To The Dreamers Of This And Other Worlds...

[Hervé]

... where each and everyone is THE writer...

Amzer Zo| April 7, 2014 at 11:06 am |
[...]

“Reality is a dream one managed to land in the physical universe.”

It’s one I latched onto from that phenomenon called “déjà vu” I ran into and remembered that I dreamt the “déjà vu” the night before and which gives an avenue of dealing with such and that is of “recognizing” the “conditions” of the “experiment” as in an about-to-happen “déjà vu.”

In other words, it’s all going according to script!

[...]

Visions of the Impossible

How ‘fantastic’ stories unlock the nature of consciousness

Louis Faurer

By Jeffrey J. Kripal

The greatest taboo among serious intellectuals of the century just behind us, in fact, proved to be none of the "transgressions" itemized by postmodern thinkers: It was, rather, the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview.
—Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (2002)

Consider two impossible tales.

Scene 1. Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he relates the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were in port in St. Louis, the writer had a dream:

In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.

Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized "that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream."

Martin Munkacsi

Winky Lewis, Aurora Photos

Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him an overdose of opium for the pain. Normally the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised $60 to put Henry in a metal one. Twain explains what happened next:

When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the center of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

Who would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it as a series of coincidences? Twain could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were many. In 1878 he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they worked. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared "the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest." He offered the essay to the North American Review on the condition that it be published anonymously. The magazine refused to do so. Finally, Twain published the article in Harper’s, in two installments: "Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript With a History" (1891) and "Mental Telegraphy Again" (1895).

Mental telegraphy. The technological metaphor points to Twain’s conviction that such events were connected to the acts of reading and writing. Indeed, he suspected that whatever processes this mental telegraphy involved had some relationship to the sources of his literary powers. The "manuscript with a history" of the first essay’s title refers to a detailed plotline for a story about some Nevada silver mines that one day came blazing into his mind. Twain came to believe that he had received this idea from a friend 3,000 miles away through mental telegraphy.

Scene 2. The American forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio’s book Beyond Knowing is filled with extraordinary stories of impossible things that routinely happen around death. Here is one such tale.

It began one night when Amatuzio encountered a very troubled hospital chaplain, who asked her if she knew how they had found the body of a young man recently killed in a car accident. Amatuzio replied that her records showed that the Coon Rapids Police Department had recovered the body in a frozen creek bed at 4:45 a.m.

"No," the man replied. "Do you know how they really found him?" The chaplain then explained how he had spoken with the dead man’s wife, who related a vivid dream she’d had that night of her husband standing next to her bed, apologizing and explaining that he had been in a car accident, and that his car was in a ditch where it could not be seen from the road. She awoke immediately, at 4:20, and called the police to tell them that her husband had been in a car accident not far from their home, and that his car was in a ravine that could not be seen from the road. They recovered the body 20 minutes later.

Most scholars have no idea what to do with such poignant, powerful stories, other than to dismiss them with lazy words like "anecdote" or "coincidence." Or perhaps we could study their textual histories and show that they are not as straightforward as they seem. That would be a relief.

As with the heads of Hercules’ Lernaean Hydra, however, with every story we so decapitate, three more, or three thousand more, appear. We are swimming in a sea of such stories, if only we could recognize our situation. We do not know how many such stories there might be, much less what they might mean. We do not know because we have never really tried to find out. Why, after all, would we study something that does not exist? "Water?" the fish asks. "What’s water?"

It is worse than that, though. It is not just that we are told that such things, which happen all the time, cannot happen at all. It is that there are subtle, and not so subtle, punishments in place for those who take such events seriously—that is, for those who let the Hydra stand. Note that both stories feature a kind of professional fear. Twain struggled for years with whether to own his experiences in print. Even the hospital chaplain was shaken to the core by what he encountered. Clearly these events violate something basic about our worldview and our established ways of knowing. That is why Amatuzio titled her book Beyond Knowing.

It is not just our fault, though. There are fundamental ambiguities inherent in the experiences themselves, ambiguities that make it difficult to put and keep these experiences on our academic tables. To start with, these things are not things. Nor are they replicable or measurable. And then there is the key role that the human imagination plays in these visions.

I have recounted two fairly straightforward, empirical cases, but the records are filled with more difficult, that is, more symbolic or outright mythical accounts whose strangeness would boggle even the most generous minds. Finally, the recounting of even the empirical cases is often changed in small ways (missing an important detail or supplying a nonexistent one), which suggests that these visions are accurate anomalous cognitions that have been "filled in" with imagined details—mixtures of trick and truth.

The early-Victorian researchers had it right: They called dreams like the two with which I began "veridical hallucinations," or hallucinations corresponding to real events.

We are not very good at such paradoxical ways of thinking today. We tend to think of the imagined as imaginary, that is, made up, fanciful. But something else is shining through, at least in these extreme cases. Somehow Twain’s dreaming imagination knew that his brother would be dead in a few weeks—it even knew what kind of bouquet would sit on his brother’s breathless chest. Similarly, the wife’s dream-vision knew that her husband had just been killed and where his body lay. In those events, words like "imagined" and "real," "inside" and "outside," "subject" and "object," "mental" and "material" cease to have much meaning. And yet such words name the most basic structures of our knowing.

Or not knowing.

Both stories are about a kind of traumatic transcendence, a visionary warping of space and time effected by the gravity of intense human suffering. Even these most basic "categories of the understanding," as Immanuel Kant called them, surrender their reign before the needs of the human heart. Much as Kant argued, these appear to be our own cognitive filters, not some perfect reflection of what is really there, or, dare I add, of what we are really capable.

There was more to Kant’s fundamental insight than philosophical precision. On August 10, 1763, the philosopher marveled (in a private letter) at the clairvoyant abilities of the Swedish scientist-seer Emanuel Swedenborg, who, in 1756, related to some dinner guests, in Gothenburg, the precise details of a fire advancing in a southern suburb of Stockholm, 50 miles away. From 6 to 8 in the evening, he reported on the fire’s advance until it was finally put out, just three doors from his own house. In the next few days, Swedenborg’s account was investigated and confirmed by the political authorities after the news spread and the governor got involved.

But here is the catch: Kant may have clearly accepted in private the empirical truth of such an extraordinary event, but he mocked and made fun of Swedenborg in public. There is that professional fear again.

Debunkers misunderstand such stories as the soon-to-be-dead brother, the appearance of the fatal-car-accident victim, and the advancing fire—all of which happened under extreme circumstances—when they ask, with a sneer, why all psychics do not get rich on the stock market, or why robust psychic phenomena cannot be made to appear in the controlled laboratory.

Putting aside for the moment the fact that psychics sometimes do get rich, and that statistically significant but humble forms of psychic phenomena do in fact appear in laboratories, the answer to why robust events like those of Twain, the widowed wife, and the Stockholm fire do not appear in the lab is simple: There is no trauma, love, or loss there. No one is in danger or dying. Your neighborhood is not on fire. The professional debunker’s insistence, then, that the phenomena play by his rules and appear for all to see in a safe and sterile laboratory is little more than a mark of his own ignorance of the nature of the phenomena in question. To play by those rules is like trying to study the stars at midday. It is like going to the North Pole to study those legendary beasts called zebras. No doubt just anecdotes.

Context matters. Methods that rely on or favor extreme conditions are employed in science all the time to discover and demonstrate knowledge. As Aldous Huxley pointed out long ago in his own defense of "mystical" experiences suggestive of spirit or soul, we have no reason to deduce that water is composed of two gases glued together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by traumatizing it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands. The situation is eerily analogous with impossible scenarios like those of Twain, the wife, and the Swedish seer. They are generally available only in traumatic situations, when the human being is being "boiled" in illness, stroke, coma, danger, or near-death.

Allow me to update Huxley. Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to certain drastic conditions, like the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see that matter is not material at all. But—and this is the key—we can get to that point only through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars and decades of preparation to inflict and then analyze it.

Because we’ve invested our energy, time, and money in particle physics, we are finding out all sorts of impossible things. But we will not invest those resources in the study of anomalous states of cognition and consciousness, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones. While it is true that some brain research has gone beyond assuming that "mind equals brain" and that the psyche works like, or is, a computer, we are still afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world, and that we possess fantastic capacities that we have allowed ourselves to imagine only in science fiction, fantasy literature, and comic books.

Take my own discipline, the history of religions, which is filled with countless tales that make my two opening stories look ordinary. We are told endlessly, and quite correctly, that religious experience of every sort is "constructed" by local languages, ritual practices, and institutions. We thus insist on "contextualizing" every experience and event, which means locking them down tight to a particular physical point in space-time and so not allowing them to inform how we understand other obviously similar experiences and events at other points of space-time.

For example, individuals have been seeing dead loved ones (or loved ones about to die at a distance) for millennia, which suggests strongly that experiences like those of Twain, the widowed wife, and Swedenborg are very much a part of our world and not simply constructed by culture. Such comparisons are deeply suspect these days, mostly because they end up suggesting something at work in history that is not strictly materialist—like a mind that knows what is going to happen before it happens, or a departed soul that appears to his sleeping wife.

In the same vein, we are told, again quite correctly, that religion is about power and politics, or economics, or patriarchy, or empire and colonial oppression, or psychological projection, or the denial of death, or—now the latest—cognitive templates, evolutionary adaptation, and computerlike synapses. And ultimately, of course, what religion is really about is nothing, since we are nothing but meaningless, statistically organized matter bouncing around in empty, dead space.

In the rules of this materialist game, the scholar of religion can never take seriously what makes an experience or expression religious, since that would involve some truly fantastic vision of human nature and destiny, some transhuman divinization, some mental telegraphy, dreamlike soul, clairvoyant seer, or cosmic consciousness. All of that is taken off the table, in principle, as inappropriate to the academic project. And then we are told that there is nothing "religious" about religion, which, of course, is true, since we have just discounted all of that other stuff.

We have conscious intellectuals telling us that consciousness does not really exist as such.

Our present flatland models have rendered human nature something like the protagonist Scott Carey in the film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). With every passing decade, human nature gets tinier and tinier and less and less significant. In a few more years, maybe we’ll just blip out of existence (like poor Scott at the end of the film), reduced to nothing more than cognitive modules, replicating DNA, quantum-sensitive microtubules in the synapses of the brain, or whatever. We are constantly reminded of the "death of the subject" and told repeatedly that we are basically walking corpses with computers on top—in effect, technological zombies, moist robots, meat puppets. We are in the ridiculous situation of having conscious intellectuals tell us that consciousness does not really exist as such, that there is nothing to it except cognitive grids, software loops, and warm brain matter. If this were not so patently absurd and depressing, it would be funny.

Humanists have paid a heavy price for their shrinking act. We are more or less ignored now by both the general public and our colleagues in the natural sciences, whose disciplines, of course, make no sense at all outside of universal observations, and who often work from bold cosmic visions, wildly counterintuitive models (think ghostlike multiverses and teleporting particles), and evolutionary spans of time that make our "histories" look insignificant and boring by comparison.

I am aware, of course, that there are signs of life in the humanities. I am thinking in particular of the development of "big history" in historiography and of the new materialisms, vitalisms, and panpsychisms of contemporary philosophy, as evident in Thomas Nagel’s recent well-publicized doubts about the adequacy of neo-Darwinian materialism, expressed in his book Mind and Cosmos.

These are all positive signs, but I wonder if they are bold enough. A new materialism is, after all, still materialism, and the big histories remain allergic to any hint that human beings may be more than historical beings. In short, these new moves still keep the game-changing evidence off the table.

I also wonder if there are good reasons for ignoring the humanities. Why, after all, should anyone listen to the truth claims of a set of disciplines whose central arguments often boil down to the claim that the only truth is that there is no truth; that all efforts toward truth are nothing more than power grabs; and that all deep conversation across cultural and temporal boundaries is essentially illusory—that we are all, in effect, locked into our local language games, condemned to watching shadows in our heads, which are going nowhere and mean nothing?

I am chained to that brain floor like everyone else. I am making no certain metaphysical claims here, although I am pointing out that our present ones have erased huge swaths of the human experience and, by so doing, have impoverished our thinking. I have not, like Plato’s hero, escaped from the cave of the senses and seen the sun of mind outside. But over the past three decades, I have read and spoken with many who have described some hint or gleam of exactly such a shining intellect.

I suggest a way out of our present impasse: We should put these extreme narratives, these impossible stories, in the middle of our academic table. I would also like to make a wager, here and now, that once we put these currently rejected forms of knowledge on our academic table, things that were once impossible to imagine will soon become possible not only to imagine but also to think, theorize, and even test. I am betting, in other words, that we actually need these so-called impossible things to come up with better answers to our most pressing questions, including the biggest question of all: the nature of consciousness.

Toward this same end, I propose that we reimagine the humanities as the study of consciousness coded in culture. I am not suggesting that we can study consciousness directly, or that any ego can ever know what consciousness is in itself. I understand that we can study consciousness only as it is reflected and refracted in cultural artifacts, like texts, art objects, languages, and social institutions, or, as the cognitive scientists have it, in cognition.

But I think it matters a great deal whether we are willing to imagine that consciousness might exist in its own right and may well be more than a function of brain matter or local historical and cultural processes. Even the admission of this possibility would be enough to bring the humanities back to consciousness and humanists back to the academic table as central and valued participants. The humanities would no longer be, as my Rice University colleague Timothy Morton puts it, "candy sprinkles" on the cake of scientism. Quite the contrary: Our texts, our narratives, and our methods of interpretation would function as guiding ideals, as pointers to where anyone interested in the nature of mind might go for answers.

After all, consciousness is the fundamental ground of all that we know or ever will know. It is the ground of all of the sciences, all of the arts, all of the social sciences, all of the humanities, indeed all human knowledge and experience. Moreover, as far as we can tell, this presence is sui generis. It is its own thing. We know of nothing else like it in the universe, and anything we might know later we will know only through this same consciousness. Many want to claim the exact opposite, that consciousness is not its own thing, is reducible to warm, wet tissue and brainhood. But no one has come close to showing how that might work. Probably because it doesn’t.

A broad historical perspective might help here. As scholars like the American literary critic Victoria Nelson, in The Secret Life of Puppets, or the Dutch historian Wouter Hanegraaff, in Esotericism and the Academy, have demonstrated, Western intellectual history has seen immense swings back and forth between Platonism and Aristotelianism: between a philosophy rooted in mystical and visionary experience (a Platonism that helped produce, among other things, the conviction that profound mathematical and philosophical truths are "remembered" or "discovered" and not "constructed") and an empirical rationalism that bases its knowledge on sense data and linear logic. With the rise of science, rational empiricism has been dominant for the past few centuries.

The solution is not simply to swing back to some kind of pure Platonism, but to effect a synthesis of the two modes of knowing. The sciences are a big help here, for two reasons. First, because they can challenge humanists to abandon their absolute constructivism, and second, because the sciences have utterly failed to explain consciousness.

We now have two models of the brain and its relationship to mind, an Aristotelian one and a Platonic one, both of which fit the neuroscientific data well enough: the reigning production model (mind equals brain), and the much older but now suppressed transmission or filter model (mind is experienced through or mediated, shaped, reduced, or translated by brain but exists in its own right "outside" the skull cavity).

Whether we can eventually address both the hard problem of consciousness and its elaborate coding in human culture hinges on whether we can integrate the Aristotelian and Platonic models, resisting an either-or solution. So far we have not been able to resist. The rules of what gets counted in academe are defined by the dominance of the production model and the suppression of the transmission model. In short, today Plato may admire Aristotle, but Aristotle sneers at Plato.

That is probably not the end of the story, though. Consider the musings of one contemporary neuroscientist, David Eagleman, who teaches and does research at the Baylor College of Medicine. At the end of his book Incognito, Eagleman turns to the question of the soul and expresses reservations about promissory materialism, the commonly heard claim that, although we do not yet know how to explain mind through material processes, we eventually will. Indeed, everything will eventually be explained in a materialist framework, because everything is only matter.

Maybe, Eagleman concludes. Or maybe not. It is extremely unlikely that we just happen to be living at the moment when all things will soon be explained. Previous generations claimed the same, and they were all quite wrong. The likelier scenario, he observes, is that the more we learn about the brain and consciousness, the stranger, not simpler, things will get. Here is where one of his thought experiments comes in. A parable:

Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box. … Now let’s say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again. … You come to a clear conclusion: The voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations, and you admit that you don’t know—but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.

Assuming that you are truly isolated, what you do not know is pretty much everything that you need to know: radio waves, electromagnetism, distant cities, radio stations, and modern civilization—everything outside the radio box. You would not have the capacity to even imagine such things. And if you could, Eagleman says, "you have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them." You could convince almost no one, and you yourself would probably reject the existence of such mysterious, spiritlike waves. You would become a "radio materialist." Eagleman points out at the end of his book: "I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio, but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out."

Countless clues suggest that the human brain may function as an imperfect receiver of some transhuman signal.

William James, Henri Bergson, and Aldous Huxley all argued the same long before Eagleman. Bergson even used the same radio analogy. This is where the historian of religions—this one, anyway—steps in. There are, after all, countless other clues in the history of religions that rule the radio theory in, and that suggest, though hardly prove, that the human brain may function as a super-evolved neurological radio or television and, in rare but revealing moments when the channel suddenly "switches," as an imperfect receiver of some transhuman signal that simply does not play by the rules as we know them.

Although it relies on an imperfect technological metaphor, the beauty of the radio or transmission model is that it is symmetrical, intellectually generous, and—above all—capable of demonstrating what we actually see in the historical data, when we really look. It is symmetrical and generous in the sense that it affirms everything we have been doing for the past century or so in the humanities and the sciences (all that Aristotelian stuff about the body and the brain), and it puts back on the table much of the evidence that we have taken off as impossible or nonexistent (all that Platonic stuff about the human spirit). In this same generous, symmetrical spirit, it is not that materialism is wrong. It is that it is half-right.

Such a radio model certainly has no problem understanding how Mark Twain could have known about his brother’s imminent funeral, why a wife could know about her husband’s distant car wreck, or why a Swedish scientist could track a fire 50 miles away. The mind can know things distant in space and time because it is not limited to space or time. Mind is not "in" the radio or brain box. The payoff here is immense: The impossible suddenly becomes possible. Indeed, it becomes predictable.

What we have been doing for the past few centuries is studying the construction and workings of the physical radio. But the radio was built for the radio signal (and vice versa). How can we understand the one without the other? It is time to come to terms with both. It is time to invite Plato back to the table—to restore the humanities to consciousness. The rest will follow.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is a professor of religious studies at Rice University. He is the author, most recently (with Ata Anzali, Andrea R. Jain, and Erin Prophet), of the textbook Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms (Wiley, 2014).

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Amzer Zo, i read that very recently -- not sure if a PA person posted it or if it was in one of my Reader's Digest paranormal volumes... lol

It was probably both -- not sure what it is about the dead and the dying, AZ, but they do come to us.

I bet the people who dream about it before it happens are really shaken by it.
Pretty sure Carl Jung had some good/bad/ugly experiences with death and dreams.

One night he woke up and felt "energy passing through his skull", and it turned out, at that precise moment of of Carl's patients committed suicide in the night.

[araucaria]

I have a hunch we’ll get a post from Bill on this thread.

Mark Twain was born during one passage of Comet Halley and died at the age of 76 during its next passage in 1911. Somehow he knew this was going to happen. Maybe this is why he didn’t believe that story he once read in the newspaper: ‘the report of my death was an exaggeration’. This raises two questions: how would he know the time of his death from the time of his birth? And what astrological or other phenomenon was playing out here?

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

Posted by araucaria (here)
I have a hunch we’ll get a post from Bill on this thread.

Mark Twain was born during one passage of Comet Halley and died at the age of 76 during its next passage in 1911. Somehow he knew this was going to happen. Maybe this is why he didn’t believe that story he once read in the newspaper: ‘the report of my death was an exaggeration’. This raises two questions: how would he know the time of his death from the time of his birth? And what astrological or other phenomenon was playing out here?

when you convert your birthdate to Julian reckoning, and then use that approach to compare birth/death (Julian dates remember!) of famous and powerful people,
and you might discover something fairly mind-blowing with some of them (and maybe yourself). especially some of the scottish bloodlines.

I stopped researching "using Julian dates to predict deaths w/ a simple formula" because historically that sort of thing is frowned upon.
in fact i didn't even keep much of the research... tsk

in fact i wouldn't recommend any of you do this and just forget i said anything


P.S. your observation about the comet is wayyyy too cool.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

p.p.s. http://www.archives.gov/press/press-...5/nr05-83.html
Press Release
June 1, 2005
Did You Know…Independence Day Should Actually Be July 2?

Independence Day Should Have Been July 2 –July 2, 1776 is the day that the Continental Congress actually voted for independence. John Adams, in his writings, even noted that July 2 would be remembered in the annals of American history and would be marked with fireworks and celebrations. The written Declaration of Independence was dated July 4 but wasn't actually signed until August 2. Fifty-six delegates eventually signed the document, although all were not present on that day in August.



_______________

I will probably die on a date that's bad for the USA somehow. lol

[avid]

A small offering - but George Ure's Urban Survival http://urbansurvival.com/2014/04/17/...s-early-start/ has regular anomalies posted, used to be called WUJO as he was associated with Clif High for years (halfpasthuman), but now called WoWW (world of wu-wu :-))
His lucid dreams' site has been transferred to:
http://www.nationaldreamcenter.com/d...ip_Ferry_Dream

I have watched George's site for years now, and he has some fascinating takes on the economy (that's his forté), but also is so aware of the need to prepare - for whatever. A fascinating chap. Worth a look.

[Fairy Friend]

Wow I am excited to see Mark Twain's name. I am a fan and supposedly related. My grandmother's maiden name is Clemens and my father's middle name in honor of him.

[rgray222]

It is most unfortunate that science does not take this human ability (a sixth sense) seriously. I am afraid it is for several reasons, empirical proof is hard to come by or considered impossible to come by therefore it is relegated to the "odd or bizarre news". If you can't touch it, taste it, see it or feel it then it must not be real. Which is wrong on many levels. It is my belief that we all have experiences everyday that are similar to Twain's but we either don't believe they are real, don't want to believe they are real or we simply think they are wrong. They may not be dreams or remembrance from this lifetime or even this universe but they are very much real.

Every thinking person knows that science can only take mankind so far, the rest is up to each individual. Sooner or later mankind will have to move beyond the hard science to understand the wonders of the universe and our role in it. Waiting around for science to tell us what to believe is simply foolish. We must let go of "the science" and trust our inner being, our soul to really achieve our full potential.

I would say that the vast majority of mankind suspects this but letting go of science and trusting yourself is a change that is very hard to make. I would bet that every single person on this planet can tell at least one intriguing story about a dream, a feeling, a strong emotion or experienced a strong sense of deja vu. Of course science wants to explain the explainable instead of just believing.

Most scientist want us to feel a bit inferior. They intimidate us and make us feel foolish for expressing some of these thoughts. If mankind would talk openly and honestly about these dreams, these "feelings" we would all start to understand life in an entirely new way. If the media embraced some of these ideas and removed the stigma of the unknown we would all be moving ahead together. Instead this topic is only discussed around the fringes of society and each one of us is on our own to move forward at our own pace.

We should applaud scientist, university professors and the media when they do discuss this subject.........it takes courage to do so. These topics are quietly and gently considered taboo.

A leap of faith in yourself is probably the best way to raise your consciousness and truly understand what is happening in the universe.

[Fairy Friend]

All paths lead to the truth. There will be a merging of art, science, philosophy, music, dreamers and math. Mergings are already starting.

[Mike Gorman]

Posted by rgray222 (here)
It is most unfortunate that science does not take this human ability (a sixth sense) seriously. I am afraid it is for several reasons, empirical proof is hard to come by or considered impossible to come by therefore it is relegated to the "odd or bizarre news". If you can't touch it, taste it, see it or feel it then it must not be real. Which is wrong on many levels. It is my belief that we all have experiences everyday that are similar to Twain's but we either don't believe they are real, don't want to believe they are real or we simply think they are wrong. They may not be dreams or remembrance from this lifetime or even this universe but they are very much real.

Every thinking person knows that science can only take mankind so far, the rest is up to each individual. Sooner or later mankind will have to move beyond the hard science to understand the wonders of the universe and our role in it. Waiting around for science to tell us what to believe is simply foolish. We must let go of "the science" and trust our inner being, our soul to really achieve our full potential.

I would say that the vast majority of mankind suspects this but letting go of science and trusting yourself is a change that is very hard to make. I would bet that every single person on this planet can tell at least one intriguing story about a dream, a feeling, a strong emotion or experienced a strong sense of deja vu. Of course science wants to explain the explainable instead of just believing.

Most scientist want us to feel a bit inferior. They intimidate us and make us feel foolish for expressing some of these thoughts. If mankind would talk openly and honestly about these dreams, these "feelings" we would all start to understand life in an entirely new way. If the media embraced some of these ideas and removed the stigma of the unknown we would all be moving ahead together. Instead this topic is only discussed around the fringes of society and each one of us is on our own to move forward at our own pace.

We should applaud scientist, university professors and the media when they do discuss this subject.........it takes courage to do so. These topics are quietly and gently considered taboo.

A leap of faith in yourself is probably the best way to raise your consciousness and truly understand what is happening in the universe.

I think you have hit on a very real point-the rationalist paradigm is so all pervasive, the scientific method has such hegemony over the academic realm, that to even suggest it is flawed gains you immediate
discredit. The underlying powers that shadow the research and teaching of scientists is linked to the funding sources of universities and research establishments-therefore if you are seen to be a maverick
and suggest alternative perspectives you can kiss your career good bye. Rupert Sheldrake is a very pertinent example-his banned TED lecture gained him a label of 'pseudo-scientist'-if was not for his impeccable credentials
gained from decades of work at Cambridge university he would have been finished, but he is a 'Real Scientist' with links and relationships with others-his work on 'sixth sense' and the Morphic Fields and extra sensory perception is brilliant.
Rupert is one of many who know there is a lot more to our existence than the materialist paradigm can describe. We are definitely on the verge of a change of scientific paradigm (I do not like that word, but it serves) it is long overdue
but there is a lot of resistance. The article was extremely well written. Of course we all share an underlying knowledge that there is a lot going on, that it points to something colossal we cannot yet describe. I'm afraid it is a matter of time
once again, I'd love to be around one hundred years hence, it will be a very different humanity, if we can only just make it through!

[chocolate]

Posted by TraineeHuman (here)
[...]

Everything we ever know is filtered through ourselves. It's very important to Know Thyself very well. Otherwise we won't appreciate what sort of filter we have and are.

It goes deeper than that, too. All our experience of "the universe/multiverse" is forever within our individual consciousness. So, to thoroughly know what's in our own consciousness turns out to be the same as knowing the entire universe/multiverse.

taken from OBEs What are they how to make them happen and where does the Higher Self fit in

There are those who have bridged a lot of what Amzer Zo has put forward in his OP, and some of them 'walk among us'.
We already have a person on the forum -- may not be Bill Ryan per se, but that doesn't make him any less important, or less worthy of one's attention than Bill -- TraineeHuman ( I don't know his real name ) -- who can bring much light into all matter/consciousness and the related studies. What one needs is just to read through, and to get into some practice.
TraineeHuman has covered in his thread the connection ( or the lack there of ) between physics ( science as we know it right now ), religion ( more of the spiritual side of it ), consciousness, psychology, time travel, the dream worlds and their connection to art and other forms of expression, and so much more 'fascinating' topics ( I have been witnessing being discussed in a more shallow way throughout the forum recently ) than just the mere division between materialism and spiritualism/consciousness.

I am sure he cannot promise you an easy ride, having 81 pages of posts, but the way I see it, can it get any more difficult than it already is in this world?

[Hervé]

Just considering the variety of interpretations given to the fauna, flora and objects encountered in those other states/dimensions/densities...

... you know... ETs, Archons, Djinns, Demons, Tulpas, thought forms, eggregores, Golems, holographic recordings of times past/present/future, hypnotic hallucinations/delusions...

... and the "natural"/programmed inclination is to resort to the "knowledgeable ones"... you know... high priests, gurus, geeks, shamans, sorcerers, medicine wo/men, experts... all under the influence of "human emotions," as depicted by Greek and other mythologies, or, of more or less mischievous "spirits" having their fun with the "incarnated ones"...

... and one may be able to see why "science" was bound to develop as a means of investigation independent from that "spirit" box where everything is possible on a whim... so that some may be able to "think" outside that box.

There is an entrance/exchange point/means though, and the analogy to radio waves is more than apt since that entrance/exchange point/means is by way of electromagnetism:

Posted by ktlight (here)
[...]

... Before we began, he placed some yogurt into a sterilized test tube, inserted two gold electrodes, and turned on the recording chart. I was excited, yet dubious. We began to talk, and the pen wriggled up and down. Then, just as I took in my breath prior to disagreeing with something he’d said, the pen seemed to lurch. But did it really jump, or was I only seeing what I wanted to see?

At one point, while Backster was out of the room, I tried to muster up some anger by thinking of clear-cut forests and the politicians who sanction them, of abused children and their abusers. But the line depicting the electrochemical response of the yogurt remained perfectly flat. Perhaps the yogurt wasn’t interested in me. Losing interest myself, I began to wander around the lab. My eyes fell on a calendar, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an advertisement for a shipping company. I felt a sudden surge of anger at the ubiquity of advertising. Then I realized — a spontaneous emotion! I dashed over to the chart, and saw on it a sudden spike apparently corresponding to the moment I'd seen the ad.

When Backster returned, I continued the interview, still excited, and perhaps a little less skeptical."

Now go to the link to read the interview:

http://thesunmagazine.org/archives/1882

If a yoghourt can distinguish/discern and "tell" what's fake or what's "real" and the "telling" can be translated via electromagnetic means...

... it becomes understandable that it's child play for ETs to put up and show one's memories -- short or long, very long -- on a video screen, etc...

Also, if a yoghourt can do it, it becomes possible for "anything" to accurately identify psychopaths... which might be the real reason why "lie detectors" outputs and interpretations are not admissible in courts...

However, things could get complicated if said yoghourt, on the witness-stand, gets "possessed"/influenced by some entity/spirit passing by... or a cell phone tower or any other electromagnetic influence...

What it boils down to, is that there is a 3D wooff and warp of interconnections underlying this whole universe and it's variously labelled as "life," "source," "ether," "morphogenic field," "holographic universe," "source field," etc...

Posted on April 4, 2014 by martyrathbun09
More than thirty years of research has demonstrated rather conclusively that the average human being when connected to a galvanic skin response detection device (generic name for a Hubbard Electro-psychometer) routinely registers presentiment of about five seconds. That is, the meter reads on average 5 second prior to the subject being provided with a concept to respond to. This research has been performed on people taken off the street, with no previous psychic or spiritual training or study. It has been conducted applying exacting scientific standards.

Anyway... a big drum of worms, ain't it!

[Hervé]

One would think it's only religions which have a vested interest in shoving the "not-normal" under any available carpet... not so!

Here is Jon Rappoport's take on it:

Paranormal You
Nov7, 2013 by Jon Rappoport

1960. First day of rehearsal for a college play, The Lower Depths. I walk out on the stage and look around. It’s quiet, but inside I feel thunder. Everything is different. New shining space. I start smiling. I’ve been waiting for this moment for God knows how long. A place apart. A world where imagination takes on flesh and comes to life.

The theater director, Walt Boughton, is leaning against a wall. He looks at me. He sees and he knows. He nods. His message is clear: That’s right, my boy, you’re here, this is it, nothing will ever be the same…

We live in a society where consumers can pick and choose among thousands of narratives about themselves, their lives, their future, their duties, their needs, their status.

Just the other day, I wrote about a new Pentagon/DARPA project aimed at studying brain signals, in real time, to understand how and why people buy some narratives and reject others.

A common feature of most narratives is: limited life, limited power.

Or to put it another way, limited access to larger aspects of Self.

The trick of narratives, as retired propaganda master, Ellis Medavoy, once told me, is: built-in limitation; it looks like “desire fulfilled”; it looks like happiness.

But it isn’t.

And when people find that out, they experience buyer’s remorse.

“Why did I think that narrative described what I wanted? Why did I think it would make me satisfied?”

The space-continuum in which we live has its own narratives. They hang from it like barnacles. The gist? You can’t get out. There is nothing to get to.

Again, I refer to the brilliant hypnotherapist, Jack True, whom I interview 43 times in my collection, The Matrix Revealed. Jack did sessions with patients that went directly at the space-time matrix.

“Under hypnosis,” he said, “I had people look at the continuum and tell me what they saw. I had them describe it in their own way. Then I asked them to look outside it.”

The material from those sessions is extraordinary, in several respects. It helped me, when I was researching my companion collection, Exit From the Matrix.

Some of Jacks’ patients came “back around the barn,” as Jack characterized it, and ended up relating what sounded like dreams, dreams they would have while asleep. The narrative wasn’t smooth, it wasn’t moving from beginning to end. It was asymmetrical, just as in dreams, where the scenery shifts, where one event ends in midstream and another pops up, where the “plot line” dissolves…and a new plot takes over.

Several of Jack’s patients said their encounters outside the space-time continuum felt very familiar—as if they’d been there before.

Jack: “One patient said he found himself in a dim hall. It was very large. People were talking, but he couldn’t see them. A single voice took over, and a character stepped out of the shadows. He told the patient to remember this meeting when he woke up. He said this was one of a great number of places outside ordinary space-time. He said there was no reason to consider this ‘visit’ strange or unusual. On the contrary, life inside space-time was unusual…”

There are millions and millions of narratives that are used to convince people life inside space-time is It, it’s all there is, it’s normal…

And normalcy is the key. That’s the icon, the symbol, the header, the trance-inducer. What is normal seals the deal. It labels what is allowed to be experienced. It tells people what is not allowed to be experienced.

These narratives about normalcy hold people inside the gates, and provide boundaries for Self. “Self can’t get any bigger than this.”

In the early 1960s, I was teaching at a private school in West Los Angeles. On a Monday morning, I got off the bus and walked along Pico Boulevard toward Overland Avenue. My first class was in 15 minutes or so.

Out of nowhere, a small black bird dive-bombed me, landed on my head with both feet and took off again.

The day before, I’d seen Hitchcock’s The Birds. I thought this was an unusual follow-up, to say the least.

I saw the bird land in a tree near the corner of Overland. I walked to the tree and looked at the bird.

He flew down and landed a couple of feet away from me on the sidewalk. He hopped closer.

He cocked his head and looked up at me.

“It’s Hitchcock,” I said.

He took off, flew across the street, and disappeared over the roof of the Security National Bank building.

After school that day, I told one of the teachers about the incident. He said, “You know, they’re hiring us to show these crazy kids how to fit in [be normal], and this is what you’re telling me? A movie and reality intersect?”

We laughed.

But I realized something. Something about Normal.

These kids in our small private school were all rejects from the public system, or from other private schools. They couldn’t make it there. Many of them were what the psychologists called “acting out.”

I’d have to write a few hundred pages just to begin giving you the flavor of what it was like to deal with 15 or 20 of them, at once, in a classroom. It wasn’t about teaching content, believe me. It was about me surviving.

But at bottom, every one of those kids was, in his/her own highly idiosyncratic way, Not-Normal. That’s all. And what was driving them completely bat-crazy was, no one would deal with them on their own terms.

Everyone was trying to fix them. Everyone was feeding them narratives about “normal, fitting in.”

The next day I changed all that. In my classes, we worked up improvised sketches. Theater. No plot, no direction, no narrative, just off-the-cuff dreamtime in the moment and lots of roles, some of which they were already playing every day to a dead audience of teachers. But it wasn’t dead now. They had me and they had each other.

They jumped at the chance. They didn’t need any direction or instruction. It was as if they’d been waiting all their lives for someone to say, “Just perform what you’re already performing.”

They were actors. That’s what they’d been trying to tell adults.

And everything fell into place. They loved it, I loved it, we all offloaded a few tons of stress and a whole lot of insane normalcy…and then they calmed down. Not because there was a strict rule about behavior, but because they had escaped the tyranny of Is. And Has To Be. And Must. And Normal.

That day, the space-time of the continuum, in that classroom, went away. It disintegrated. What took its place was an island of joy. Which is to say, what sits outside this matrix is more real than real. When you find it.

It doesn’t have to be spooky.

It’s Magic Theater.

Sit down some time with a bunch of real stage actors and ask them when they feel most alive. A certain percentage of them will confess it’s when they’re on the boards, performing a role. That’s when they feel most like themselves, even though they’re pretending to be somebody else. That’s when the day-to-day space-time continuum goes away and new one comes into being.

That’s when normal steps aside and paranormal makes its entrance.

A fake space, a repressed space, a continuum of frustration vanishes.

Conventional standards don’t explain what is happening. They can’t.

Life. Theater. Theatricality. Roles played to the hilt. The Paranormal.

There is no single narrative for a human being. There are as many as he wants to invent. Sometimes the stage is dead, the lights are off, the seats are empty. But then we get a glimpse of something else. We walk up on the stage and feel that space and realize the old walls are gone and this is it, and we’re ready, and the energy comes out of nowhere and we do things we thought were impossible.

Normal disintegrates.

This is art. This is a level of life that is waiting for all of us.

Jon Rappoport

[Hervé]

Beyond all structures

Jun23, 2014 by theodorewesson

by Jon Rappoport
www.nomorefakenews.com

We are fascinated with structures and systems because they work, and because some of us feel an aesthetic attraction to them.

They work until you want to do something different.

Many people want to grab a structure and pull it around them and sit there like a bird in a cage. They want to go from A to B to C and feel the satisfaction of knowing it works every time.

Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all.

But go into a corporation and say you want to teach them creativity and they’ll say, “What’s the system?”

Once, at a party, I told a personnel chief at a company, “The system is to stand on your head.”

“Literally?” he said.

“No. That would be too easy. People would find a system for that. But figuratively, that’s what you want to get people to do.”

He scratched his head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s where we start. I say something and you don’t understand. Then we have a chance.”

“What are you?” he said. “Some kind of Zen teacher?”

“No,” I said. “If I said I was, you’d pigeonhole me. I teach non-systems.”

He laughed in an uncomfortable way.

“We don’t operate on non-systems at the company.”

“No, but if you let three or four people do that, they might come up with a product you never dreamed of.”

That he could understand. Vaguely.

Here’s how things work at some companies. The second-tier honchos decide it’s time for a new product. They call in the chief of production and ask him what could be done. He suggests a whiz-it 4, which is basically a whiz-it 3 with a few more bells and whistles.

The honchos give him the green light, and he goes to work. He triggers the structure he already has. He gets underlings to make sketches of whiz 4, and with those he assigns compartmentalized tasks to various departments under him. The timetable is eighteen months.

He appoints a project supervisor to oversee the whole thing.

The project supervisor pretty much knows what’s going to happen. The six departments in charge of bringing in the whiz 4 on time will do okay—except one key department will fail miserably, because three guys in that dept. are lazy. They find ways to delay operations. They ask meaningless questions. They let work pile up on their desks. They meddle in other people’s business.

Twelve times, the production supervisor has tried to get these idiots fired. No go.

So everybody settles down to grind of bringing in whiz 4 on time.

Structure.

Manuals, rules and regs.

This can make magic the way an ant can fly to the moon.

So long ago, it was in another life, I taught private school in New York. There were six kids in my class, all boys. I was supposed to teach them math. They were all at different levels. They had no ambition to learn math. No matter what I did, they performed miserably. Add, subtract, multiply, divide, decimals, fractions—it didn’t matter. If they managed to learn something on Monday, they forgot it by Tuesday. It was rather extraordinary.

So I took them to an art museum one morning. They were as lost there as they were in the classroom. But I wasn’t. That was the key. I was already painting in a little studio downtown, and I was on fire.

So I began to talk about the paintings. The Raphael, the Vermeer, the Rembrandt. The De Kooning, the Pollock, the Gorky. I had no plan, no idea. I just talked about what they could see if they looked.

And then we walked back to school and I set them up with paints and paper and brushes and told them to go to work. I said I didn’t care what they painted. Just have a good time. Do something you like.

All of a sudden, they weren’t making trouble. They were painting. No more whining and complaining.

I walked around and watched them go at it. I pointed to this or that area and mentioned what I liked.

There was no way to measure or quantify or systematize what the kids were doing that day, but they were coming alive, out of their sloth and resentment.

Then we got back to math, and it was as if they’d all experienced an upward shift in IQ.

That night, back in my studio, I made a note in my notebook. It went something like this: Give them a non-structure, and then follow that with logic; it works.

So that was that.

There used to be something in this culture called improvisation. People understood what it was, even if they wouldn’t do it themselves. Now the word has almost vanished. Same with the word spontaneity. The moment when eye, mind, and brush meet canvas. When mind meets the new. When the inventor suddenly gets up from his chair and trots over to his workbench and starts putting pieces together.

This becomes magic because imagination jumps into the fray. The urge to invent takes the foreground.

The trouble with all these imported Asian spiritual systems now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now.

You need Now, which is dry tinder to the spark of imagination.

Magic isn’t really a return to the mystical past. Alchemy was what people did in the Middle Ages to give themselves a Now, on which they could inject the flame of their imagination.

At its highest levels, it wasn’t a system. Not really.

But if you have enough history at your back and you stand away far enough, everything looks like pattern and structure and system. That’s the illusion. That’s the deception.

Systems allow people to see and also make them blind. If they can’t fold an event into a structure, then for them it isn’t there. This is very interesting. This is where all the myths of Hermes (aka Mercury) sprang from. He was the figure who flew and passed through walls and had no barriers in the space-time continuum—the tin can we call universe. So people pretended, at a deep level, that they were unable to comprehend him. He was invisible to them. He was a trickster. He toppled idols of the hidebound, rule-bound, system-bound society.

Mythologically, he ranked very high in the pantheon of the gods. There really was no reason he couldn’t be considered the king of the Olympians.

But he didn’t want the throne or the lineage. That was just another structure, erected by his god-colleagues, who were bored out of their minds and desperately needed the entertainment and distraction it could provide.

Hermes lived deep in the fire of his own imagination and speed and improvisation and spontaneous action.

He didn’t need metaphysics or cosmology. He already embodied them, and much, much more.

To him, the notion of shared, consonant, and brick-by-brick reality as the longed-for ultimate goal became an enormous joke.

The word “art,” across the full range of its meanings, is what happens when, from a platform of structure, a person takes off and discovers that consciousness doesn’t particularly want to wait around a railroad station looking at What Is forever. Consciousness wants to invent what isn’t there.

So it does.

Jon Rappoport

*********************************************************

... or why the "Here & Now" thread is a necessary balance to PA... or why "grounding" and immersing oneself in "nature" is so beneficial... one get's one's attention redirected or re-focused onto one's current environment, away from worries or stress, when getting fascinated with the aesthetics of a flower or the ambulation of an ant... a certain school of thoughts uses this phenomenon to produce "miracles" with what is called a "locational"...

[ulli]

Brilliant, Amzer, that is exactly how "they" run the world,
and why everyone becomes more and more miserable in the long run.

And what a pleasant surprise to find your reference to the Here and Now thread right at the end...
and that you understand my motives. Well, one of them....that Avalon needs a balancer thread.

But it was also meant to be a place where people can discover that there is still room for more mirth
and that life goes on even after the horror show of an evil elite in cahoots with aliens and so on.

He really hit the nail on the head with this one:

"The trouble with all these imported Asian spiritual systems now is that they have a long and distinguished history, and the history tends to infiltrate everything that’s happening. It’s venerated. You need a clean slate, a wide open space. You need Now."

[Hervé]

Thank you dear friend

Indeed, there's no place like NOW!

...



"Me"... Now...