Evolutionary Exploration

By Bogdan Heretoiu

Whether we think, love, laugh, sleep, or walk we are able to do so because of and through our brain. This book reveals an experiential way to tap into the brain's potential and access a natural state of functioning that precedes interpretation. This is not the universal truth, nor is it just another product speculating on people's hope, but a practical exploration into how we function and evolve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bogdan Heretoiu
• Release date: Feb 4, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452303918

Bogdan Heretoiu

My personal motto – Living at the speed of Life – is also the simplest way to describe my life. Having been born in Romania – a land of many magical tales, gorgeous mountains, beautiful music, and excellent food - I spent my youth before moving abroad to the United States exploring and experiencing wilderness, natural beauty, and meeting simple folks with millennia-old traditions. While professionally speaking I am a filmmaker with experience ranging from various crew positions to producer and film professor, my long-time passion (since before I even knew about filmmaking) has been for the potential we all have, as living creatures, to evolve. I spent most of my young years reading everything I could find about philosophy and psychology and when I was fourteen of age I began studying Martial Arts, which also led me to intense practice of meditation, breathing techniques, as well as yoga. Throughout my entire practice and my travels, I searched for the spiritual common denominator – a quest for the method that could bring people together, rather than divide them. "Evolutionary Exploration" is the result of that quest. I hope you'll enjoy your reading, and above all - Keep Exploring. Bogdan Heretoiu, Author of "Evolutionary Exploration"

Book preview

EVOLUTIONARY EXPLORATION

by

Bogdan Heretoiu

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Bogdan Heretoiu on Smashwords

Evolutionary Exploration

Copyright (c) 2010 by Bogdan Heretoiu

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Table of Contents

PART ONE:

Deconstructing the Myth of MIND

Chapter One – INTRODUCTION

Chapter Two - A FEW WORDS ABOUT MYSELF

Chapter Three - FEAR AND CHANGE

Chapter Four - OUR GREATER CALL

Chapter Five - CONVENTIONAL EDUCATION AND CONVENTIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Chapter Six - THE STARTING POINT

Chapter Seven - WHY CHANGE

Chapter Eight - ON LANGUAGE

Chapter Nine - THE MIND

Chapter Ten - EVOLUTION AND POWER

Chapter Eleven - EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING

Chapter Twelve - THE ELUSIVE SCIENCE OF NOW

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PART TWO:

Evolutionary Exploration

Chapter Thirteen - BEGINNING

Chapter Fourteen - THE FIVE SENSES - GATEWAYS TO YOUR BRAIN

Chapter Fifteen - THE SPEED OF STILNESS

Chapter Sixteen - WHAT NEXT?

Chapter Seventeen - TRIGGERS

Chapter Eighteen - IMAGINATION

Chapter Nineteen - APPLICABILITY OF E.E. IN VARIOUS RESEARCH FIELDS

Chapter Twenty - THE TASTE OF LIFE - AN EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY THROUGH AN ORDINARY DAY

Chapter Twenty-One - NAVIGATING EXISTENCE TOGETHER

AFTERWORDS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Chapter One - INTRODUCTION

A book is like a voice - it carries with it a story made of dreams, ideas, and information that takes the form of thought, translated into written language. When I started to write this book, I found that before being able to type the first word, I needed time to tune this voice and - as if I was playing an instrument - I had to find the tone that felt most powerful, sincere, and direct so I could say what I had to say. A brief line from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet was the key to finding the tone of this book:

Say not, I have found the truth, but rather, I have found a truth. Say not, I have found the path of the soul. Say rather, I have met the soul walking upon my path.

I can now say that I have found a truth that works for me like no other truth ever learned, from any other source. I can now say that the path upon which I have been walking met the path I am on now, and that the act of exploring in itself matters more than an arbitrarily defined path or destination.

Needless to say, this book represents my personal journey and not the universal truth. Stating something as a universal truth is to state that one knows everything about everything and that would make the issuer of the statement pathologically delusional while the statement itself would be highly manipulative. Writing about my experience comes as a logical step within this journey, mainly because of my firm conviction that the information herein will be useful to many people who simply seek more from their living experience than what conventional education led them to believe is possible.

What I do works for me, over and over again, and I know it works for you too, only you may not be conscious of it until you choose to. What I do is part of the natural functioning of the brain, unconstrained by a certain method, system, philosophy or religion. What I do is not mine, it is ME. My brain ALREADY exists. It already INTERACTS with its environment and itself. IT is ME, and just because I speak of it does not imply duality or separation. I am what I am and so are you.

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Evolutionary Exploration is both a concept and an application based on the thesis that we can all use our brain - which is the central command center for everything we do while we exist in our very own, unique molecular configuration known as the human body - both as a subject of exploration as well as the instrument of exploration, and, that as long as we are alive, the brain is the initiator of all processes within the sequence of phenomena we refer to as being our life.

This does not mean that life itself along with everything in existence depends on our brain, but that our participation within all that is in existence takes place through the use of the brain - as long as we are configured in the form of our current living human body.

The application of the experiments described as part of the process called Evolutionary Exploration is in direct relationship with the fact that every single process and phenomena that we are involved with is initiated by our brain and accomplished through our brain. As humans, we may connect with everything else only through the use of our brain. If the brain stops functioning, we - as a molecular configuration - die. It is possible that if a soul does indeed exist, that soul may become one with the Universe or God after our physical death, however, while we are alive, everything we do is through the use of our brain.

Whether we think, pray, meditate, love, hate, laugh, cry, learn, play, sleep, breathe, eat, blink, or walk we are able to do so because of and through our brain.

Evolutionary Exploration is an individual learning process that attempts to return to the origin of all processes within the sequence of phenomena that we call life, and to reclaim the state of functionality that allows us to directly tap into our brain's potential.

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This book reveals my personal exploration into accessing various brain processes and presents the framework that I use to discover and learn. For years I have searched for the common denominator of all spiritual practices and techniques, as well as for a method that did not require any extra products to work. In my quest, was looking for a natural way of functioning that made sense from an evolutionary point of view rather than from a human-made interpretative perspective because it was impossible for me to accept that billions of years of natural - cosmic - evolution that led to life in human form, could only continue if humans were to sit on their heads for ten years, pray and worship their entire life, or think their way into a next evolutionary stage.

Considering the complexity of our brain, a functional way had to exist - a way that had to be independent of its interpretative byproducts. My conviction is that I have tapped into how this natural, functional way works, and that I have begun to understand how to apply its basic principles to our day-to-day life. The common denominator I was looking for had to be a unifier of people, rather than a divider. Evolutionary Exploration is the result of this quest.

My intention is to share information, not to look for followers and/or feed people's mental addiction to any system or method. On the contrary, I invite you to take the lead and experiment on your own. This book is not about right or wrong, instead, it is about learning how to experiment in the most natural way possible, so you may tap into the potential that our brain holds.

This is not Scientology, Creationism, Science-Fiction, Spiritual Neuroscience (Neurotheology), wishful thinking or anything else you may have labels for. This is not the universal truth, nor is it just another product speculating on people's hope. It is an important and practical exploration into how we function and grow into our potential. Regardless of gender, age, or state of health, this work is for everyone with an open mind, curious to experiment and discover new things about themselves.

It is my opinion that we must assume responsibility for our future as a species, explore our potential, and share it with our children - this way we will pass on a legacy of exploration, learning, and transformation that is much needed for the future generations.

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Chapter Two - A FEW WORDS ABOUT MYSELF

My personal journey started at a very young age as a result of two opposing but equally powerful influences in my life - my grandparents and my father. While my grandmother was a very simple, modest, exceptionally fair woman, my grandfather was an engineer, a scientist and a philosopher. Both contributed to my years of growing-up with a great mix of intuition, discipline (which I later lost and found again), kindness and love. My Grandparents offered me the best blend of humanity - which was needed to counteract the psychologically abusive and often times violent behavior of my father whose main contribution to my development was fear and chaos.

Little did I know at that time, my grandparents' existence prepared me to have an open mind and an insatiable curiosity and desire to learn beyond what I was taught in school. My grandfather's collection of esoteric, science, and philosophy books were the first thinking coordinates that I received and used for many years to come - both as a refuge, but also as a guide. On the other hand, the physical and emotional abuse that my father put me through forced my mental abilities to develop in order to protect myself. Unfortunately, fear is a powerful but highly destructive guide. Although it sharpened my senses, it also locked me in confused and very damaging thinking patterns.

While influenced by two such opposite forces, my mind met with a conflict that was to remain unresolved for almost forty years. I lived in a reality that resembled much more the reality that I identified my father with - yet I always felt and sensed a different reality through a window that was opened by my grandparents during my early childhood.

Psychologists could possibly determine that due to trauma, my mind often took refuge in an imaginary world, hence the dual perception of reality and the ongoing conflict. They could go on about the influence I received from reading such advanced books at a young age and make it a determining factor for many of my issues. As I consider myself a very intelligent being, I did take that option into account. It was evident to me that reality was the common perception experienced by everybody, while what I was sensing beyond, could have been an illusion, a refuge.

I am sure that you have experienced at one point in your life a meeting with a person whose face felt familiar, but you simply were not able to say from when and where did you know that person. You actually did not know (in the sense of active memory), but your mind was telling you something that felt close to feeling. The recollection of that person's identity was beyond your current mental configuration, yet you sensed a certain familiarity that implied knowing. Now imagine living in a reality where everything triggered mental stimuli of this sort, almost all the time, and then imagine living with such stimuli of familiarity but also knowing for certain that you have never known directly that what seemed familiar.

Living a kind of extended deja-vue can get a bit unsettling as you can imagine. If you think of a person and that person calls you on the phone in the next five minutes, you may think that you're psychic or that the person calling you is, but when you're a child as I was, these kinds of events can be confusing. Almost nothing in our regular education allows the possibility of a beyond. Reality, according to conventional education, is what we can perceive and measure. To claim that there is something beyond reality usually leads to being labeled as psychologically imbalanced. Often, parents invest a great deal of effort in discouraging a child's imaginative process, especially after a certain age. Their reasoning is not because of the imaginative process itself, but mainly due to the prospect of their child not fitting in because of that imaginative process.

Here is an example. You know the place you live in, right? You know the streets, the houses, the landmarks, etc. You either drive or walk in an automatic pilot sort of way, because that's your reality. You just know it. Now imagine being transported below ground, into the sewer system of your familiar neighborhood. It is a dark and wet environment, completely different than what's above ground. You kind of know where you are, but you also sense that you can easily get lost at any turn. What you are experiencing is also reality, but normally it is beyond your daily perception of reality. If you came to learn every inch of the city sewer tunnels as well as you know the city streets, you would walk through the city carrying in your mental image of reality BOTH parts of the city - one above and one under the ground. If you don't know both parts very well it can get confusing, right? Imagine the extra confusion when you know the city and you know the sewers, but YOU ALSO KNOW FOR SURE THAT YOU'VE NEVER BEEN IN THE SEWER SYSTEM, yet somehow your brain projects in your mental picture of reality extra fragments of a reality that shouldn't be there...

Of course we now know a lot more about the neuroscience behind some of our experiences, but for my young brain, this conflict generated such confusion and frustration