A Shakespeare by any other Face

A Shakespeare by any other Face

A Shakespeare by any other face would be even more lucrative it would seem. 

You couldn’t make it up…except they seem to be doing just that. William Shakespeare is obviously the most famous playwright and poet in history. But we have very little in the way of biographical details of the man from Stratford upon Avon to whom the greatest literary works of all time have been attributed.

There are no letters that we know of – this alone is quite interesting as you would have thought, at least, that he wrote to his family in Stratford whilst he worked in London. He left none of his books in his will when he died and we have no portraits of him when he was alive, despite him being present at court and a successful playwright. The famous balding image we have of William Shakespeare is from the first folio that was created after his death.

So it is no wonder that when a portrait emerged that could have been a portrait of Shakespeare that was created during his lifetime, people from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust were interested. After a few years of examination, they announced to the world in 2009 that it was indeed genuine.

Shakespeare by any other face

Yet there was immediate opposition from academics and critics. The portrait was said to be of courtier and poet, Sir Thomas Overbury and other portraits of him exist.

These seem to have been mostly ignored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust which has prominently used the controversial image as their favourite Shakespeare pinup. It is easy to see why this is a much preferable image for the author of Romeo and Juliet as the man in this image is more handsome than the image in the first folio. 

Some are even reporting that any critique of the Trust’s behaviour on this matter is being met with the threat of litigation. At the end of the day, it is all about money; a handsome, young, full-colour Shakespeare looking a bit like Joseph Fiennes, who played Will Shakespeare in the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’, is going to bring in more money for the Stratford tourist machine than an older, plump balding one. This article from The Guardian newspaper website suggests that the new portrait was worth around £15 million to the Trust in terms of tourism. 

This may turn out to be one of these cases where the untruth becomes so widespread that it simply becomes the truth. What are your thoughts? Are you shocked that The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is presenting a controversial portrait as Shakespeare? Do you dismiss it as just yet another lie that we are told on a daily basis by people in power? Or do you think the portrait is genuine and this is the true likeness of William Shakespeare? Please leave your comments below. 

The Guardian. Is this a Shakespeare portrait I see before me? Well, no. 

The Times Literary Supplement Blog. But if not Shakespeare, then who? Peter Stothard 

The Telegraph. William Shakespeare portrait could be 16th-century courtier. Sarah Knapton

Images: Public Domain, Canva

 

Access your Genius – Exercise

Access your Genius – Exercise

In this exercise, which you can access by clicking on the audio stream below, you can experience how to access your Genius to solve a problem.

We are all multidimensional beings and exist beyond our physical bodies. Aspects of ourselves that we sometimes call the Higher Self, exist in consciousness levels beyond space and time.

This is where we get that intuitive sense of knowing – warnings of danger and other intuitive experiences. This is because these aspects of ourselves actually know the future.

However, we are not meant to always be in touch with this aspect consciously or we would not get anything done at all on the Earth plane.

But we can tap into this wisdom when we need to. Sometimes we can do this to get the solution to a problem we may be facing. In this exercise I will take you through the steps of accessing your inner wisdom to solve a problem.

Image: Shutterstock

Please let me know how this exercise has helped you in the comments below.

For more on The Genius Groove: The New Science of Creativity click here.

 

Soleira Green on Genius

Soleira Green on Genius

In 2009, I caught up with one of my favourite wisdom teachers, Soleira Green.

Those of you who have been with me from the old days of 2004 and the Children of the New World Conferences will remember her fabulous talks.

Since then she has founded so many initiatives as a visionary coach and genius accelerator but most of all Soleira is so ahead of everyone else’s teaching that she is impossible to define.

If ever anyone is constantly evolving the ‘new’ it is her and her network.

In this interview, she gives a succinct explanation of genius a long time before the rest of the world caught up to this way of thinking.

She explains how true genius is the place where the inner and outer genius pool meet and that tapping into this meeting place can be taught.

Enjoy the interview. There is more about The Genius Groove here. Find out more about Soleira Green and Genius here.

 

The Quantum Physics of Big Magic

The Quantum Physics of Big Magic

In this article, we shall be examining the science and quantum physics of Big Magic. In the book, Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, she describes how she had an idea for a very specific type of novel with a particular type of plot and characters. Although she got a contract to write the book, she never got round to it as life intervened and she had the immigration struggle of her husband to deal with.

Elizabeth Gilbert author of Big Magic

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Big Magic
By Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA (Amusing Muses) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When she got back to the book, the impetus had left and she didn’t write it. So it was with amazement that she hooked up with another writer friend whom she had just met and not shared her plot with and essentially this friend was writing the same book only the details such as location had changed.

They had not conferred and there was nothing that the publisher could have said. Gilbert concluded that the book itself had needed to be birthed and as she herself had not done it, the idea had simply gone to someone else. Gilbert elaborates throughout the book on how ideas exist somewhere waiting to be birthed in partnership with us.

She admits that she doesn’t understand how it works. In The Genius Groove, I outline how, with the scientific knowledge that we currently have, we could explain the creative processes that Gilbert describes.

This model flips the usual explanation of consciousness around. Instead of consciousness and information being produced by the brain, the whole universe is created from consciousness as posited by some quantum physicists.

Even mainstream physicists discuss how all we can really know about the universe is information. When we get down to the tiny subatomic level, we find that reality is more ethereal than we first thought. When it comes to an electron, for example, we cannot say why it always has a charge. We don’t know what is powering it. We can just say that the information of an electron is that it has an electric charge.

The Quantum Physics of Big Magic

Science tells us that the universe is filled with information. Is this the source of our creative Big Magic? (Videoblocks)

So even mainstream scientists would agree that a fundamental aspect of the universe is information. In the new model of creativity the brain is not the generator of consciousness or information as the brain itself is made up of atoms. The brain is an organ that has a particular purpose to act as a conduit for information.

Concepts from Quantum Physics say that we are living in a dynamic field of light the Quantum Vacuum. From what we have discussed before – we know this field contains information.

We can now put the science behind Gilbert’s experiences. Projects, Poems and books can exist in the field, ready to come through the brain of a ready recipient.

So the idea for the novel existed as a wispy idea in the information field ready for someone to receive and download the full novel. Maybe we should change the name from ‘Big Magic’ to ‘Big Informational Field Brain Processing’!

But I don’t think it will catch on. Essentially Gilbert has written a detailed description of her experience of creativity without proving a mechanism. Why should she? Science especially paradigm revolutionary science is probably not her thing.

Luckily we have a The Genius Groove for a fuller explanation complete with scientific references.

Check out The Genius Groove here for more.

What are your thoughts? Do you think that in Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert is describing the Quantum Field? You can comment below.

Image: Pixabay

Physics and consciousness – a dialogue at last.

Physics and consciousness – a dialogue at last.

Physicists generally avoid discussing consciousness. It seems to be too ethereal a subject for them really to get hold of. It forces them to enter a world outside of calculations and experiments and examine the world of human behaviour which is far less predictable and controllable.

But the past twenty years has seen a shift in science as a whole where the once forbidden topic of consciousness is coming to the forefront. Possibly because it is the last frontier and people are running out of other topics to study for their PhDs.

Yet it was still a surprise when Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge tackled the problem in 2014 and published a paper suggesting that Consciousness could be a state of matter. You can read the abstract here. http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

You can see his TED talk below.


He is basically arguing that consciousness is not something external that is animating matter, but a consequence of the way in which matter is arranged mathematically.Tegmark himself states that there are many gaps in his idea.

One that really springs to mind for me is what happens when people are clinically dead and then are resuscitated? Or how much of a rearrangement is necessary from moment to moment for a being to be alive at one point and then dead the next?

Questions and gaps aside it is good to see that such a prominent physicist actually tackling the question at all as he open the gates for others to consider the topic too.

Of course here at Paradigm Revolution we have been discussing consciousness and matter for many years. You can get started by exploring this website or checking out Simply Divine which is an easy guide to the Science of Spirituality.

Image: Modified from Shutterstock

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