Merkabah

[Skarekrow]

THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPIDER


​

"Consider a fisherman-let's say, a young man who owns a small boat and weaves his own nets.
One sunny morning the fisherman sails out from the harbor and casts his net into the ocean.

By the end of the day he has accumulated a fine catch of succulent fish.
Back ashore, he sets aside a share of the bounty for his evening meal.

He guts and cleans the fish and roasts them over an open fire on the beach.
Perhaps he calls down his wife from their seaside cottage; perhaps the couple dine alfresco as the sun sets, gazing into each other's eyes; perhaps, nine months later and as an indirect result of their activities on that happy evening, the fisherman's wife bears a healthy child… but these plausible sequelae are not pertinent to our story.

Now imagine another biological organism, in this case a spider: a common orb-weaver spider, of which there are some three thousand species worldwide and probably one or two in your own garden or backyard.

Like the fisherman, the spider weaves a net (of sticky silk) and uses it to capture another species (a moth) as food.
Like the fisherman, the spider prepares its meal before it consumes it-it pumps digestive enzymes into the body of the captive insect, sucks out the liquefied matter, and discards the empty husk, much as the fisherman discarded the inedible bones and organs of his fish.

Perhaps the spider follows his meal by finding a mate, impregnating her, and offering his body to be devoured; perhaps the female then produces a pendulous, silk-encased sac of fertilized eggs… but all this, like the fisherman's amorous evening, is incidental to our story.

The fisherman's tale is pleasant, even heartwarming.
The spider's tale is viscerally disgusting.

But from an objective point of view, nothing distinguishes one from the other but the details.
A net is a net, whether it's made of nylon or spider silk.

A meal is a meal.
The important difference lies in the realm of subjective experience.

The fisherman's day is richly felt and easily imagined.
The spider's is not.

It is extremely unlikely that the simple fused ganglia of an arachnid generate much if anything in the way of psychological complexity.
And an anthill-although it is also a functional biological entity, capable of its own equivalent of net-casting and food-gathering-has no centralized brain at all and no perceived experience of any kind.

The rich inner experience of the world is central to human life and our appreciation of it.
But the preponderance of life on Earth gets along perfectly well with out it.

In this respect, human beings are a distinct minority.
The fishermen of the world are greatly out numbered by the spiders.”

~ Robert Charles Wilson

 

[Skarekrow]

I fully agree with you on this one. I have some very not proud moments of judging others for not reacting the way I did in certain situations. But my actions/reactions made me the person I am today, and them the person they are, whether for better or worse. (I still dont like a few of them and their decisions though lol. I havent grown out of my immaturity of that)

In the near death experiencer (although, clinically dead is still dead…I would like them to term it a “death experience” or a "post death experience”) supposedly, and this is through numerous accounts being quantified…we will get to have a life review where not only will we get to experience certain parts of our lives but we will also experience how our actions effected someone else and we will feel and know if something hurt them from their own perspective, and see how that ripples out into their life, and feel those ripples…negative or positive.
That would be a seriously difficult thing to do, but experiencers also feel the absence of judgement against them, only unconditional love.
I guess we shall see one day.

 

[sprinkles]

THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPIDER


​

"Consider a fisherman-let's say, a young man who owns a small boat and weaves his own nets.
One sunny morning the fisherman sails out from the harbor and casts his net into the ocean.

By the end of the day he has accumulated a fine catch of succulent fish.
Back ashore, he sets aside a share of the bounty for his evening meal.

He guts and cleans the fish and roasts them over an open fire on the beach.
Perhaps he calls down his wife from their seaside cottage; perhaps the couple dine alfresco as the sun sets, gazing into each other's eyes; perhaps, nine months later and as an indirect result of their activities on that happy evening, the fisherman's wife bears a healthy child… but these plausible sequelae are not pertinent to our story.

Now imagine another biological organism, in this case a spider: a common orb-weaver spider, of which there are some three thousand species worldwide and probably one or two in your own garden or backyard.

Like the fisherman, the spider weaves a net (of sticky silk) and uses it to capture another species (a moth) as food.
Like the fisherman, the spider prepares its meal before it consumes it-it pumps digestive enzymes into the body of the captive insect, sucks out the liquefied matter, and discards the empty husk, much as the fisherman discarded the inedible bones and organs of his fish.

Perhaps the spider follows his meal by finding a mate, impregnating her, and offering his body to be devoured; perhaps the female then produces a pendulous, silk-encased sac of fertilized eggs… but all this, like the fisherman's amorous evening, is incidental to our story.

The fisherman's tale is pleasant, even heartwarming.
The spider's tale is viscerally disgusting.

But from an objective point of view, nothing distinguishes one from the other but the details.
A net is a net, whether it's made of nylon or spider silk.

A meal is a meal.
The important difference lies in the realm of subjective experience.

The fisherman's day is richly felt and easily imagined.
The spider's is not.

It is extremely unlikely that the simple fused ganglia of an arachnid generate much if anything in the way of psychological complexity.
And an anthill-although it is also a functional biological entity, capable of its own equivalent of net-casting and food-gathering-has no centralized brain at all and no perceived experience of any kind.

The rich inner experience of the world is central to human life and our appreciation of it.
But the preponderance of life on Earth gets along perfectly well with out it.

In this respect, human beings are a distinct minority.
The fishermen of the world are greatly out numbered by the spiders.”

~ Robert Charles Wilson

[video=youtube;oO4tbqYkgD0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO4tbqYkgD0[/video]

 

[Skarekrow]

[video=youtube;9QlDX8mPAcc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9QlDX8mPAcc[/video]​

 

[Skarekrow]

David Chalmers on Consciousness
​

[video=youtube;kmZaA_xoJiM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kmZaA_xoJiM[/video]​

 

[Skarekrow]

​

Can you live a normal life with half a brain?


A few extreme cases show that people can be missing large chunks of their brains with no significant ill-effect — why?
Tom Stafford explains what it tells us about the true nature of our grey matter.
​

How much of our brain do we actually need?
A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged.

These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor.
It isn't just that we don't understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain.
By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have.

This isn't just brain damage — the whole structure is absent.
Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth.

A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.
The woman wasn't completely unaffected — she had suffered from uncertain, clumsy, movements her whole life.

But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates.
The sharks that swam when dinosaurs walked the Earth had cerebellums.

This case points to a sad fact about brain science.
We don't often shout about it, but there are large gaps in even our basic understanding of the brain.

We can't agree on the function of even some of the most important brain regions, such as the cerebellum.
Rare cases such as this show up that ignorance.

Every so often someone walks into a hospital and their brain scan reveals the startling differences we can have inside our heads.
Startling differences which may have only small observable effects on our behaviour.

Part of the problem may be our way of thinking.
It is natural to see the brain as a piece of naturally selected technology, and in human technology there is often a one-to-one mapping between structure and function.

If I have a toaster, the heat is provided by the heating element, the time is controlled by the timer and the popping up is driven by a spring.
The case of the missing cerebellum reveals there is no such simple scheme for the brain.

Although we love to talk about the brain region for vision, for hunger or for love, there are no such brain regions, because the brain isn't technology where any function is governed by just one part.

Take another recent case, that of a man who was found to have a tapeworm in his brain.
Over four years it burrowed "from one side to the other", causing a variety of problems such as seizures, memory problems and weird smell sensations.

Sounds to me like he got off lightly for having a living thing move through his brain.
If the brain worked like most designed technology this wouldn't be possible.

If a worm burrowed from one side of your phone to the other, the gadget would die.
Indeed, when an early electromechanical computer malfunctioned in the 1940s, an investigation revealed the problem: a moth trapped in a relay — the first actual case of a computer bug being found.

Part of the explanation for the brain's apparent resilience is its 'plasticity' — an ability to adapt its structure based on experience.
But another clue comes from a concept advocated by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman.

He noticed that biological functions are often supported by multiple structures — single physical features are coded for by multiple genes, for example, so that knocking out any single gene can't prevent that feature from developing apparently normally.

He called the ability of multiple different structures to support a single function 'degeneracy'.
And so it is with the brain.

The important functions our brain carries out are not farmed out to single distinct brain regions, but instead supported by multiple regions, often in similar but slightly different ways. If one structure breaks down, the others can pick up the slack.

This helps explain why cognitive neuroscientists have such problems working out what different brain regions do.
If you try and understand brain areas using a simple one-function-per-region and one-region-per-function rule you'll never be able to design the experiments needed to unpick the degenerate tangle of structure and function.

The cerebellum is most famous for controlling precise movements, but other areas of the brain such as the basal ganglia and the motor cortex are also intimately involved in moving our bodies.

Asking what unique thing each area does may be the wrong question, when they are all contributing to the same thing.
Memory is another example of an essential biological function which seems to be supported by multiple brain systems.

If you bump into someone you've met once before, you might remember that they have a reputation for being nice, remember a specific incident of them being nice, or just retrieve a vague positive feeling about them — all forms of memory which tell you to trust this person, and all supported by different brain areas doing the same job in a slightly different way.

Edelman and his colleague, Joseph Gally, called degeneracy a "ubiquitous biological property ... a feature of complexity", claiming it was an inevitable outcome of natural selection.

It explains both why unusual brain conditions are not as catastrophic as they might be, and also why scientists find the brain so confounding to try and understand.

 

[Skarekrow]

CAN YOUR DREAMS PREDICT DEATH?
NEW EVIDENCE, SURPRISING RESULT.

Are precognitive dreams real?
This dream researcher has compiled more than anyone in history.​

When Andy Paquette left his job as a leading Hollywood film animator he had no idea he would wind up compiling the largest database of precognitive paranormal dreams in history, but that’s what happened.

Andy, who is currently finishing up his PhD at King’s College, London is the author of Dreamer: 20 years of psychic dreams and how they changed my life has just published groundbreaking paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration that examines precognitive dreams about death:A New Approach to Veridicality in Dream Psi Studies; Vol. 26, No. 3

I recently had a chance to talk to Andy about the implications of his research into psychic of death dreams.
Here are some excerpts and a link to the full interview.

Excerpts - Click here for YouTube version

[video=youtube;BlT0FvGkJKk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=BlT0FvGkJKk[/video]

Full Interview - Download MP3 (65 min.)


Over the years of researching and documenting his dreams, Andy has had some significant dreams involving death. His latest research asks whether dreams allow us to cross the veil of the afterlife:

Alex Tsakiris: Walk us through some examples and really nail down when you say, you had a dream about them and then you found out that they had died two weeks earlier. People are going to immediately say, you could have known somehow, some way that they were dead.

Walk us through how you verify that you really have something.

Andy Paquette: I had one dream where a woman came to me and was telling me a person that I knew who happened to be a clerk at a store I’d been to maybe five times in my life had a person close to him–a relative had just died and that he was really despondent about this.

As a result he was abusing drugs and alcohol and she warned me that he would die if he continued abusing these things.
And she told me that she wanted me to go talk to him and give him this warning that she was giving me.

Alex Tsakiris: So this is more or less a complete stranger?

Andy Paquette: I have talked to the guy [before].
I bought a couple of things from him, and I did know his first name but we really hadn’t talked about anything other than is this paint available and where is it?

That was the extent of our couple of conversations.
And it was in a new city, I had just moved to Phoenix so it’s not like I knew the area very well either.

Anyway, I went upstairs and I told my wife about the dream and she says, are you going to go talk to him and I said, are you kidding me?
Go up to this guy I don’t know and [tell] him this weird dream?

What if he hasn’t had a relative that died?
That’s going to be really embarrassing.

And she really insisted and said you have to do this.
She was so insistent that finally I said fine.

But it was a pain because this store was 45 minutes from where I live by car and [it’s] expensive gas-wise.
So I drove all the way down there, I get to the store and I see this guy behind the counter and I’m [thinking], oh great, how do I do this?

So I said to him, and I don’t want to use his real name so I’ll just call him Frank.
I said, Frank, and I gave him the name of some shipment that he might’ve had.

He said, oh yeah they’re in the back.
So we get to the back of the store and I said you know, it’s kind of a funny thing, I had a dream about you last night.

And he looked at me kind of quizzically like he was wondering what that meant and he said, “Nothing bad I hope…”
So I said, “Let me put it to you this way, have you had a very close relative die recently?” And he said, “Yes, I did.”

And I said I had this young woman come to me in this dream, and I described her to him, and only at this point did it occur to me that the person who came to me in the dream was the person who died.

This oftentimes doesn’t hit me until later.
So [I said] she told me that you were very upset about this and you were abusing alcohol because of it and that you were going to die as a result.

I did not mention the drugs because I didn’t want him to feel like maybe my next call was going to be to the police to have him arrested, so I just mentioned the alcohol.
And I said does this make any sense to you?

And he said, “It’s true. My sister-in-law who I was very close to got killed in a car crash.”
It wasn’t two weeks earlier…I think it was like 10 days earlier or something like that.

She was parked at a stoplight and a police car involved in a high-speed car chase rammed the back of her car and she was killed instantly.
And he was despondent and he said he was abusing alcohol a lot.

He didn’t say anything about drugs.
And then he said something that kind of surprised me–he said that he had a dream of her also earlier in the week and that she had given him the exact same message.

She’d said if you don’t get over this, if you don’t stop abusing this stuff, you will die.
You need to stop.

So she told him the same thing that she told me.
To me that was the real validation.

While some of Andy’s conclusions about spiritual dreams and encounters with those who have passed may sound like “new age” blather, Andy has substantiated his conclusions with the most rigorous scientific examination of paranormal dreams on record:

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk about the spiritual aspect.
When you enter that realm, that dimension, whatever we want to call it…where do you think you are?

Are you in the same place that we all are when we dream?
Are you in a different place?

Can we all access that spiritual realm that you access through dreaming?

Andy Paquette: I think some of us are–this is going to sound kind of weird–but I think some of us are permitted to, and some of us, it’s not part of the plan for our life.
It gets in the way of other things we’re trying to accomplish with our life and so that kind of thing is blocked off.

But I think a lot of people probably do this without realizing it.
When they sleep they’re essentially freed of their physical constraints and then they do these things, which they tend to forget when they wake up.

And I think there’s a reason for forgetting.
It’s because if they remember in a lot of cases it would affect the decisions they make while they’re awake, and that would change the experience they have in their waking state which may interfere with or ruin experiences that they’re supposed to have.

For instance, in the skeptic-believer debate that you have on psychic things, I do feel that some people are really meant to remain skeptical because if they don’t then it affects how they go through their life and other things they’re supposed to learn from it.

Other people are supposed to produce this kind of information so that it’s there for those who are ready to accept it.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s the kind of, almost New Agey kind of stuff that drives folks nuts but here’s what so cool about you–you went ahead and did the research.
You can share these opinions and form these opinions but then when someone pushes you, you can say, okay, here’s the research.

Here’s what I did to record it.
Here’s not only the 12,000 dreams in my journal but here’s the database breakdown of all of them.

So at some point we should probably transition into picking up on this story: you start recording these dreams; you start having this amazing dream journal; you realize it’s an amazing dream journal; you realize these dreams are completely out of this world.

Literally.
You’re in this other dimension; you’re meeting these spirit beings…But at the same time the scientist in you is trying to figure out how to catalogue this stuff and make it somewhat understandable in terms of scientific terms.

Tell us how that played into this.

Andy Paquette: You gave me three things to chew on and I want to say two things: on the New Age subject, for the most part New Age stuff drives me bananas because it’s not evidence-based.

In the few cases where I think there’s some evidence behind it, that doesn’t bother me so much.
But I do see a lot of things that come from…as far as I’m concerned they have no justification for the claims they make.

And it bothers me too, so I just wanted to state that clearly.
As far as the evidence is concerned, you made a statement there that’s not completely accurate.

I didn’t realize that these things were unusual for a very long time.
I’m not even sure it really hit me until I was living in Holland and I talked to Stanley Krippner for the first time in 2009.

I knew that it was unusual to have precognitive dreams, write them down and then check them out, but I didn’t know how unusual it was.
The reason is because I had read some books at the Parapsychology Foundation in New York and it seemed to me if I was interested in reading a book about this type of psi ability or that kind, they always had a book or paper to read.

So I developed this impression that researchers in this field had thousands or even millions of cases to choose from.
And there were probably thousands of people like me around who were doing this kind of thing.

So I really didn’t know how unusual this was until I actually started looking into those records myself.

Andy’s research led him to writing a peer-reviewed paper with the help of renowned social scientist Dr. Daryl Bem.
Even with Dr. Bem’s support, he still had to endure a grueling peer review process to get his work published:

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s talk about statistics.
What you’ve really broken some ground on is tying these what you call “spontaneous” and what other people would call anecdotal accounts, to statistical measures that social scientists are really comfortable with and psychologists like Dr. Daryl Bem who assisted you greatly after you brought him in on the process in doing this.

Tell us about that interface of statistics and these accounts.

Andy Paquette: Daryl was great.
What happened is I submitted this to the Journal of Scientific Exploration quite a while ago.

I think it was March of last year.
And I got a whole raft of comments almost all of which had to do with statistics.

Alex Tsakiris: We should back up and tell people in case they don’t know, who Daryl Bem is and in the process I really want to tell people about this process and about this journal–the Journal of Scientific Exploration.

Again, we can say we don’t have to pay any attention to the skeptics but of course we do.
And if you mentioned the Journal of Scientific Exploration to skeptics, it gets the rolling of the eyes and the shrugging of the shoulders.

I want you to tell people what you went through, what the peer review process was like, what the acceptance was like, what the editorial process was like, and what the standards were like for getting your paper into this journal.

Andy Paquette: I’ll say that for the other two also.
Every paper that I’ve submitted to them is initially rejected.

They said they were interesting subjects but they needed me to explain myself a lot better.
I think in every case I went through a minimum of two drafts and with this article I think I went through about six.

But I felt they were very rigorous.
And I think people who roll their eyes at this particular journal are really ill-informed frankly.

Nevermind the fact that they’ve gotten Nobel Laureates who’ve played an active role in the publication, they also have really prominent researchers who are publishing in this journal.

In fact if I want to find good articles on these kinds of subjects, really rigorous articles by people who know what they’re talking about, I’m more likely to find them here than in almost any location not only because they are willing to publish it but because good researches like to publish in this journal.

Also Mentioned:
The Final Transition Conference prepares families to handle difficult end-of-life preparations

EDIT - Here is the link to the PDF of the actual paper if you are interested like I am in reading all the juicy details.
Enjoy!

http://www.newdualism.org/nde-paper... Scientific Exploration_2012-26-791-824-1.pdf​

 

[Kgal]

@Skarekrow & @sprinkles ,

I apologize because you've probably already posted something about this, but I was hoping you could maybe point me in the right direction or offer some insight on something I've been thinking about...

I believe there was a conversation in the movie Clerks where one of the characters asks how a "lightsaber" knows when to stop - why doesn't it just keep projecting out (the answer was the "Force", and then the reply came "That's your answer for everything" )

Anyway, this is related. Correct me if I'm wrong, but quantum physicists are saying (or have been saying) that really, there is no matter, there is only energy and waves, and our brains are able to interpret these waves as matter. So the question is, how does an object "stop", or have distinct sides if it's just energy (an explanation for a 10 year old is what I'm looking for I guess ). I've heard that people who have taken mushrooms have witnessed objects morphing or fading away. Is there any point for one to want to see through this dimension? Once you see through it, wouldn't the regular world be boring? Just hoping to get your thoughts - thanks!

When I read your question of how does an object 'stop' a scene from the movie What the Bleep popped into my mind. The main character steps onto the basketball court of a young physcist in the making and he explains to her every object -whether it be animal, plant, or mineral - has an electron field around it and these electrons repel each other.
I think of it like each object has it's own frequency wave and when others get into each respective field it "rubs" each other the wrong way and does not phase so appears to remain separate and distinct.

Each object materialized in this 3rd frequency program(game) obeys and acts according to the rules(physical laws) of the program. Each object has consciousness that agreed to manifest here in a co-creation with other objects or - entities as many call them. The entities then undergo many kinds of experiences while manifested here on the Earth plane.

Take Granite for example. Granite is an element of the Earth because its consciousness formed out of the Earth. Granite may exist on the Earth because it is OF the Earth - yet has its own consciousness AS Granite. It then undergoes many experiences upon the Earth ranging from colossal mountains to grains of sand on the beach. This is a co-creation with Earth and all the entities on and of this planet.

Granite "stops" at the edge of its "granite-ness" because of the consciousness that is Granite. One could also say its because Consciousness was asked to take on the role of Granite within the parameters of the Program...or the rules of the Game....or the records in the Akash.

When we use our human eyes to view Granite within the 3d program we see it as it is - which is rock. Once a person moves into another frequency phase they will begin to see the consciousness expression of Granite in ITS other phase(s).

Coincidentally I saw a painting hanging on my wall do that morphing thing and it seemed to come out of the wall and move. Prior to that I had seen a profile image of a beautiful woman manifest in it...which was strange for the painting is of a colorful path through trees and flowers....nothing else.

Your question about whether the regular world would be boring got me to thinking about what I've been 'seeing" and experiencing. I would answer your question Yes...and No.
Yes...the regular (3rd frequency) world does get boring....at least that's what I'm experiencing now. Yet at the same time I notice whenever I'm looking at or hearing Nature - that experience is richer and more ...hmmm...satisfying?....yes...Satisfying...than ever before in my long life.
It's the other stuff...the "things"....made by "things"....that I'm not interested in any more...and therefore I find the world boring for the most part because that is what society deems most important at the moment.... stuff...Stuff..and more STUFF. Well...perhaps I should say "FAKE" stuff....things with no heart or soul. it's hard for me to explain because a painting crafted with the heart and soul of the artist is still a "thing"...but its really a creation from the heart...and I find I value THAT kind of creation more than ever these days.

So how does one explain trying to live in two worlds at the same time? Those people who had an experience of being phased into a another frequency had their senses heightened and were forever changed. I can attest to it myself.

I think when one experiences that shift they begin to "see" the truth and light in all things....whether that be in nature or the craftmanship of a master using their gift...and one can see it here on this level and hopefully will see it on other frequency levels one day.

In the end I do not find it boring as I adjust to being in different frequencies on this beautiful planet.

 

[Kgal]

The Sun's solar activity causes earthquakes on Earth?

Oh darn....I didn't realize he was going to talk about publishing his book... Oh wow.... They tried to stop his publishing.....so he's self publishing. It makes you wonder what else they've stalled from publishing out there because it doesn't match their belief system.

I've been following this guy for a few years for his Sun activity. He and his team gather data from numerous sources and government sites to track correlations if any.

Anyway - I know you guys are into frequency, vibration, sound, and energy. Here's some information on how the Sun is connected to the Earth. Keep in mind...we too vibrate at the Schumann Resonance of the Earth.

[video=youtube;pEyflcAlqZc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEyflcAlqZc[/video]

 

[Skarekrow]

The Sun's solar activity causes earthquakes on Earth?

Oh darn....I didn't realize he was going to talk about publishing his book... Oh wow.... They tried to stop his publishing.....so he's self publishing. It makes you wonder what else they've stalled from publishing out there because it doesn't match their belief system.

I've been following this guy for a few years for his Sun activity. He and his team gather data from numerous sources and government sites to track correlations if any.

Anyway - I know you guys are into frequency, vibration, sound, and energy. Here's some information on how the Sun is connected to the Earth. Keep in mind...we too vibrate at the Schumann Resonance of the Earth.

Very interesting stuff! Yes, it is quite odd how they seemed to shut them out in the middle of the night when no one would be online.
Hmmmm….makes me me wonder now about the hype the news is giving to a Pacific NW “big one”…kind of like the one CA has been waiting for for 40 years.
I’m out of range of any tidal waves, but I live about an hour or 45 mins away from Mt. St. Helens, so I guess that could always erupt again to the south and nail me.
That is…if Yellowstone doesn’t take us all out first…hahahaha!
Yes, it seems that any kind of inference to an electrical universe is shunned by mainstream science, even though the data is quite good…from the above video I would say that 80% range warrants more investigation at least into the possibility.
Unless they are A.) Hiding the truth, or, B.) Stuck in current paradigms and taboos
Combine that with the egos of some of these guys and I can see why they wouldn’t want such things to become a “factual” thing.
It would blow up the jobs and fields that thousands of people study and have devoted their lives to…if someone's life’s work was about to be blown to bits, wouldn’t a lot of people try to suppress and ignore it?
Thanks for the post and thanks for the extended explanation (way better than mine!) to AJ!

 

[Skarekrow]

Was wondering about the possibility that some paranormal activity as dream-bleed through from people who are out of body yet are still dreaming and are not acting in a conscious manner?
If you believe that people have actual OOBE and our minds can travel to other places, other times, other dimensions or universes, then at least some of the paranormal activity that is reported should be considered as a possibility.
There are reported incidences of people being either seen or heard or interacted in some way with the non-dreamers within the dream.
i.e. - One report of losing consciousness just before returning to the non-dreaming world was in the report I posted above, where the author was in his Mother’s kitchen and he began to wake, so he would lose consciousness in the dream and wake in bed. Well as he “lost consciousness” he said he fell and hit the wall and slid down to a sitting position on the floor. Unexpectedly, his Mom looked to his spot. Upon waking and calling his Mother, she did indeed hear a strange sound, though saw nothing. She described as “a paper bag, hitting and then sliding down the wall.”
So I guess we sound like paper at times, haha.
Of course, if there is indeed mind duality, then this would also allow for the existence of spirits or ghosts to exist as well.
I just wonder how much of the activity is unconsciously generated by PSI activity or OOBE while dreaming.
And if someone is prone to such activity, does that in turn drawn other entities to you?
Even some of the really frightening experiences that people have had could indeed be either the physical representation of an internally terrible or traumatized person.
If someone feels like a monster inside, then perhaps when acting OOB and in an unconscious manner this trauma or evil could be represented by something equally as frightening or traumatic?
It would also explain why some ghosts seem to have intelligent responses but only rarely are substantial.
If the subject producing the PSI phenomena were an unconscious participant then intelligent but perhaps garbled responses would seem to be more likely.
Whereas someone who is having a conscious OOBE may be able to interact on a seemingly more intelligent basis (though it is rare, from those who have such OOBEs, they normally cannot interact with the environment…which is quite different than dreaming)
But once again, this also allows for sprits to exist, which could have other unknown explanations.
Just a thought.

Edit - This would also explain why some “spirits” don’t seem to think they are dead, whereas others seem to know they are.

 

[Kgal]

Was wondering about the possibility that some paranormal activity as dream-bleed through from people who are out of body yet are still dreaming and are not acting in a conscious manner?
If you believe that people have actual OOBE and our minds can travel to other places, other times, other dimensions or universes, then at least some of the paranormal activity that is reported should be considered as a possibility.
There are reported incidences of people being either seen or heard or interacted in some way with the non-dreamers within the dream.
i.e. - One report of losing consciousness just before returning to the non-dreaming world was in the report I posted above, where the author was in his Mother’s kitchen and he began to wake, so he would lose consciousness in the dream and wake in bed. Well as he “lost consciousness” he said he fell and hit the wall and slid down to a sitting position on the floor. Unexpectedly, his Mom looked to his spot. Upon waking and calling his Mother, she did indeed hear a strange sound, though saw nothing. She described as “a paper bag, hitting and then sliding down the wall.”
So I guess we sound like paper at times, haha.
Of course, if there is indeed mind duality, then this would also allow for the existence of spirits or ghosts to exist as well.
I just wonder how much of the activity is unconsciously generated by PSI activity or OOBE while dreaming.
And if someone is prone to such activity, does that in turn drawn other entities to you?
Even some of the really frightening experiences that people have had could indeed be either the physical representation of an internally terrible or traumatized person.
If someone feels like a monster inside, then perhaps when acting OOB and in an unconscious manner this trauma or evil could be represented by something equally as frightening or traumatic?
It would also explain why some ghosts seem to have intelligent responses but only rarely are substantial.
If the subject producing the PSI phenomena were an unconscious participant then intelligent but perhaps garbled responses would seem to be more likely.
Whereas someone who is having a conscious OOBE may be able to interact on a seemingly more intelligent basis (though it is rare, from those who have such OOBEs, they normally cannot interact with the environment…which is quite different than dreaming)
But once again, this also allows for sprits to exist, which could have other unknown explanations.
Just a thought.

Edit - This would also explain why some “spirits” don’t seem to think they are dead, whereas others seem to know they are.

I still know very little about the Astral plane or 4d plane as it's called...but I have heard it used to be filled with Dark Energy and was perilous to cross over into 5d or vice versa. It has been said when a certain galactic civilization came here to create misery and suffering for us - they quickly figured out how to use the astral plane for their benefit. They were able to "access" human minds to influence them easier from there than on the physical plane. As the human population increased in the last 6 decades the amount of Dark Energy increased in the astral due to all of the atrocities they were able to create by manipulating the masses.

I think people died and got lost in 4d because they had no way to get to 5d.

At first I thought there's no way I want to see "beyond the veil" because it'll be filled with dark entities. But! ...it seems since Dec 2012....lightworkers everywhere have been clearing their fields, creating portals through 4d, and restoring balance and Light there. I clearly remember my final push to "bust through" 4d and make my portal go all the way to 5d. LOL...weird....I know...

So I'm wondering if one were to venture beyond the veil to 4d if they would experience anything Dark and horrible now?

I know I've seen and experienced many things now and each time I looked through my third eye to see what I can see - all of the entities - were never threatening to me. They may have looked scary as hell like the time the snake man walked up to me and for a moment there I was petrified. He was just doing it to teach me I would see many many strange entities including a snake head on a human body(sort of)...but that it was up to me to react whichever way I chose to. Hah! I remember I kept repeating in my mind (my friend has seen her future self as a Shaman lady with two other shamans on either side of her: one being a lion and the other being a snake.)

In dreams while being a human form on 3d - we generally go to 5d and view our other lives going on. We have other lives on Earth happening - some seemingly in the past - some happening in the future - as well as - lives in other parts of the universe. To me this explains why dreams can feel so real....it's because they are...to the degree one realizes all dreams....and all lives....are roles we play out to create the universe. This one in particular is most difficult because here we play the game "We are NOT connected to Source Energy"....and therefore we think we're just walking meat who has to have a job to eat. We have no idea we're actually here playing out a role in order to have experiences while pretending we're not Light.

I'm thinking people see/saw monsters in the astral because they were there....and not necessarily because the person has their own personal issues and would attract them. Although I would bet you a million dollars that if a psychopath were to go to the astral plane they would indeed attract entities like themselves because then the Dark 4d entities would have someone they could manipulate. Dark only wants to pair up with dark. They actually cannot exist where there is enough Light energy.... Which is why now the Dark Galactic Entities have left the planet and only their human minions are still here.

The minions are still able to manipulate the masses because the majority of people still have their 3d programming in place in their human energy fields. The Earth energy grid is still keeping the Fear energy programming viable for now so millions upon millions can finish out their karmic contracts of violence and suffering. BUT...Gaia will only do this for so long...and based upon many different sources I've heard I am thinking by Fall 2016 Gaia will no longer maintain the Fear 3d programming as she moves completely in phase with 5d frequency.
After that date....the corrupt peoples of the world will have nothing to stand on...nothing at all...and humanity will be able to breathe a sigh of relief at last. Remember....the majority of humanity will not know what's going on and they will react in chaos for a while...but anything based upon Fear will have no energy to support it...and we will finally be able to craft a new world emphasizing Cooperation, Kindness, and Compassion.

You can prepare your self for the coming rise in frequency by continuing to ask your Archangel to assist you in releasing any dark energy you may be carrying within your fields.
In the last week each time I've asked AA Michael to help me in releasing stuff I have felt immediate assistance. It is quite amazing!!! ...along with a lot of crying....but I'm grateful for it all.

Well...I've rambled long enough. Back to work. [rolls eyes]

 

[Skarekrow]

I still know very little about the Astral plane or 4d plane as it's called...but I have heard it used to be filled with Dark Energy and was perilous to cross over into 5d or vice versa. It has been said when a certain galactic civilization came here to create misery and suffering for us - they quickly figured out how to use the astral plane for their benefit. They were able to "access" human minds to influence them easier from there than on the physical plane. As the human population increased in the last 6 decades the amount of Dark Energy increased in the astral due to all of the atrocities they were able to create by manipulating the masses.

I think people died and got lost in 4d because they had no way to get to 5d.

At first I thought there's no way I want to see "beyond the veil" because it'll be filled with dark entities. But! ...it seems since Dec 2012....lightworkers everywhere have been clearing their fields, creating portals through 4d, and restoring balance and Light there. I clearly remember my final push to "bust through" 4d and make my portal go all the way to 5d. LOL...weird....I know...

So I'm wondering if one were to venture beyond the veil to 4d if they would experience anything Dark and horrible now?

I know I've seen and experienced many things now and each time I looked through my third eye to see what I can see - all of the entities - were never threatening to me. They may have looked scary as hell like the time the snake man walked up to me and for a moment there I was petrified. He was just doing it to teach me I would see many many strange entities including a snake head on a human body(sort of)...but that it was up to me to react whichever way I chose to. Hah! I remember I kept repeating in my mind (my friend has seen her future self as a Shaman lady with two other shamans on either side of her: one being a lion and the other being a snake.)

In dreams while being a human form on 3d - we generally go to 5d and view our other lives going on. We have other lives on Earth happening - some seemingly in the past - some happening in the future - as well as - lives in other parts of the universe. To me this explains why dreams can feel so real....it's because they are...to the degree one realizes all dreams....and all lives....are roles we play out to create the universe. This one in particular is most difficult because here we play the game "We are NOT connected to Source Energy"....and therefore we think we're just walking meat who has to have a job to eat. We have no idea we're actually here playing out a role in order to have experiences while pretending we're not Light.

I'm thinking people see/saw monsters in the astral because they were there....and not necessarily because the person has their own personal issues and would attract them. Although I would bet you a million dollars that if a psychopath were to go to the astral plane they would indeed attract entities like themselves because then the Dark 4d entities would have someone they could manipulate. Dark only wants to pair up with dark. They actually cannot exist where there is enough Light energy.... Which is why now the Dark Galactic Entities have left the planet and only their human minions are still here.

The minions are still able to manipulate the masses because the majority of people still have their 3d programming in place in their human energy fields. The Earth energy grid is still keeping the Fear energy programming viable for now so millions upon millions can finish out their karmic contracts of violence and suffering. BUT...Gaia will only do this for so long...and based upon many different sources I've heard I am thinking by Fall 2016 Gaia will no longer maintain the Fear 3d programming as she moves completely in phase with 5d frequency.
After that date....the corrupt peoples of the world will have nothing to stand on...nothing at all...and humanity will be able to breathe a sigh of relief at last. Remember....the majority of humanity will not know what's going on and they will react in chaos for a while...but anything based upon Fear will have no energy to support it...and we will finally be able to craft a new world emphasizing Cooperation, Kindness, and Compassion.

You can prepare your self for the coming rise in frequency by continuing to ask your Archangel to assist you in releasing any dark energy you may be carrying within your fields.
In the last week each time I've asked AA Michael to help me in releasing stuff I have felt immediate assistance. It is quite amazing!!! ...along with a lot of crying....but I'm grateful for it all.

Well...I've rambled long enough. Back to work. [rolls eyes]

I do ask for help!
And I do feel like I am helped.

If anything, starting this thread has convinced me of our duality, which wasn’t necessarily the intent.
I feel that things will change too…I honestly do, I don’t know why, or how, and I think this is part of the reason I have always been successful at stopping pain meds that I was addicted to…somewhere subconsciously I just have a feeling that it will work out how it’s supposed to, and to relax, the pain will end.
That’s kind of how I felt about my disability too…I was really only a little worried that I wasn’t going to get it, for the most part, I was sure it would work out.

I suppose if we are on a 5d plane when sleeping then some, albeit small amount of energy could manipulate our 3d space and bleed through as I suggested above.
This makes sense to me too, as there are knocks and doors have slammed in the middle of the night when I’ve detoxed before.

Also, I’m fairly certain my Son heard me in an OOB dream where I was pushing an entity from the house here (this was just last month I think?) and he woke up because he heard me yelling, though when he opened the door, it was immediately silent he said…his room is across from mine and I leave the door open at night so he saw me sleeping…besides, I would have woken Sensiko.
Then as he went down the hall…which is where I was in my dream…actually hovering in my dream…he says he saw a ball of light go by the kitchen.
Asked if it could have been a car or light shining in…he says - No way.
I remember waking from that dream in a drenched sweat that always seems to accompany defending my house from negative entities.
What do you think?

 

[Skarekrow]

@Kgal

Here is the rundown of what took place.
In my dream I rose out of bed because I could sense something in my house (as I was aware of the whole house, except it looked like I was looking through thin linen or very sheer fabric)…when I came to the hallway, I pinpointed where it was and as I started to push it out with waves of my Qi I yelled at it over an over to “get the fuck out of my house, you have no right to be here!” and I rose off the ground the more intense the waves got. I pushed it through the living room wall and it took off from my house fast!
I couldn’t tell you what it was…I just know it was negative.
Then I woke up just drenched in sweat…now I don’t know the timeline from the dream to when my Son got up…I don’t know if this happened and then he got up or if he was up while this was taking place.
Let me just add…he usually just rolls his eyes when I put on a show about ghosts hahaha…though he says he doesn’t disbelieve…he’s just never seen anything besides this…so I highly doubt he was making things up…he isn’t like that….he tells the truth regardless of if he gets in trouble or not. (not to mention that he told me his story before I ever disclosed my own dream to him)
Also, I wanted to add, that I feel the previous dream we discussed where I was shown how to push things and manipulate things with my mind (though I could already do this somewhat and have “Qi blasted” something/someone 4 times now..3 in my house)…anyhow, I feel this was further instruction of how to protect myself and my loved ones looking back on it now.

 

[Skarekrow]

Rationalists are Harshing My Empiricist Mellow

"And so they set forth toward the region which they had vowed to conquer, a band of gallant knights, all bedight in massy armor and bravely bearing lances and swords, all seated on steeds which were both swift and sure. But as soon as the first had crossed the border of that region his weapons became like rotten wood, the joints of his armor began to gape widely, and his proud steed altered to a sorry jade, which stumbled at every pebble in the way. And thus fared it with every knight as he crossed, for lo, it was an enchanted boundary”

– Walter Prince


The undead dudes abide…
​

Anomalistics is in desperate need of a philosophy that really ties the room together.
Call it “anomalism”, or “anomaloofness”, or El Philisophico Anomalistico if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

Maybe you’re into strange phenomena, maybe you’re not, but make no mistake, those strange phenomena abide, regardless of whether you feel they have any significance in your life.

There’s no reason for everybody to be out there scanning the skies for unidentified flying objects, chasing ghosts, or waiting breathlessly for the next unexplained fish fall.

Frankly, some of us would rather just go bowling, but should you choose to cast a curious eye at the unexplained and unabashed weirdness of the world, you inevitably run up against professionalized modern skepticism, and should you ever have been foolhardy enough to talk about your passion for the preternatural in mixed company, you know of that which I speak.

Personally, I haven’t spent enough time poking myself in the eye with a sharp stick lately, so I decided, in the interest of expanding my epistemological horizons, to watch a recent presentation from Goethe University Frankfurt’s SkepCon 2015 conference called “A Skeptic’s Guide to Ghost Hunting”.

The presenter, a well-known and well-respected “skeptic paranormal researcher” named Hayley Stevens (http://hayleyisaghost.co.uk) was well-informed, eminently logical, and absolutely charming, making numerous salient points including the entertainment industry’s common, dubious usage of technology in the name of scientific method in the same manner that spiritualists once used Ouija boards and planchettes; that the interpretation of bizarre experience is often passed through a cultural filter; and that the nature of folklore transmission has fundamentally changed in the Information Age, not to mention a highly informative discussion about the technical issues surrounding audio, digital and video recording.

Unfortunately, and this is absolutely no reflection on Ms. Stevens, I found myself inexplicably and viscerally appalled until I sat down and began musing on what could possibly bother me so much about a perspective with which I agreed or was willing to concede on so many reasonable points.

A few drinks later, I realized that open-minded inquiry into strange phenomena does not so much array the scientist/skeptic against the true believer (although the skeptic tends to encapsulate their target in a “belief system”, and thus defines the debate), as it pits the rationalist against the empiricist.

Skeptics would no doubt be horrified at my framing of the tension in this way, but that is due to the fact that they sagaciously approve of psychologist Erich Fromm’s observation that “many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself; Many a severe neurotic believes that his compulsive rituals or his hysterical outbursts are normal reactions to somewhat abnormal circumstances”, without recognizing that it applies to themselves as well as the folks that they disparage.

Before we tackle the philosophical side of the argument, allow me to point out a well-documented sociological phenomenon of particular salience.

Countless times, I’ve heard “public” skeptics preface a presentation on the malleability of human perception, the existence of various strange phenomena, or hoaxing, with the phrase, “I used to believe in…”.

Presumably, the implication is they grew older and wiser, and their former immersion in belief and emergence from said belief is held up as a philosophical credential.

On the other hand, anthropologists have been studying religions and ideologies for quite some time and commonly note that there is a distinct “apostate” effect – that is, the most vociferous and unwavering critic of a constellation of beliefs is the individual who once committed to those beliefs, but then left the fold.

This has been seen time and again, when converts leave new religions (which the skeptic would refer to as “cults”).
There is a rebound in which the system of beliefs that was once regarded as so reasonable is depicted as exaggeratedly insane, evil and destructive.

I don’t want to suggest that a lot of skepticism is motivated by early disappointments doled out by Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny.

No, actually, I do want to say that, because I’m kind of a jerk, and I feel it’s only fair, as the average skeptic will describe those who experience strange phenomena and have the gall to talk about it, in terms borrowed from psychopathology.

Of course, there are plenty of crazies out there, just as there are no shortage of fundamentalist skeptics (not sure those categories are actually antipodal), but most folks are ontological “satisficers” – that is, they have an answer, right or wrong, that explains life, the universe, and everything adequately for their needs, independent of how anyone else feels about their ideology, and are otherwise unconcerned.

In modern parlance, this is called being well-adjusted and happy.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Some of my best friends are well-adjusted and happy.
Yet, there are also those of us that seek out weirdness, that note the disjunction between realities, and question why such a thing should exist.

Skeptic and believer alike share a sense of wonder at the variety of human experience, ultimately differing on an age old epistemological debate surrounding the theory of knowledge, that is, whether our primary source of truth is reason (rationalism) or sensory experience (empiricism).

Now, given that skeptics quite routinely demand empirical evidence when faced with strange phenomena and that empiricism is the basis for scientific method, this argument might seem counter-intuitive, but the root of the difference between rationalism and empiricism is that rationalism posits that reality is logical, and thus one additional entity exists that is denied by a strict empiricist – that is, innate knowledge.

If reality has an inherently logical structure, then truth can be deduced independent of sensory experience.
Simply put, when faced with a ghost, the rationalist can deduce that the existence of ghosts is illogical, thus ghosts cannot exist, and alternate explanations must be explored.

The empiricist on the other hand validates the fact that there was a sensory experience, and asks what knowledge can be derived from it, without the a priori assumption that those events that defy logic (a logic highly reliant on the ambiguously understood concepts of space, time, and causality) are categorically false.

This can lead the empiricist and rationalist to identical conclusions, but there is something particularly insidious about the ontological principle that we can innately recognize the truth of a proposition independent of conscious experience.

In other circumstances we would call that knowledge by revelation.
The skeptical battle cry that strange phenomena invariably “defy logic” represents just such an a priori assumption that through reason alone we are capable of apprehending the truth of the matter, and demonstrations of how one can mimic an experience then ensue.

Aristotelian logic is a valuable survival shortcut for us grubby little human beings, but it must base itself on an initial proposition, that is, create the structure and boundaries from which it then reasons away anything structurally unsound.

Yet the world continues to be an undeniably strange place, and one can choose to ignore the strangeness or plumb its depths, but constrained by a strict rationalism, the primacy of a particular species of logic, and the precept that we can innately “know” and recognize what is reasonable and unreasonable, we are refusing a chance to step over an enchanted boundary and explore other modes of existence, other ways of understanding consciousness.

Big assumptions (the universe is logically structured) lead to minute conclusions (a given instance of the illogical is also impossible). Certainly, the metaphysical basis for one’s inclination towards empiricism can vary widely, but rationalism springs from a single source – the arid metaphysic of pure logic.

Still, innumerable people have found themselves crossing the enchanted boundary and experiencing an “otherness” that spits in the eye of the rational intellect, that serves no logic but its own.

In 1930, Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, then the Executive Research Officer for the Boston Society for Psychic Research, presciently remarked on how scientific empiricism, elsewhere so useful, was twisted through skepticism based on rationalism, declining to intellectually engage that which it regarded as fundamentally illogical.

“Thus begins a tale which still continues.
For the knightly band is made up of sundry learned and professional men, the region which they set forth to harry is that of psychical research, and verily, it seems to have an enchanted boundary, for it happens to them when they cross it even as has been said.

In other fields they are prudently silent until they have acquired special knowledge, but they venture into this with none.
Elsewhere they test their facts before they declare them, but here they pick up and employ random statements without discretion.

Elsewhere they use a fair semblance of logic, but here their logic becomes wondrous weird.
Elsewhere they generally succeed in preserving the standard scientific stolidity, but here they frequently manifest and confess a submission to emotions ill befitting those who sprang from the head of Brahma.

Elsewhere they observe the knightly etiquette of the lists, but in this field think it no shame to decline the fair encounter, and, from the safe shelter of the barrier, to jeer about the presumptive quality of their opponents’ brains” (Prince, 1930, p19).

If there is any grain of wisdom in Aldous Huxley’s proposition that the experience of the mysterium tremendum is a function of man’s recognition of the incompatibility of his ego with infinity, then it is dangerous to rely too heavily on an idealized ego imagined to be capable of apprehending reality through unadulterated logic and a firm belief in ideal forms.

As the cowboy Stranger remarked at the end of the Big Lebowski, “I guess that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself”.


References

Prince, Walter Franklin, 1863-1934.
The Enchanted Boundary: Being a Survey of Negative Reactions to Claims of Psychic Phenomena, 1820-1930.
Boston, Mass.: Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1930.

 

[Skarekrow]

Here is the progression on the wood burning project that I’m currently working on…
I will still even out the color I added and I am going to copper-leaf the internal panels of the butterfly wings.
Then will hit the natural wood with a very light stain and clear coat the whole thing before framing.
I think it will turn out really well! @housel

This is the first version…I sketch the design first then do a light/rough version of the line work.

Then I darkened the lines and fixed any discrepancies in the mirror image…added a few embellishments. (pen is for size reference)

Then I added some color (which will still be evened out). I was going for the same color that copper tarnishes to…that blue green color because I am going to put copper leafing within the panels of the butterfly’s wings.
The raw wood will receive a light stain of some sort with a clear coat finish over it all before framing it.

 

[Skarekrow]

Lou Ferrante

How the Dreaming Brain Can See the Future

[video=youtube;u1szUHdZM04]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u1szUHdZM04[/video]


Sorry there is no description for this video yet, it just came out yesterday from the ongoing IONS conference happening now.
This is a fascinating video…very cool!​

 

[PintoBean]

​

Can you live a normal life with half a brain?


A few extreme cases show that people can be missing large chunks of their brains with no significant ill-effect – why?
Tom Stafford explains what it tells us about the true nature of our grey matter.
​

How much of our brain do we actually need?
A number of stories have appeared in the news in recent months about people with chunks of their brains missing or damaged.

These cases tell a story about the mind that goes deeper than their initial shock factor.
It isn't just that we don't understand how the brain works, but that we may be thinking about it in the entirely wrong way.

Earlier this year, a case was reported of a woman who is missing her cerebellum, a distinct structure found at the back of the brain.
By some estimates the human cerebellum contains half the brain cells you have.

This isn't just brain damage – the whole structure is absent.
Yet this woman lives a normal life; she graduated from school, got married and had a kid following an uneventful pregnancy and birth.

A pretty standard biography for a 24-year-old.
The woman wasn't completely unaffected – she had suffered from uncertain, clumsy, movements her whole life.

But the surprise is how she moves at all, missing a part of the brain that is so fundamental it evolved with the first vertebrates.
The sharks that swam when dinosaurs walked the Earth had cerebellums.

This case points to a sad fact about brain science.
We don't often shout about it, but there are large gaps in even our basic understanding of the brain.

We can't agree on the function of even some of the most important brain regions, such as the cerebellum.
Rare cases such as this show up that ignorance.

Every so often someone walks into a hospital and their brain scan reveals the startling differences we can have inside our heads.
Startling differences which may have only small observable effects on our behaviour.

Part of the problem may be our way of thinking.
It is natural to see the brain as a piece of naturally selected technology, and in human technology there is often a one-to-one mapping between structure and function.

If I have a toaster, the heat is provided by the heating element, the time is controlled by the timer and the popping up is driven by a spring.
The case of the missing cerebellum reveals there is no such simple scheme for the brain.

Although we love to talk about the brain region for vision, for hunger or for love, there are no such brain regions, because the brain isn't technology where any function is governed by just one part.

Take another recent case, that of a man who was found to have a tapeworm in his brain.
Over four years it burrowed "from one side to the other", causing a variety of problems such as seizures, memory problems and weird smell sensations.

Sounds to me like he got off lightly for having a living thing move through his brain.
If the brain worked like most designed technology this wouldn't be possible.

If a worm burrowed from one side of your phone to the other, the gadget would die.
Indeed, when an early electromechanical computer malfunctioned in the 1940s, an investigation revealed the problem: a moth trapped in a relay – the first actual case of a computer bug being found.

Part of the explanation for the brain's apparent resilience is its 'plasticity' – an ability to adapt its structure based on experience.
But another clue comes from a concept advocated by Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman.

He noticed that biological functions are often supported by multiple structures – single physical features are coded for by multiple genes, for example, so that knocking out any single gene can't prevent that feature from developing apparently normally.

He called the ability of multiple different structures to support a single function 'degeneracy'.
And so it is with the brain.

The important functions our brain carries out are not farmed out to single distinct brain regions, but instead supported by multiple regions, often in similar but slightly different ways. If one structure breaks down, the others can pick up the slack.

This helps explain why cognitive neuroscientists have such problems working out what different brain regions do.
If you try and understand brain areas using a simple one-function-per-region and one-region-per-function rule you'll never be able to design the experiments needed to unpick the degenerate tangle of structure and function.

The cerebellum is most famous for controlling precise movements, but other areas of the brain such as the basal ganglia and the motor cortex are also intimately involved in moving our bodies.

Asking what unique thing each area does may be the wrong question, when they are all contributing to the same thing.
Memory is another example of an essential biological function which seems to be supported by multiple brain systems.

If you bump into someone you've met once before, you might remember that they have a reputation for being nice, remember a specific incident of them being nice, or just retrieve a vague positive feeling about them – all forms of memory which tell you to trust this person, and all supported by different brain areas doing the same job in a slightly different way.

Edelman and his colleague, Joseph Gally, called degeneracy a "ubiquitous biological property ... a feature of complexity", claiming it was an inevitable outcome of natural selection.

It explains both why unusual brain conditions are not as catastrophic as they might be, and also why scientists find the brain so confounding to try and understand.

I remember reading about the fascinating case of hemispherectomy in a New Yorker article some years ago. I just found the article. Apparently, we can do pretty well with only half a brain! Here is NYer article:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/03/the-deepest-cut

 

[PintoBean]

Lou Ferrante

How the Dreaming Brain Can See the Future

[video=youtube;u1szUHdZM04]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u1szUHdZM04[/video]


Sorry there is no description for this video yet, it just came out yesterday from the ongoing IONS conference happening now.
This is a fascinating video…very cool!​

Very interesting. I think all people have the capacity to some level of clairvoyance, if they open their mind to the possibility. Some people are of course more naturally inclined. I do believe our astral bodies can hop through time and that we are more likely to do this in a sleep (or near sleep) state. I used to have more clairvoyant dreams. Some important, mostly inconsequential. I felt I could develop them more, especially when I focused on important issues before sleep, and made careful effort to recall before I was fully awake. But they have mostly stopped over the last 10 years or so. I attribute part of this to becoming overly involved in the material world, and also to the use of sleep aids. I'd like to reclaim my clairvoyance. I hope to work on this. Sorry, I don't mean to invade your thread.

 

[Skarekrow]

Very interesting. I think all people have the capacity to some level of clairvoyance, if they open their mind to the possibility. Some people are of course more naturally inclined. I do believe our astral bodies can hope through time and we are more likely to do this in a sleep (or near sleep) state. I used to have more clairvoyant dreams. Some important, mostly inconsequential. I felt I could develop them more, especially when I focused on important issues before sleep, and made careful effort to recall before I was fully awake. But they have mostly stopped over the last 10 years or so. I attribute part of this to becoming overly involved in the material world, and also to the use of sleep aids. I'd like to reclaim my clairvoyance. I hope to work on this. Sorry, I don't mean to invade your thread.

You didn’t “invade” it.
I think if you began to keep a dream journal, writing down bits and pieces of what you can recall then it may help your mind get used to that.
IMO we are meant to remember some dreams and other’s we are not supposed to…especially if someone were to have precognitive dreams every night with good recall, it would not only influence the choices we make (and perhaps those are choices we need to make), but it would probably start to play havoc with someone’s mind I would imagine it would be…kind of like in Inception….where she lost her ability to distinguish reality from dreaming.
Still, I hear you about the sleep aids…I’m sure you are dreaming just as much as you were before, but the recall could have been diminished because of them.
I remember when I took Chantix to quit smoking and it actually stimulates dreaming…I had the time of my life…I would wake up every morning and just have my mind blown…too bad that shit is sooooo expensive, I would have stayed on it just for the dreams alone.
I guess for some folks though, they have intense nightmares…which is something that I was forced to learn to deal with as a child with nightly night terrors.
I became really good at waking myself up from a bad dream…but then I also started to relish the rush from the dreams too…like going on a roller coaster.
It’s very rare now that I have a dream that truly scares me.
I do think that I have been having OOB experiences ever since I was a child in my sleep.
Recently, I was having a conscious dream…I was walking around some alleyways behind some houses…the alley ended and it came to a point with the house on the corner’s grass. There were cars parked along the alleyway behind the houses….it seemed to be somewhere, just outside of a city…perhaps almost in the country…it seemed to be dusk and I remember I found Sensiko (this is who I sleep beside IRL), but I could tell that she was still ‘sleeping’, she was on a mission walking somewhere and I walked with her for a while trying to get her to realize she was sleeping too and this was a dream…at one point it seemed as if I was getting through and I told her some random word to remember…I can’t think of what it was now..like “peach pie” or something equally random.
I said it over and over to her…I said remember…unfortunately, she did not remember the word the next day.
But, it’s already infrequent that you are conscious in your dreams…to have two people consciously co-dreaming side by side in bed would be rare I would imagine.
Still…we have both been visited by the other’s deceased Father in our dreams.
When I told Sensiko what her Father looked like and how the sentence he spoke (He was from Poland, but escaped the Nazi’s and lived for some time in France before moving to the US, so his accent and sentence structure was very distinct) she said that is exactly what he would have said and how he would have said it.
My own Father told me in a dream that she will make me happy and to hang on to her.
Could they all just be concoctions of my own mind to convince me of this or that…sure…but all we have ultimately is our OWN subjective experience…so in essence those dreams are just as real as you are or my dog is sitting next to me.