Harari starts off the book beautifully by stating that 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being (AKA the big bang) which is the story of physics. 300,000 years later complex structures called atoms, molecules happened and their interactions which is the story of chemistry. Then 3.8 billion years ago a planet called earth, certain molecules combined to form particular organisms which is the story of biology. 70,000 years ago, organisms belonging to the species called Homo Sapiens started to form elaborate structures called cultures. The development of these cultures is called history. Our history has had the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), the Agricultural Revolution (12,000 years ago) and the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago). This book tells the story of the constant evolutions of man.

Compared with other animals’, humans are born prematurely as their vital systems are still underdeveloped. A kitten forages on its own a few weeks after birth. A colt can trot shortly after birth. Humans babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education.

This fact means humans have had to form an extraordinary social ability. Lone mothers could hardly gather enough food for their offspring hence consequently rely on other family members and neighbors to raise their children. As you have heard before, it takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution has favored those forming strong social ties for survival.

Human are easily molded. Harari described humans like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom. This is why today we can educate our children to become Christian or Buddhist, capitalist or socialist, career focused or family orientated.

Tools were used in early years for food. You never approached a pride of lions eating its prey. When they were done you would dare not go near the hyenas and jackals as the scavenge for leftovers. Only then would you approach the carcass, look carefully left and right and eat the edible remains. You’re also left with the bones. Using tools like stones to break open the bones and eat the marrow, a highly nutritious part of the carcass. Num num num.

Homo’s position on the food chain was generally in the middle. They hunted for smaller creatures and were hunted by larger predators. There were 6 types of Homo’s, Homo Sapiens (that’s us) outplayed, outsmarted and outlasted the others 400,000 years ago as some species of man started to hunt larger game using strategies like team work to out maneuver them. Thus, hunting larger game on a regular basis. Only in the last 100,000 years with the rise of Homo Sapiens that man has jumped to the top of the food chain.

Before the Cognitive revolution there was the Foraging Revolution. The size of the average Sapiens brain has decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new niches were opened up. Yes, our brain become smaller to adapt.

Foragers mastered not only the surrounding world of animals, plants and objects of their outer world but their inner world of their own bodies and senses for survival. They had to remember which of the 10,000 types of berries, plants, root and much more foods to eat and which to avoid. They were in tune with their surroundings, listened to the slighted movement in the grass and hear a snake in the bush.

Forgers secret to success and a longer life expectancy which protected them from malnutrition and starvation was their varied diet. During the Agricultural Revolution, farmers tend to eat the crop they grew. So, if they harvest rice, potato or wheat the family would live off that one and only food source which lacked essential nutrition. Ancient foragers ate dozens of different foodstuffs, maybe berries and mushroom in the morning and rabbit and wild onion in the evening. Tomorrow’s menu would be different.

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating between 70,000 and 300,00 years ago constituted the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? They are not sure. Perhaps an accidental genetic mutation changed the inner wiring of the Sapiens brain enabling them to think in unpredictable ways and communicate using an altogether new type of language.

I love that; this mutation could have happened in Homo Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, but it didn’t. It was by pure chance. We are here by pure evolutionary chance. It’s more important to understand the importance of the genetic mutation than the cause. What was most surprising about the special language was it enabled us to conquer the world.

In conquering the world, we invented stories to tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and justice outside of the human imagination. So, if this is all created by our imagination and actions, what could you create in your own life? Imagine the possibilities.

Since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been living in a dual reality. One the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by the imagined reality become even more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depend on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States, Starbucks and Google. This shows we have evolved to create greater levels of influence and awareness to govern.

Now, most people know we are much like chimpanzees. And we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees on a one to one or ten to ten level. Significant difference occurs past 150 and when we reach 1000 – 2000 levels of Sapiens/Chimpanzees. If you tried to bunch 2000 chimpanzees into Time Square, there would be pandemonium. Imagine it. There would be fighting, power struggles, disorder. Bunch humans together in this same space and we are order seeking, creating patterns such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political institutions that never could be created in isolation. So, we are constantly looking for order in our own life and life around us. Maybe that’s why we rose above all other animals as the people or people with the most order rules. Then the person with the most order, rules too.

Now let’s move onto the Agricultural Revolution. Mortality was high. Babies weaned at an early age and were fed wheat because of the Agricultural age. Children lived more on porridge than mothers milk. There was competition for the porridge among siblings. Mortality levels rose. In the Agricultural societies, at least one in every three children died before the age of 20. Yet the increase in births still outpaced the increase in deaths.

Scholars once proclaimed that the Agricultural Revolution was a great leap forward in humanity. They told of a tale of progressed fueled by human brain power. Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent humans. Eventually humans were so smart that they could decipher natures secret codes, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat. We moved from foraging to farming.

During the Agricultural Revolution, hunters may have caught and adopted a lamp, fattening it up for slaughter. At some stage, there become a greater number of lambs and they would slaughter the more aggressive lamps first. The more submissive, most appealing lamps were allowed to live longer and procreate. The result was a herd of domesticated and submissive sheep. Pigs had their snouts cut off so they could not smell or their eyes gauged out so they could not see where they were going to ensure they stayed with their owner.

As humans spread around the world, so did their domestic animals. Ten thousand years ago, not more than a few million sheep, cattle, goats, boars or chickens live. Today there is over a billion sheep, a billion pigs, a billion cattle, and more than 25 billion chickens. I think there are more chicken on the earth than other animals because no chicken is worshiped by any religion.

Agricultural Revolution made the future far more important. Humans started to think about life in seasons and crops, worrying about next year and the year after. Foragers discounted the future as they lived hand to mouth. A little like our factory workers today, working paycheck to paycheck, day to day, week to week.

McTaggart uncovers that the human mind and body are not separate but connected to a sea of light, sound and energy and that consciousness may be central in shaping our world at a quantum level. This connection is known as The Field.

Light in The Darkness
The overview effect is described in the first chapter. This was first experienced by Ed Mitchell, who was the 6th man to land on the moon and the first to experience a feeling of connectedness. He described it as if all the planets and all the people of all the time were attached by some invisible web. This was a majestic sight, seeing the earth as a floating spaceship surrounded by darkness, Ed wept at the sight.

Philosophers had talked about this connectedness. David Bohm’s vision of a world of ‘unbroken wholeness’ and implicate state.

Scientists at the time did not allow for this connectedness, except for in quantum world, in the very, very small world, in the world of the inanimate and non-living. Quantum physics had discovered a strange property in the subatomic world called ‘non-locality.’ This refers to the ability of a quantum entity such as an individual electron influenced another quantum particle instantaneously over any distance despite there being no exchange of force or energy. This suggested that when quantum particles have been in contact remain connected even when separated, so that the actions of one will always influence the other, no matter how far they are separated.

Albert Einstein coined this term ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Matter was no longer separate.

This connectedness brought in the idea of that the universe had a living consciousness. It suggested that the consciousness of the observer brought the observed object into being. Nothing in the universe existed as an actual ‘thing’ independently of our perception of it. Every minute, of every day, we are creating our world.

It leaves me to wonder is this the same that is happening to us with any person we have a connection with, that we were creating our world?

The Sea of Light
To understand this field first let’s look at it relative to people and start by asking the following question;
What are people made of? People are made of muscles, bones, and organs.
Then what are the organs made of? Organs are made of cells.
What are cells made of? Cells are made of organelles.
What are organelles made of? Organelles are made of proteins.
What are proteins made of? Proteins are made of amino acids.
What are amino acids made of? Amino acids are made of atoms.
What are atoms made of? Atoms are made of protons, neutron, and electrons.
What are electrons made of? Electrons are made from the electron field.

What is the electron field made of? …..

This is where we end eight levels down. This is the hard limit of our scientific understanding. To the best of our present ability to perceive and to reason, the universe is made from fields and nothing else and these fields are not made from any smaller components.

Within the field, there is an uncertainty principle developed by Werner Heisenberg who created quantum theory. This theory implies that no particle is ever at rest as it is constantly in motion due to a ground state field of energy constantly interacting with all subatomic matter. It means that the basic substructure of the universe cannot be eliminated and is always in motion.

Beings of Light
Fritz-Albert Popp was a philosopher as much as he was a scientist. He was fascinated with light. He tried to make sense of the world around him, to find solutions that he could apply to everything in life. He research was condemned by his colleagues for many years but he managed to stay driven and forge on through the setbacks. He was willing to embrace both pleasure and pain, not needing permission to live his mission.

In his time as a professor at university, Popp created a light machine, something to register the omission of light from cells. Plants for instant radiated 100 photons per square centimeter, whereas humans would emit 10 photons in the same area. When light was shone on living cells, the cell would take up the light and after a certain delay, shine intensely, a process called ‘delayed luminescence’. Popp believed this was a corrective device. The organism had to maintain a delicate equilibrium of light. In this instance, when it was being bombarded with too much light, it would reject the excess.

The human body is amazing. Every cell undergoes around 100,000 chemical reactions per second and simultaneously repeats itself around every cell in the body. At any given second, billions of chemical reactions are occurring. Imagine the timing of the body. If the timing was off, humans would blow themselves up. If everything is working together in a big orchestra, who is the conductor?

Seriously! Stop and think. Who is making your body work if we are creating everything in the world?

Popp studied the body and light rigorously. He had a woman sit in his lab every day for 9 months recording photon readings of a small area of her hand and forehead. What he discovered was light emissions followed a certain pattern at day 7, 14, 32, 80, and 270 days. They were identical even after a year. There was a natural biological rhythm of light in the body.

He wondered what kind of light would be present in an ill person. He tried his machine on a series of cancer patients. Every patient the client had lost their natural rhythm and coherence. The lines of internal communication were scrambled. They had lost their connect with the world. In effect, their light was going out.

Just the opposite occurred with Multiple Sclerosis. MS was a state of too much order. Individuals with this disease were taking in too much light and this was inhibiting of cells to do their job. Too much cooperative harmony prevented flexibility and individuality. MS patients were drowning in light.

Perfect cohesion is an optimum state just between chaos and order. The healthiest bodies would have the lowest amount of light.

Even food is the same. When tested, the healthiest food had the lowest and most coherent intensity of light. Any disturbance in the system would increase the production of photons. Health was a state of perfect subatomic communication, and ill health was a state where communication breaks down. We are ill when our waves are out of synch.

In one of the numerous cases, Popp came across a woman with breast and vaginal cancer. Popp tried mistletoe and other plant extracts on samples of her cancer. Each plant omitted different amount of light. He found one particular mistletoe remedy created a coherence in the tissue similar to that of the body. Within a year of treatment of mistletoe, all her laboratory tests were back to normal. A woman with terminal cancer had her proper light restored, just by taking a herb.

It’s a Guy Thing is full of questions and answers to help women to understand men at a deeper level. It is important to remember with anyone’s body of work, it may not all fit into your model of the world. For me, I analyse every piece of information I gather through universal principles. Some of Deida’s work is brilliant, other parts of the book I discard. I would hope you do the same.

Men and women are so different in the way they think and behave. Men are single-focused; women are multi-focused. Men concentrate on work and resources, females on family and reproduction.

There is a constant contrast between male and female energy. Women identify themselves as the source of light or energy and are then concerned about radiance. Men are more concerned with the void in which the light shines. Most men would rather watch women dance than dance themselves.

This is not to deny that women can only have feminine energy and male have masculine. That is far from the truth. Everyone knows a woman who works in a male-dominated friend like engineering, construction or the police force where they have adapted their energy to their career and play in a man’s world or a man who takes care of the kids.

Deida states 80% of all men demonstrate more masculine than feminine energy. Men in the 20% category are more feminine and more relatable to women in their qualities. We may exhibit different energies around different people and circumstances but our essences will be more one or the other.

The duality of masculine and feminine energy is what brings couples together, it’s the polarity that gives charge and ignites sexual energy between two people. You want polarity. You need it. It is what gives the sizzle in the sexual dynamic.

One reason sexual dynamic becomes less passionate is that it turns into a friendship, business partnership or parenting relationship. The man and women become less and less relaxed in their masculine and feminine poles. Therefore, sexual polarity decreases.

To achieve deep emotional and sexual intimacy, women and men must incarnate deep feminine and masculine energy in the play of their relationship together. If you are not doing this, the relationship can become more practical. The juices dry up.

The purpose of both sexes is to appreciate their own essences without projecting onto the other to be the same as them. It’s about loving the differences. But most of the time the sexes want them to act like they do. It is easier for you to understand someone who thinks and behaves like you.

Men give off masculine energy which for women can be seen as offensive. Masculine energy is rigid and stays focused on a task for lengths of time. This means they won’t notice you, think to call you or text you. They are focused on that task, watching TV, training at the gym, at work that everything else doesn’t exist.

I’m glad I caught your attention. This is a chapter from The Four-Hour Body by Tim Ferris. You’re going to love this one.

For almost all women, the most sensitive part of their vagina will be the upper left-hand quadrant from their perspective, around one o’clock from the man’s perspective.

Before we go any future, no man can give you an orgasm. He can only help you to do it yourself. Nailing the technique helps though men.

A woman has to be comfortable masturbating, playing with herself in order to know how to bring herself to orgasm. Men, encourage your women to play with herself. Maybe even report back to you how it was.

If you’re someone who struggles with bring themselves to an orgasm, tell your man that you’ve started (or have always) had a challenge orgasming. Men love a challenge. They thrive on wanting to fix a woman’s inability to have an orgasm. If you as a woman can’t orgasm, then read Betty Dodson’s book Sex For One, it’s the Ferris recommends about self-loving and I would agree with him

Your homework before you start this exercise is before going to sleep to masturbate in bed for five minutes. Not for the end goal of the big ‘O’ but to merely explore your body and to become more comfortable with yourself.

You need to know how beautiful and exciting you are in that state of orgasm and not feel the need to hide your expression. Some women can be embarrassed to show her “o face” to their partner. You think that the frowning, the squirming with your mouth wide open is ugly or unattractive, not remembering that men go nuts for it.

Have you ever wondered why men find it easy and women not so much t organsm. Here is some fun facts. In 1559 Realdo Colombo, of the University of Padua in Italy announced the discovery of the clitoris and planted his flag. “Since no one has discovered the projections and their working, if it is permissible to give a name to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus” Gabrielle Fallopian, Realdo’s successor, and later of fallopian tube fame, refuted his claim, as did Italians, Danes and every Y chromosome in between.

Leadership is a verb (doing word) not a noun. C W Perry states “leadership is accepting people where they are and taking them somewhere.” To succeed, you help others follow you up the ladder. If you are not moving, they are not following. You know you have achieved a leadership when the people you work with are becoming leaders themselves.

The form of leadership will change depending on the relationship you have with each person in the team. You will be on different levels with different people and the level can change quickly. People will respond to you based on the level of leadership you are on with them.

The Five Levels of Leadership
Level One: Position
Level Two: Permission
Level Three: Production
Level Four: People Development
Level Five: Pinnacle

As human beings with a physical body, we all suffer from pain. We can be physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually drained from the pain. If you fight it, you might find yourself endlessly seeking healers and doctors to rid you of your suffering.

Very few people make use of the pain and transcend it. Pain has a logic and distinct function, hence, there is a brilliant function of pain. It serves a purpose. When we experience pain, we immediately label it as ‘sickness’,when it is actually a brilliant signal telling us to do something to right ourselves. It is telling us what to do, minute by minute to prevent more serious problems.

Ward shares he has nothing to recommend to you, absolutely nothing, except what you yourself are prepared to learn from the enormous wisdom of your incredible inner self. This is wisdom, because as the student is ready, the teacher appears. For those who are not ready, it falls on deaf ears.

Consciousness has baffled people since the fifth century and will continue to have scientists seeking answers for a few more centuries to come. We are at the tip of the iceberg of what we know with consciousness.

In these pages, there are no clear answers, only to leave you with more questions about the conscious mind.

Renée Descates in the 17th century stated, “the conscious mind and the body are cut from very different cloth kinds”. He distinguishes between material self (the body) and the immaterial self (the mind). The body and the brain are made of matter and the mind is immaterial, something that can never be touched, observed or measured.

David Charmers, a philosopher in 1995 updated Descartes point of view and dubbed the mind as a hard problem, he states that you can see a color red but you don’t know what it feels like according to someone else’s experience. You see your dog but and you know how your dog’s brain works but you don’t know what it is like to be a dog.

This experience is called “qualia”. This is how consciousness is defined; it is your own private personal and highly subjective experience and there is no way to explain the sense of what it is like for you to anyone else, everything in the world is unique to you.

Not everyone agrees with Descartes. Some insist that there is no hard problem and disregard his ideas as one of the greatest mistakes in the history of thinking. Ultimately believing that we will be able to measure qualia and understand enough of the way the brain works to understand consciousness.

In understanding consciousness, people want to understand free will. Do we have free will? Are we really in the driver seat? Do we really make our own choices?

Free will tends to be strengthen by our morality. There is some evidence that the fear of punishment is what keeps society from breaking down. Our powerful belief in free will is bound with a fundamental desire to hold people responsible for their harmful actions.

It may turn out we don’t have the ability to choose but we will still choose to act as if we do. This is due to the readiness potential. If science could show that we are not in the driver’s seat of our own mind and life, free will would be hard to shake. This is because free will gives us a greater sense of satisfaction and self-efficiency, higher commitment in relationships and greater meaning in life. It serves as a greater purpose to humanity.

What is the consciousness?

There is matter and consciousness in the universe where one exists alongside the other, perhaps conveniently, cannot be explained in a present understanding of physics. Space if taken to the extreme, this idea can lead to paints like he’s in the view that all matter even in animate objects like rocks are imbued with some degree of consciousness.

Everything has a level of consciousness.

The brain contains at last count 19 billion neurons with so many connections between them, if you count one every second day would take you 3 million years to the task. Incredible, right?

The structure, the connectivity, the patterns, the flow, everything that makes you you.

There are curiosity surrounding the brain’s connectivity and if it does add up to consciousness is a huge question that is left unanswered. For now.

Philosopher John Locke defines consciousness as the perception of what passes in the man’s mind setting the tone for later research. In 1915 Sigmund Freud declares the subconscious to be a source of human behavior. Today, psychology refers to the subconscious as non-conscious, and preconscious or unconscious to describe what happens outside of full conscious awareness.

The first magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of a human was in 1977. This method later revolutionizes the study of the living brains and helped to further our understanding of consciousness from a scientific perspective.

There are different levels of consciousness and we can differentiate between levels of consciousness. For example, being vividly awake as opposed to being under a general anesthetic. The experience will be relative to the conscious sense of self.