as well as when they are amused, and they may laugh cynically when disappointed. While laughter is evoked by a punch line, indicating that the brain’s conscious, cognitive regions must decide that the circumstances are right for laughter, most people cannot will themselves to laugh on command or to suppress an unwanted case of the giggles. Laughter arises from our conscious minds and from a primitive, precognitive part of our brains, something that’s very deep in our animal nature.

Recent study also indicates that laughter may be primarily a function of the left hemisphere. In 1998 doctors at the University of California of Los Angeles reported that they were able to make a sixteen-year-old girl laugh by stimulating a tiny region in the left frontal lobe, the supplemental motor cortex. They were testing her to try to find the source of her epileptic seizures. When they stimulated that particular region with an electric current, the girl burst out laughing. She was asked to perform various tasks, such as naming objects, reading, counting, and extending her forearms, but regardless of the activity, she consistently laughed when that area was stimulated. Even more interesting was the fact that although the girl’s laughter was being triggered electrically, each time she laughed she had a different explanation for it, attributing it to whatever object was in front of her or whatever action she was engaged in at the time. She saw a picture of a horse as hilarious, giggled over a book she was reading, and once told the researchers, “You guys are just so funny.”

Provine says that, in part, laughter functions as a kind of social signal, just like a smile or a scowl. Indeed, studies have shown that people are thirty times more likely to laugh in social settings than when they are alone. Even nitrous oxide loses much of its potency if taken in solitude. Laughter occurs when people are comfortable with one another, and the more laughter, the more bonding within the group, lending credence to the old saw that laughter is “contagious.” If there is a feedback loop of bonding-laughter-more bonding, it may explain one of the most bizarre incidents of contagious laughter ever recorded: in 1962, an epidemic of laughter among schoolgirls in Tanganyika lasted for six months and forced officials to close schools to break up the group and end the marathon.