Nevertheless, I have made a discovery that is likely to change your life so thoroughly that, were you to meet your transformed self, you would not know yourself. For starters, one of the most striking changes in you will be that your power of free choice will be removed. Does that sound sinister? Maybe. But maybe not so much if you realize what free choice really is.

Ideally, we would like our choices always to be the right ones, the best possible choices from all possible alternatives. Unfortunately, we usually lack most of the information that bears on any given decision and, especially, the future impact of our decision. If only we could know the future and thus the full implications of all the choices available to us. We would never make a mistake and would always choose the very best of all available options.

Yet, if this were the case, there would be no freedom of choice unless we were to perversely choose badly and that would make no sense. So as you can see, freedom of choice is a function of our ignorance, ignorance concerning what all the options are and our ignorance as to future consequences.

When I said that I plan to remove your freedom of choice, what I meant was that you would no longer be in the dark when making choices. Such a situation is hard to imagine but, were it to be possible, it would be called "free will" since we would feel the full freedom of expression of our soul to do what is right, in every sense of the word.

I think I can hear some of you mumbling that you wouldn't want to live like that but perhaps you haven't considered that, without free will, you will never completely be your authentic self. Only free will can grant you the full expression of what you are in your essence, your heart of hearts. So the removal of free choice is not so sinister after all now, is it?

There is no need for concern, however, for there is very little likelihood that the free choice of any of us will be converted into free will in the near future and the reason is rather obvious. We are too desperately clinging to a small part of reality for us to be able to grasp the whole picture or even any significant part of it. Think of a pickpocket. He doesn't see you or the struggle your life has represented until now. He doesn't see your job, family, hobbies, fears or ideals. All he sees of you are your pockets. Similarly your insurance salesman or your plumber or the taxman. They see you as very little more than how you intersect with their interests. Even your wife or best friend has only the foggiest notion of what really touches you or how you feel in any given moment. In fact, if you are like most people, you barely know yourself.

We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are. We see only things we are prepared to see. Our perceptions are limited by whatever attachments control us in the moment and, if  we think about it, we'll quickly see that what concerns us, at any given moment, is what makes us concerned or worried about our welfare and that of those we love.

But if I am honest with myself, I'll realize that the bottom line of all this is my fear of death. Have you ever been really terrified? Have you ever had a really bad nightmare? Sometimes I think there is no limit to how terrified we can become under the right circumstances. Some people are said to be reconciled with death but I suspect that they are actually numbed by circumstances or drugs so that very little awareness actually reaches them. Face it, as much as we'd like to deny it, the chief feature of our lives is death or more precisely, our vulnerability to every form of harm up to and including death. Everything we do in our lives is in some way connected with pursuing pleasure as a celebration of life and, even more, the illusion of security and the denial of death. How do I know?

I am terminally ill with a rather aggressive form of cancer and probably have little more than a year to live. People are uncomfortable around me and aren't sure where to look and what to say. It's not just that they feel badly for me. We simply don't feel comfortable around those who are facing death. They remind us, in a very concrete and  immediate way, of our own mortality and we don't know how to handle that.

Paradoxically, some of us are even willing to risk our lives in extreme sports and such just to feel more alive. I know. I used to skydive in my youth and few things, short of falling in love, are as exhilarating. Most of us, to enhance our sensation of living, are willing to limit ourselves to more conventional thrill seeking and even gentle activities such as meditation and, in some cases, even recreational drugs. Unfortunately, whatever our pursuits and our station in life we, ultimately, have to face death, first the death of friends and relatives and, finally, our own.

So what I wish to talk about is a totally new approach to enhancing life and avoiding death or, rather, avoiding vulnerability. For as long as we are preoccupied with avoiding the awareness of our mortality and with the pursuit of transient joys and pleasures, the extent of our perception will remain trivial and the big picture will elude us. Imagine going through life accumulating opinions and beliefs and even convictions but never really knowing what it was all about, why we lived and why we had to die.

We have been cheated. We expected a better world and certainly not one dominated by deprivation, disease, violence, oppression and unfairness. 

When we are small children, we are indoctrinated with fairy tales - stories that always end with good prevailing over evil and the prince and princess living "happily ever after." Until we are able to reason and question, we are protected from the sordid "facts of life" known as, "life is not a bed of roses," "by the sweat of your brow .. .," "life is not a bowl of cherries," "life is hard and then you die," etc. Instinctively, we realize that children must be instilled with the belief that life is good and that they must be sheltered from the harsh knowledge of what we believe to be the nature of the "real" world. Then, around the age of four - the age of reason - we crush them with the news that fairy tales must be put aside as irrelevant, that life and nature can be horribly cruel and unjust and that, in any event, all life ends in death.

What happens is that most of us abandon this utopian world, this beautiful existence where we have everything going for us, and we begin to accept the fact that we're now going to have to go school and, instead of learning through direct experience, touching and feeling and joy, we're going to be crammed full of second-hand knowledge, in other words, information. We will be required to take everything on faith and, from here on in, we'll live in a world where the only certainties are "death and taxes." Our parents are revealed to be less than gods and, worst of all, we learn that everything alive is programmed to die.

Each of us responds differently to this news but, one thing is sure. No one embraces constraint with open arms, and no one gladly exchanges an open-ended paradise for the restricting limitations of hell on earth. It is very hard for us even to begin to conceive of the dimensions this trauma represents for the small child or to measure its repercussions throughout life. Most of us block this trauma from our awareness and retain little or no recollection of it. After all, one moment everything is rolling along fine as we contemplate the wonders waiting for us as we grow up. The next, our whole life has been irrevocably changed. Remember, the young child is totally vulnerable and without guile or defense mechanisms since he is protected by all-powerful and all knowing parents or at least expects to be.

So the child experiences everything with the whole of himself and innocently takes everything at face value. The child's collision with restrictive reality arrives with such crushing force that, from then on, everything we think and do is conditioned by this compromise. It defines the limits of our willingness to engage reality and thus the limits concerning how much of our potential can be readily realized. So the "scientist to be" is, at the age of four, already compromised as to access to his inner potential.

Very few people think of fairy tales as dissident material but, when you think about it, that is just what it amounts to. Yet people don't ask themselves why little children are so protected from the "facts" of life if later they're to be told that life is not a bowl of cherries, and "life is hard and then you die" and things of that nature. Obviously, we don't tell children fairy tales to hurt them even though these stories don't seem to conform to reality. Clearly, as children, we have a deep-seated need to believe that life is good. In fact, I am convinced that, without it, we would be deprived of the basic faith we need to function in life and be irreparably injured psychologically. Yet as soon as we can "safely" be told the facts of life society does so.

This is society's most reliable, built-in protection from non-conformist and utopian impulses. But the price it pays for stability gained in this way is enormous in terms of sacrificing the creative efficiency of its scientists to be. Conformist impulses and routines simply do not favor scientific breakthroughs.

The spirits of only a tiny remnant of children survive intact after this uncompromisingly brutal assault upon their most fundamental beliefs. In most of us, the resulting disillusionment amounts to the almost total destruction of our world view. Only an exceptional few, miraculously find the inner resources to resist parental authority and cling to their former, utopian ideal. They now belong to a separate reality, out of step with the rest of the world and, of course, other children. In a sense, from the perspective of society, it's a little like retreating into autism. You could say that they take an autistic step backing away from conventional "truth" since they will reject many of the fundamental standards by which society operates or, what you could call, the prevailing paradigm. These people, throughout their lives will, for the most part, prove constitutionally unable to compromise themselves and play the games usually required for professional success.

But only in the rarest of cases does the small child manage to resist the steam-roller of convention and refuse to allow his spirit to be compromised by believing in the preeminence of limitation. But only among these will we be able to find the scientists who will be able to use any significant part of their creative potential and make science the efficient enterprise it should be.

If society had killed your spirit in this way, you'd be a total cynic and would have probably turned me off by now. If you are one of the few who survived outside the conventional paradigm, you will have enough faith in unlimited possibilities to be already engaged in turning them into realities. But most of you, still here, are like me, somewhere in between and have enough hope left in them to have some faith in unlimited possibilities.

What I want to tell you is that there is a way out of this mess. The world can, indeed, be totally changed without resorting to the use of force or even the deceptions of politics. But for this we need to have some measure of faith in two things:

1) We must believe in the genius inherent in all humans. In most, this genius is hardly realizable because they have been too compromised by society. But, as they say, we are made in the image in G-d and this suggests unlimited creative potential.

2) We must also believe in the inherent goodness of physical existence meaning that were we able to learn everything there is to know about physical matter and apply that knowledge, the result would be a perfect utopia without illusions, lack, poverty, unhappiness, aging or even death. In other words, we have to have some measure of belief in the fairytale version of existence.

Without some degree of faith in these two principles, we will be unable to mobilize ourselves enough to work or contribute towards utopian existence and our view of existence will be largely nihilistic without our even realizing it.

The spearhead of human intelligence is the discipline that seeks to master matter. That discipline is science and technology. No subject matter is as resistant to understanding and it is obvious that material breakthroughs have vast transformative implications for the world. Throughout history, whatever nation was most technologically advanced, dominated the world. No one can escape the influence of physical matter.

Yet, in spite of modern discoveries and in spite of all that science fiction portrays, most people cannot imagine the immense potential of science. For instance, Einstein discovered that it is possible to convert an unstable isotope of uranium into a fabulous amount of energy. Who has not heard of his E=mC2 formula? Whom of us could have ever imagined the possibilities that he discovered? Yet this was merely an unstable isotope and only a small part of that was actually converted into energy. But should we learn how to convert stable matter into energy and with total efficiency, according to E=mC2, one kilogram of matter, any kind of matter (e.g., sand, water, air, stone, garbage), we could release enough energy to supply all the world's energy needs for a full day.

But here we are, half a century later and we haven't learned how to do this. We also haven't found a cure for the common cold and we are still dropping like flies from heart disease, cancer and hundreds of other ailments.

From my perspective, science has let us down - big time - and the reason is that science, as it is now conducted, is impossibly inefficient. I am not talking about allocation of funds or accounting problems. Where we are most wasteful is in our use of the scientist's mind in that we use only the tiniest part of it. It is commonly said that we use only 10% of our mind but I believe that, in reality, we don't one ten thousandth of it.

Typically, the research scientist goes to university and is brought up to date on the state of the art. Once he graduates, he is expected to do research and further advance scientific knowledge that, hopefully, somewhere along the line, will bring improvements into our lives. In order to come up with new theories and then new hypotheses that can be tested in the laboratory, he has to contemplate the matter upon which he or she chooses to specialize. Sooner or later, if he is lucky, he will have a kind of epiphany, a creative spark of insight. If that insight is sufficiently important, he can spend the rest of his career elaborating it.

Imagine trying to run your electronic appliances on sparks of static electricity generated from rubbing the carpet. Absurd as this might seem, I claim that this is a faithful analogy for the current inefficiency of research in science! For example, think of the countless billions of dollars that have disappeared down the black hole of cancer research. I am proposing a "Mind Tank" that could establish a new standard of creativity in science swiftly producing the breakthroughs that we so urgently need.

My purpose here isn’t to belittle the efforts of scientists but to remind ourselves that the effort we put out is always a function of what we believe possible - faith. Until Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile in 1954, it was widely considered impossible. Soon after, it became commonplace. We wouldn't find the energy to throw a light switch if we didn't believe in the likelihood of the light going on. We are able to go to extraordinary lengths once we know something we want is possible to us. The pioneer, in the absence of such certainty, is acting to a great extent on faith which is why we attribute such virtue to important pioneering efforts. When our energy is low, we often experience our body as a heavy, opaque slab of meat. Yet there are high-energy moments when we feel light as a feather and alive throughout. The amount of effort needed to make the body alive with contemplation and extrapolation and analogous to massive parallel processing in computers, is tremendous. And the only way to generate unprecedented levels of effort is to believe in what one is seeking and in the potential of thought itself. In other words, as already said, one must believe in our capacity for higher levels of thought, our inherent genius, and in the worthwhileness of what there is to discover.

One cannot overestimate the difficulty of sustaining our attention on anything at all. Anyone who has studied the dynamics of attention (and few pursuits are more elusive) has come to realize that our awareness consists of micro-connections between ourselves and the objects of our attention - connections that endure for the tiniest fraction of a second. The illusion of continuous attention is analogous to that of steady illumination in light bulbs that actually flicker at 60 cycles per second and the continuity of action in moving pictures that flash on the cinema screen at around 16 frames per second.

The act of meditation or sustained contemplation, in its many forms, is basically an effort to stabilize attention so as to allow consciousness to form, circulating in more orderly manner in conformity with the human form. With time, more and more of ourselves is embraced with this act until the whole body becomes engaged in this effort of attention.

This is an effort with which humans have been engaged from the dawn of time, an attempt to bring more and better quality energy (e.g., intellectual, emotional, motor, sexual) to the point of observation in order to prolong our participation in the “eternal present” and allowing us to experience more of reality. The duration and quality of attention necessary to actually perceive the enormous number of subtle attributes inherent in any substance or phenomenon and integrate that data in our mind in order to extrapolate beyond direct perception requires a sustained level of effort quite impossible to imagine.

When we muse or daydream or even give what we consider to be good attention to something, we don't usually notice that every second or so, we lose our focus and return to the matter at hand. Sometimes, for instance, in reading, we fail to come back and realize that we had read a paragraph or even a page or more without registering what we were reading and we have to go back. We just don't notice this blackout when the interval is just a fraction of a second. However, when we make a special effort to sustain our attention, we begin to notice the difficulty involved. And if we do manage to stay with it, not only do we notice the difficulty, we also notice an intensification of awareness in us. When we invest attention, we harvest awareness.

These days, many people are taking an interest in consciousness. It has become popular to dabble in meditation techniques of which there are many. But very rarely does anything very spectacular come of it except subjectively. Like high-jumping, there is only so far you can go and then you are fighting for millimeters. For most people, eventually, the fascination of mini epiphanies wears off. For unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it is hard to get terribly excited over high-jumping whether it be physical high jumping or meditative high jumping.

But some people have interests that border on obsession and few things lend themselves to obsession more than scientific theories. It is much easier to concentrate on something when it holds your interest. All the moreso when that interest is intense. Some scientists have a tendency to obsess over their theories and occasionally they go overboard with them until something breaks. Some lose their balance in bi-polar syndrome or manic depression where tremendous energy is generated either from the accumulation of awareness generated by intense focus or from excitement over the visions generated by the intense contemplation or from the anticipation of rewards to be derived from the subject matter of the visions or from all three.

To be a pioneer, one must face a challenge and challenges generally involve effort and risk. Some challenges such as movie stunts involve more risk than effort. Others, like striving for an Olympic medal in sports, involve more effort than risk. Striving to activate higher mind requires a maximum of both. In fact, the effort in reaching for higher mind is, itself, the risk and a great one at that since the intensity of contemplation required can lead to psychotic break, cardiac incidents and even death. We seldom hear about this kind of striving or the risks associated with it since it is so very rare and removed from our everyday experience.

Yet, in the absence of this extraordinary effort and the higher perspective it provides, we resemble rats in a maze, condemned to see tiny parts of the whole, painstakingly piecing together clues - the isolated parts of the "reality puzzle" that we stumble upon. Higher thought enables us and, more particularly, the scientist, to see things and how they are connected, as if from above, like certain prodigies and idiots savant. These, when given a difficult calculation to make, instead of calculating it, actually "see" the answer, as if from above.

So it comes down to this, we need to master matter in order to create a utopian world. I call this "breaking the cosmic bank." To succeed, some scientists - I have no way of knowing how many - will have to risk their sanity and even their lives engaging in scientific contemplation of unprecedented intensity. There is no lack of scientists with breakthrough ideas who would be willing to take this risk provided they are given appropriate conditions especially as concerns protection for them and their families.

Many of the scientists who qualify for this experiment will be the breadwinners of their families and that income will have to be insured to protect the future of their families in case of serious mishap. The scientists themselves, however, will also need a safety net to the degree that this is possible. To achieve that, we will construct a support team around each scientist or, as I call them, "candidates for Accelerated Thought."

This is a model of the facility we hope to build. It was designed by architect Admon Cohen in Jerusalem. It is meant to house a maximum of 36 scientists and the support teams that will help protect them. These scientists will be secluded in small but comfortable apartments that will be the modern equivalent of monastic cells. Everything will be done to allow them to contemplate their ideas uninterrupted. But this silent seclusion will belie the intensity that they will be experiencing.

Once the intensity produces a certain level of agitation in a scientist, we will begin building a team around him the members with which he will bond, one after the other. Each member of this team will be selected for certain strengths and virtues to complement his weaknesses and vices so that he will be equipped to handle the intensity without the pathology of agitation. The formation of these teams to protect these scientists from potential burnout will be the most important function of the project and its principal art.

If this strategy is successful, these experiments in Accelerated Thought should lead to a rash of scientific breakthroughs something that, otherwise, would take years of research and billions of dollars. More important, with science thus accelerated by perhaps a thousand times or more, it should not take long to solve most or all of matter's secrets.

There are those among you who might be happy to forgo these benefits and accept the way things are now, including the certainty of their own death. They assume that, in the fullness of time, science will discover what there is to discover. The problem is that we tend to forget that we are at risk and that Murphy's law is working against us.

Even without the mischief factor of terrorists and such, accident alone leaves us at the mercy of whatever might go wrong in the laboratory. With our current "rat in the maze," spark-driven research strategy, who is to say that genetic engineering isn't, right now, producing a deadly virus that will get loose and kill us all. Or perhaps an accident in nuclear research will set the atmosphere on fire and turn this world into a sun? With our growing intimacy with matter, science is quickly and quietly becoming a game of Russian Roulette and so Nanotechnology, arguably our most promising and potent scientific emphasis, instead of saving us, is likely to be our undoing, as many already fear.

Accordingly, one might think that humanity's number one priority ought to be to reduce the risk of misadventure from our dealings with the matter of this world. Unfortunately, the precautions that are now being taken will inevitably succumb to Murphy's law. It is becoming clearer, by the day, that it is what we do not know and are unable to foresee is now threatening global existence. The increasing risk that each day brings reflects the truism that it is immeasurably easier to destroy than it is to create. The ever increasingly powerful tools delivered up by science and technology that, by the nature of things, are more readily used for evil than for good.

So we are trapped in a tortoise-and-hare race with the destructive hare dashing to oblivion at ever increasing speed and the tortoise of creative vision barely having left the starting line. Accordingly, humanity's number one priority must be to transform the tortoise nature of our creativity into something that will overtake the destructive hare and eliminate the risk of misadventure from our dealings with the matter of this world.

In the absence of the higher perspective of Accelerated Thought, in order to compensate for the poor quality of our creative vision, we develop extensions for our senses such as microscopes and telescopes, and for the poor quality of our thought, devices such as computers. These serve very much like crutches and, like any artificial support that helps us substitute for effort, they tend to reconcile us to our limitations and perpetuate them. Worse, they divert us away from considering the kinds of efforts for which we were created and the discoveries to which they would lead. The extrapolative vision of Accelerated Thought can be far more penetrating and revealing than any microscope, telescope or particle accelerator. The extrapolative capacity of higher mind is, potentially, a far more efficient instrument for testing hypotheses than is the laboratory. This may all may sound utopian but it was Buckminster Fuller who said that we will have to choose between utopia and oblivion. Indeed, sooner or later we shall discover there is nothing in between.

Utopia, indeed, will be the inevitable result of the spectacular acceleration of science but the conquest of matter implies much more than a life without problems, illness or death. As suggested at the beginning, it will mean the elimination of free choice and its substitution with free will.

If PM is successful, all material things, however precious today, will become interchangeable with sand and seawater and thus be totally devalued. Just as, today, it is quite impossible for us to covet seawater, once, technically, all things become interchangeable with seawater, it will be impossible for us to covet anything physical meaning that only metaphysical reality will be meaningful to us.  

Experientially, this will be experienced as an awakening. All that ever concerned us will have lost all meaning. This will include our relationships that, with mundane considerations gone, will be redefined in purely spiritual terms meaning that, for most people, most relationships, not being spiritually defined, will lose all meaning. Our usual basis for making choices will be gone and will be made for us by a whole new scale of values that will be pertinent only to our higher nature - our soul if you like.

If, like most of us, your life has been dominated by material values the awakening will be somewhat disorienting since you will have few points of reference in a purely spiritual existence. Fortunately, there will likely be others, nearby, who will have led somewhat spiritual lives and will help us adjust. Even if somewhat disoriented, we will not be unhappy since, at worst we will revert to a state that corresponds to a time when we were not materialistic, probably, early childhood.

Those who spent their lives developing spiritualy, will be able to guide us much as spiritually enlightened adults guide their children. Being a child again, however disorienting it may be for an adult, will be much preferable to the existence we now lead. From then on, our choices will be dictated by the needs of our souls and we will experience these dictates as free will since we will flow freely to whatever helps nourish us spiritually just as a child does in ideal circumstances. Since few of us are very developed, in a spiritual sense, most of us will get to relive our childhoods from the time when society compromised us and forced us to make choices that conformed to society's needs and not our own.