Merkabah

[Skarekrow]

Currently I'm too old for _________. Hahahahaha.... let's face it....some days the body just can't handle it.

I love what John F Kennedy said. It took me a long time to understand that dynamic of life. I was taught to always "brace" myself for what was coming which was always perceived as painful. I have noticed I clench my body whenever this very old and deeply ingrained lesson takes over me before I'm aware of it.

Take for example when one knows they're about to receive a shot. Don't we normally tense up and brace our self? Yet the opposite action will produce a very less painful if not painless experience. Whenever I drive over bumpy and uneven dirt roads I have learned when I relax my body through my hips area - the shaking and swaying of my car does not hurt my back or anything. Yet years before when I drove the same road it would hurt my body somewhere.

Now - wheverever I go - whomever I'm with - I seek to be in a relaxed state of Being - both in body and mind - and I help them to move toward that state as well.
This way the opportunity has a chance to present itself and I notice it.

The other one that really hits home with me is the tired line "Tis better to give than receive". ohmygod that is the one of the most evil teachings to have been passed down to us. We should have a discussion about that one.

I'm off to drive up to Dallas (4 hr drive) to buy a used pretty red Dodge cummins diesel truck. We plan to use this pull a travel trailer one day.

I get it completely....sometimes (even though I’m about to turn 37) I feel like I’m 80+ years old...beauty and health truly are wasted on youth...lol.

Did you know that if you watch yourself getting a shot, that it actually hurts less? Your mind actually causes it to hurt less. There could be several lessons in that...if we ignore those things that can cause us pain, they usually end up hurting more...as opposed to facing those things that cause us pain...even knowing that it will be painful....it ends up hurting less in the end.

I try....lord knows I do...to be relaxed...to let go of the things that cause me stress...lol....if only it were so easy.
Why is it you think that as we grow and move through life that we inevitably end up stressing about things instead of just realizing and understanding that that is just how life is in general? Are we conditioned as we grow up to expect life to be different? Are we told that life is easy? I know I wasn’t told that...and yet I am disappointed when obstacles arise in my path...when things don’t go smoothly...are we all just ridiculously ignorant thinking that it can be any other way?
Where does one begin to re-learn our expectations without becoming cynical and disappointed? Surely it would have been easier if we were taught differently growing up...just as it is easier to learn another language as a child...your mind being more elastic and less full of the bullshit we are eventually fed...so where do we begin our lesson on accepting the reality of our suffering? Or is that the grand lesson of life?
Are we just here to learn to suffer? To figure out how to accept it and by true acceptance, overcome it?
Most of the major religions would have us believe that that is what life is all about - suffering and accepting that suffering.
Buddhism, Christianity...etc...all have strong beliefs that that is the underlying nature of things...and that only through suffering can we evolve spiritually.
That is a bitter pill to swallow.
It may, possibly be a lesson that does take a lifetime to learn...maybe more than one lifetime.
Or is that the wrong thing to focus on? Is the lesson something else instead? Compassion? Love? Contentment? Overcoming fear? Forgiveness? Grace?
The list could surly go on and on almost infinitely....so where should our focus be?
It seems whenever we come close to answering one, two more arise.

Sometimes it is good to receive...
You know, as much as we look to the Saints and people who are completely selfless...who give their life in the service of others...people like Mother Teresa...who probably only had the most fleeting thought of selfishness...I feel sorry for them. I never found the stories of their lives and sacrifice uplifting...instead they always filled me with a feeling like despair....they were missing out on some of the incredibly wonderful things in life...fun, entertainment, love, sex, etc...
I have nothing but deep respect for them all...but as wonderful as they all were....as incredible as their lives were...the countless people that were given hope through their sacrifice...they missed out.
Just as someone living a selfish life of material possessions, filled with nothing but their own ego and self-indulgence is looked upon as lacking the whole picture and possibly wasted in gluttony and excess....to take it to the polar opposite I feel isn’t fully rounded either.

Drive safely!

 

[Skarekrow]

Creating the Paranormal

The mind can tap into psychic phenomena. Can it also create physical phenomena?



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By Stephen Wagner

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WHERE IS THE mind? Where does your consciousness reside? Is it solely a product of your brain? A biologist would likely say yes, since the brain is the only thing the scientist can see, examine, and experiment with. If the mind, or consciousness, is merely the output of the brain, however, how are we to explain the extraordinary cases of fully functional people who have half a brain or very little brain matter at all?

• A 39-year-old woman in China was found, to her doctors’ surprise, to have just half a brain, on the right side. The left side of her brain was completely missing, yet she lives a completely normal life, having completed high school with good grades. The only reason her doctors found out was because the woman came to them complaining of a feeling of weakness. What puzzled the doctors most was that the left side of the brain is commonly thought to control language, “but this patient has no problem communicating with people," said the hospital’s director of Neural Rehabilitation Department.
• A 44-year-old man in France was discovered to have only a thin shell of a brain. Most of his skull was filled only with fluid, leaving room for just the slightest sheet of actual brain tissue. He had a below-average IQ of 75, but was an otherwise normal civil service worker and a married father of two children.
• A low IQ isn’t always the result of this anomaly, however. A mathematics university student in Sheffield, U.K., who had an IQ of 126, had virtually no brain at all. A CAT scan revealed that the boy had less than a millimeter of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column.

If the brain really is the seat of function, consciousness and personality, then these people should be vegetables or, at best, severely disabled. Yet they are anything but. Certainly, many people who are the victims of brain trauma through accident are disabled, or worse, become vegetables (or die). Yet remarkable people like those mentioned above thrive. It could be because their “abnormality” occurred not as the result of trauma, but slowly over time, or at birth. This allowed the brain to adapt, to hand over its high functions to smaller and smaller vestiges of brain matter.
Even so, how can a fully functional, perfectly normal mind remain?
THE HOLOGRAPHIC BRAIN
The answer might be found in the consciousness rather than the brain. The consciousness of these people has obviously been unaffected by their diminishing or non-existent brains, suggesting that the two may indeed be separate things. The brain may be a mechanism that expresses consciousness, much like a radio can make a broadcast audible, yet they are two different things. If true, than how can an almost non-existent brain mechanism continue to express consciousness?
Michael Talbot theorizes the answer in his groundbreaking book, The Holographic Universe. The brain, he says (recounting the research of neurophysiologist Karl Pribram), might work like a hologram. A hologram is a three-dimensional photograph, and if you break it into pieces, each piece of that hologram contains the entire original photo. So, too, might the brain, no matter how small a piece of it remains, be able to completely express what a whole one can.
So what does all of this have to do with the paranormal?

So what does all of this have to do with the paranormal?
“The most staggering thing about the holographic model,” Talbot writes, “was that it suddenly made sense of a wide range of phenomena.... These include telepathy, precognition, mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, and even psychokinesis....”
The key to this is that our holographic brains are not stand-alone objects. Your holographic brain – an analogy for your consciousness – mingles and works not only with the holographic brains of everyone else, but with the universe itself. In a real sense, we are all a part of the same universal consciousness, which can explain ESP and other psychic phenomena, as Talbot said.
Now back to our extraordinary people mentioned at the beginning of this article.
BEYOND THE PSYCHIC
Their holographic brains – their consciousness – was able to create the semblance of a “normal” brain, complete with language, memory and other high functions. This is because the brain as hologram is able to tap the greater holographic consciousness (of which it is a part) and fill in – or create – the missing pieces. In The Holographic Universe, Talbot uses the example of those optical illusions we’re all familiar with in which the brain fills in elements of a picture that are not really in the drawing. The brain creates the missing elements because they are what it expects to see.
This gets us to thinking: If the brain can create what it wishes to see in a two-dimensional drawing, can the holographic mind create what it wishes or expects to see in the three-dimensional world? With regard to the paranormal, this could include ghostly apparitions, UFOs and even Bigfoot.
The suggestion here is that these creations of the consciousness are not illusions or figments of the imagination, but three-dimensional, physical-looking, temporary creations (holograms?) that can be viewed by many people, leave footprints, move objects and have other physical effects. (Psychologist Carl Jung suggested this as a possible explanation for UFOs back in 1959.)
I’m not suggesting that all ghosts, UFOs and sightings of Bigfoot are creations of consciousness, but some could be. Some could be just what they appear to be: spirits, alien ships and unknown primates. But in some cases they could be products of what we expect, desire or fear to see – created by the force of our powerful intentions, and physical enough to show up on videotape.
And that gets into a discussion of just what constitutes reality. But that’s too big a question for this article.





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[Skarekrow]

The Occult World of CG Jung

How a near-death experience transformed the psychologist's attitude to the world of mysticism and magic


The "Sage of Küsnacht".
Getty Images / Central Press

On 11 February 1944, the 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung – then the world’s most renowned living psychologist – slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later, in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and out-of-the-body experience – or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu sitting in a lotus position. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and he felt that the “whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence” was being stripped away. It wasn’t pleasant, and what remained was an “essential Jung”, the core of his experiences.

He knew that inside the temple the mystery of his existence, of his purpose in life, would be answered. He was about to cross the threshold when he saw, rising up from Europe far below, the image of his doctor in the archetypal form of the King of Kos, the island site of the temple of Asclepius, Greek god of medicine. He told Jung that his departure was premature; many were demanding his return and he, the King, was there to ferry him back. When Jung heard this, he was immensely disappointed, and almost immediately the vision ended. He experienced the reluctance to live that many who have been ‘brought back’ encounter, but what troubled him most was seeing his doctor in his archetypal form. He knew this meant that the physician had sacrificed his own life to save Jung’s. On 4 April 1944 – a date numerologists can delight in – Jung sat up in bed for the first time since his heart attack. On the same day, his doctor came down with septicæmia and took to his bed. He never left it, and died a few days later.

Jung was convinced that he hadn’t simply hallucinated, but that he had been granted a vision of reality. He had passed outside time, and the experience had had a palpable effect on him. For one thing, the depression and pessimism that overcame him during WWII vanished. But there was something more. For most of his long career, he had impressed upon his colleagues, friends, and reading public that he was, above all else, a scientist. He was not, he repeated almost like a mantra, a mystic, occultist, or visionary, terms of abuse his critics, who rejected his claims to science, had used against him. Now, having returned from the brink of death, he seemed content to let the scientist in him take a back seat for the remaining 17 years of his life.

Although Jung had always believed in the reality of the ‘other’ world, he had taken care not to speak too openly about this belief. Now, after his visions, he seemed less reticent. He’d had, it seems, a kind of conversion experience, and the interests the world-famous psychologist had hitherto kept to himself now became common knowledge. Flying saucers, astrology, parapsychology, alchemy, even predictions of a coming “new Age of Aquarius”: pronouncements on all of these dubious subjects – dubious at least from the viewpoint of modern science – flowed from his pen. If he had spent his career fending off charges of mysticism and occultism – initially triggered by his break with Freud in 1912 – by the late 1940s he seems to have decided to stop fighting. The “sage of Küsnacht” and “Hexenmeister of Zürich”, as Jung was known in the last decade of his life, had arrived.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

(Jung's mother Emilie.)
Yet Jung’s involvement with the occult was with him from the start – literally, it was in his DNA. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Samuel Preiswerk, who learned Hebrew because he believed it was spoken in heaven, accepted the reality of spirits, and kept a chair in his study for the ghost of his deceased first wife, who often came to visit him. Jung’s mother Emilie was employed by Samuel to shoo away the dead who distracted him while he was working on his sermons.

She herself developed medium*istic powers in her late teens. At the age of 20, she fell into a coma for 36 hours; when her forehead was touched with a red-hot poker she awoke, speaking in tongues and prophesying. Emilie continued to enter trance states throughout her life, in which she would communicate with the dead. She also seems to have been a ‘split personality’. Jung occasionally heard her speaking to herself in a voice he soon recognised was not her own, making profound remarks expressed with an uncharacteristic authority. This ‘other’ voice had inklings of a world far stranger than the one the young Carl knew.

This ‘split’ that Jung had seen in his mother would later appear in himself. At around the age of 12, he literally became two people. There was his ordinary boyhood self, and someone else. The ‘Other,’ as Carl called him, was a figure from the 18th century, a masterful character who wore a white wig and buckled shoes, drove an impressive carriage, and held the young boy in contempt. It’s difficult to escape the impression that in some ways Jung felt he had been this character in a past life. Seeing an ancient green carriage, Jung felt that it came from his time. his later notion of the collective unconscious, that psychic reservoir of symbols and images that he believed we inherit at birth, is in a sense a form of reincarnation, and Jung himself believed in some form of an afterlife. Soon after the death of his father, in 1896 when Jung was 21, he had two dreams in which his father appeared so vividly that he considered the possibility of life after death. In another, later dream, Jung’s father asked him for marital advice, as he wanted to prepare for his wife’s arrival. Jung took this as a premonition, and his mother died soon after. And years later, when his sister Gertrude died – a decade before his own near-death experience – Jung wrote that “What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.” [1]


TABLES AND KNIVES

(The knife which broke in 3.)
Jung’s mother was involved in at least two well-known paranormal experiences that are recounted in practically every book about him. Sitting in his room studying, Carl suddenly heard a loud bang coming from the dining room. He rushed in and found his mother startled. The round walnut table had cracked from the edge past the centre. The split didn’t follow any joint, but had passed through solid wood. Drying wood couldn’t account for it; the table was 70 years old and it was a humid day. Jung thought: “There certainly are curious accidents.” As if she was reading his mind Emilie replied in her ‘other’ voice: “Yes, yes, that means something.” Two weeks later came a second incident. Returning home in the evening, Jung found an excited household. An hour earlier there had been another loud crack, this time coming from a large sideboard. No one had any idea what had produced it. Jung inspected the sideboard. Inside, where they kept the bread, he found a loaf and the bread knife. The knife had shattered into several pieces, all neatly arranged in the breadbasket. The knife had been used earlier for tea, but no one had touched it nor opened the cupboard since. When he took the knife to a cutler, he was told that there was no fault in the steel and that someone must have broken it on purpose. He kept the shattered knife for the rest of his life, and years later sent a photograph of it to psychical researcher JB Rhine.


SPIRITS AFOOT

(Helene Preiswerk, Jung's cousin.)
By this time Jung, like many others, was interested in spiritualism, and was reading through the literature – books by Zöllner, Crooks, Carl du Prel, Swedenborg, and Justinus Kerner’s classic The Seeress of Prevorst. At the Zofingia debating society at the University of Basel, he gave lectures on “The Value of Speculative Research” and “On the Limits of Exact Science”, in which he questioned the dominant materialist paradigm that reigned then, as today. Jung led fellow students in various occult experiments, yet when he spoke to them about his ideas, or lectured about the need to take them seriously, he met with resistance. Apparently he had greater luck with his dachshund, whom he felt understood him better and could feel supernatural presences himself. [2]

Another who seemed to feel supernatural presences was his cousin, from his mother’s side of the family, Helene Preiswerk. In a letter to JB Rhine about the shattered bread knife, Jung refers to Helly – as she was known – as a “young woman with marked mediumistic faculties” whom he had met around the time of the incident, and in his “so-called’ autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections he remarks that he became involved in a series of séances with his relatives after the incidents of the bread knife and table. Yet the séances had been going on for some time before the two events, and at their centre was Helly, whom Jung already knew well and who, by all accounts, was in love with him. This is an early sign of his somewhat ambiguous relationship with the occult.

Helly would enter a trance and fall to the floor, breathing deeply, and speaking in old Samuel Preiswerk’s voice – although she had never heard him. She told the others that they should pray for her elder sister Bertha, who, she said, had just given birth to a black child. Bertha, who was living in Brazil, had already had one child with her mixed-race husband, and gave birth to another on the same day as the séance. [3] Further séances proved equally startling. At one point, Samuel Preiswerk and Carl Jung Sr – Jung’s paternal grandfather – who had disliked each other while alive, reached a new accord. A warning came for another sister who was also expecting a child that she would lose it; in August the baby was born premature and dead. [4]

Helly produced further voices, but the most interesting was a spirit named Ivenes, who called herself the real Helene Preiswerk. This character was much more mature, confident, and intelligent than Helly, who Jung described as absent-minded, and not particularly bright, talented, or educated. It was as if buried beneath the unremarkable teenager was a fuller, more commanding personality, like Jung’s ‘Other’. This was an insight into the psyche that would inform his later theory of “individuation”, the process of “becoming who you are”. Helly did blossom later, becoming a successful dressmaker in France, although she died young, at only 30.

In Jung’s dissertation on the séances, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena, he describes Helly unflatteringly as “exhibiting slightly rachitic skull formation”, and “somewhat pale facial colour”, and fails to mention that she is his cousin. He also omits his own participation in the séances, and dates them from 1899 to 1900, whereas they had started years before. Gerhard Wehr politely suggests that “[T]he doctoral candidate was obviously at pains to conceal his own role, and especially his close kinship relat*ionship, thus forestalling from the start any further critical inquiry that might have thrown the scientific validity of the entire work into question.” [5]

In other words, Jung the scientist thought it a good career move to obscure Jung the occultist’s personal involvement in the business.


THE POLTERGEIST IN FREUD'S BOOKCASE
In 1900, the 25-year-old Jung joined the prestigious Burghölzli Mental Clinic in Zürich. Here, he did solid work in word-association tests, developed his theory of ‘complexes’, and initiated a successful ‘patient-friendly’ approach to working with psychotics and schizophrenics. It was during his tenure that he also became involved with Freud. From 1906, when they started corresponding, to 1912, when the friendship ruptured, Jung was a staunch supporter of Freud’s work and promoted it unstintingly. There were, however, some rocky patches. One centred on the famous poltergeist in Freud’s bookcase. Visiting Freud in Vienna in 1909, Jung asked him about his attitude toward parapsychology. Freud was sceptical and dismissed the subject as nonsense. Jung disagreed, and sitting across from the master, he began to feel his diaphragm glow, as if it was becoming red-hot. Sudd*enly a loud bang came from a bookcase. Both jumped up, and Jung said to Freud: “There, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon!”, Jung’s long-winded circumlocution for a poltergeist, or “noisy spirit”. When Freud said “Bosh!”, Jung predicted that another bang would immediately happen. It did. Jung said that, from that moment on, Freud grew mistrustful of him. From Freud’s letter to Jung about the incident, one gets the feeling that he felt Jung himself was responsible for it.

This isn’t surprising; Jung did manifest numerous paranormal abilities. While in bed in a hotel room after giving a lecture, he experienced the suicide of a patient who had a strong “transference” on him. The patient had relapsed into depression, and shot himself in the head. Jung awoke in his hotel, feeling an odd pain in his forehead. He later discovered that his patient had shot himself precisely where Jung felt the pain, at the same time Jung woke up. More to the point, a visitor to his home once remarked about Jung’s “exteriorised libido”, how “when there was an important idea that was not yet quite conscious, the furniture and woodwork all over the house creaked and snapped.”


THE RED BOOK

(A page from Jung's legendaryRed Book.
Foundation for the Works of CG Jung)
It was Jung’s break with Freud that led to his own ‘descent into the unconscious’, a disturbing trip down the psyche’s rabbit hole from which he gathered the insights about the collective unconscious that would inform his own school of ‘analytical psychology’. He had entered a ‘creative illness’, unsure if he was going mad. In October 1913, not long after the split, Jung had, depending on your perspective, a vision or hallucination. While on a train, he suddenly saw a flood covering Europe, between the North Sea and the Alps. When it reached Switzerland, the mountains rose to protect his homeland, but in the waves he saw floating debris and bodies. Then the water turned to blood. The vision lasted an hour and seems to have been a dream that had invaded his waking consciousness. Having spent more than a decade treating mental patients who suffered from precisely such symptoms, Jung had reason to be concerned. He was ironically rather relieved the next summer when WWI broke out and he deduced that his vision had been a premonition of it.

Yet the psychic tension continued. Eventually there came a point where Jung felt he could no longer fight off the sense of madness. He decided to let go. When he did, he landed in an eerie, subterranean world where he met strange intelli*gences that ‘lived’ in his mind. The experience was so upsetting that for a time Jung slept with a loaded pistol by his bed, ready to blow his brains out if the stress became too great.

In his Red Book – recently published in full – he kept an account, in words and images, of the objective, independent entities he encountered during his “creative illness” – entities that had nothing to do with him personally, but who shared his interior world. There were Elijah and Salome, two figures from the Bible who were accompanied by a snake. There was also a figure whom Jung called Philemon, who became a kind of ‘inner guru’ and who he painted as a bald, white-bearded old man with bull’s horns and the wings of a kingfisher. One morning, after painting the figure, Jung was out taking a walk when he came upon a dead kingfisher. The birds were rare in Zürich and he had never before come upon a dead one. This was one of the many synchronicities – “meaningful coincidences” – that happened at this time (for more on Jung and synchronicity, see FT171:42–47). There were others. In 1916, still in the grip of his crisis, Jung again felt that something within wanted to get out. An eerie restlessness filled his home. He felt the presence of the dead – and so did his children. One daughter saw a strange white figure; another had her blankets snatched from her at night. His son drew a picture of a fisherman he had seen in a dream: a flaming chimney rose from the fisherman’s head, and a devil flew through the air, cursing the fisherman for stealing his fish. Jung had yet to mention Philemon to anyone. Then, one afternoon, the doorbell rang loudly, but no one was there. He asked: “What in the world is this?” The voices of the dead answered: “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought,” words that form the beginning of Jung’s strange Seven Sermons to the Dead, a work of “spiritual dictation”, or “channelling”, he attributed to “Basilides in Alexandria, the City where the East toucheth the West”.


GHOSTS IN THE HOUSE
By 1919, WWI was over and Jung’s crisis had passed, although he continued to practise what he called “active imagin*ation”, a kind of waking dreaming, the results of which he recorded in the Red Book. But spirits of a more traditional kind were not lacking. He was invited to London to lecture on “The Psychological Foundations of the Belief in Spirits” to the Society for Psychical Research. He told the Society that ghosts and materialisations were “unconscious projections”. “I have repeatedly observed,” he said, “the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology.”

Scientific enough, no doubt, but a year later, again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. He spent some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury rented by Maurice Nicoll (later a student of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky) and while there was serenaded by eerie sounds, while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said the place was haunted and, on one particularly bad night, Jung discovered an old woman’s head on the pillow next to his; half of her face was missing. He leapt out of bed and waited until morning in an armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that, having already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung wouldn’t be so shaken by a traditional English ghost, but the experience rattled him; his account of it only appeared 30 years later, in 1949, in an obscure anthology of ghost stories.

When his lecture for the SPR was reprinted in the Collected Works in 1947, Jung added a footnote explaining that he no longer felt as certain as he did in 1919 that apparitions were explicable through psychology, and that he doubted “whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomenon”. In a later postscript, he again admitted that his earlier explanation was insufficient, but that he couldn’t agree on the reality of spirits because he had no experience of them – conveniently forgetting the haunting in Aylesbury. But in a letter of 1946 to Fritz Kunkel, a psychotherapist, Jung admitted: “Metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious.”

A similar uncertainty surrounds his experience with the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle, with which he began to experiment in the early 1920s and which, like horoscopes, became part of his therapeutic practice. Although he mentioned the I Ching here and there in his writing, it wasn’t until 1949, again nearly 30 years later, in his introduction to the classic Wilhelm/Baynes translation, that he admitted outright to using it himself. And although he tried to explain the I Ching’s efficacy through what would become his paranormal deus ex machina, synchronicity, Jung admits that the source of the oracle’s insights are the “spiritual agencies” that form the “living soul of the book”, a remark at odds with his quasi-scientific explanation. Ironically, his major work on “meaningful coincidence”, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connect*ing Principle (1952), written with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, provides only one unambiguous example of the phenomenon, and readers who, like me, accept the reality of synchronicity, come away slightly baffled by Jung’s attempt to account for it via archetypes, quantum physics, statistical analysis, mathematics, JB Rhine’s experiments with ESP, astrology, telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal abilities, all of which read like a recrudescence of Jung’s “I am a scientist” reflex.


THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

(Philemon.
The Red Book / Foundation for the Works of CG Jung)
In the 1920s, he plunged into a study of the Gnostics – whom he had encountered as early as 1912 – and alchemy. It was Jung, more than anyone else, who salvaged the ancient Hermetic pursuit from intellectual oblivion. Another Hermetic practice he followed was astrology, which he began to study seriously around the time of his break with Freud. Jung informed his inner circle that casting horoscopes was part of his therapeutic practice, but it was during the dark days of WWII that he recognised a wider application. In 1940, in a letter to HG Baynes, Jung speaks of a vision he had in 1918 in which he saw “fire falling like rain from heaven and consuming the cities of Germany”. He felt that 1940 was the crucial year, and he remarks that it’s “when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius”. It was, he said, “the premonitory earthquake of the New Age”. He was familiar with the precession of the equinoxes, the apparent backward movement of the Sun through the signs of the zodiac. By acting as a backdrop to sunrise at the vernal equinox, each sign gives its name to an ‘age’ – called a ‘Platonic month’ – which lasts roughly 2,150 years. In his strange bookAion (1951), he argues that the ‘individuation’ of Western civilisation as a whole follows the path of the ‘Platonic months,’ and presents a kind of “precession of the archetypes”. Fish symbolism surrounds Jesus because He was the central symbol of the Age of Pisces, the astrological sign of the fish. Previous ages – of Taurus and Aries – produced bull and ram symbolism. The coming age is that of Aquarius, the Water Bearer. In conversation with Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, a friend of Hermann Hesse, Jung admitted that he had kept this “secret knowledge” to himself for years, and only finally made it public in Aion. He wasn’t sure he was “allowed” to, but during his illness he received “confirmation” that he should.

Although the arcane scholar Gerald Massey and the French esotericist Paul Le Cour had earlier spoken of a coming Age of Aquarius, Jung was certainly the most prestigious mainstream figure to do so, and it is through him that the idea became a mainstay of the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. This was mostly through his comments about it in his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky(1958), in which he argued that UFOs were basically mandalas from outer space. During his crisis, he had come upon the image of the mandala, the Sanskrit ‘magic circle’, as a symbol of psychic wholeness, and he suggested that ‘flying saucers’ were mass archetypal projections, formed by the psychic tension produced by the Cold War that was heating up between Russia and America. The Western world, he argued, was having a nervous breakdown, and UFOs were a way of relieving the stress.

Jung wrote prophetically that “My conscience as a psychiatrist bids me fulfil my duty and prepare those few who will hear me for coming events which are in accord with the end of an era… As we know from ancient Egyptian history, they are symptoms of psychic changes that always appear at the end of one Platonic month and at the beginning of another. They are, it seems, changes in the constellation of the psychic dominants, of the archetypes or ‘Gods’ as they used to be called, which bring about… long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche. This transform*ation started… in the transition of the Age of Taurus to that of Aries, and then from Aries to Pisces, whose beginning coincides with the rise of Christianity. We are now nearing that great change… when the spring-point enters Aquarius…” Ten years later, The Fifth Dimension (whose very name, appropriated from the title song of The Byrds’ third LP, suggests the cosmic character of the Mystic Sixties) had a hit song from the hippie musical Hair echoing Jung’s ideas, and millions of people all over the world believed they were witnessing “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”.


JUNG THE MYSTIC

(A mandala, symbol of psychic wholeness.
The Red Book / Foundation for the Works of CG Jung)
Jung died in 1961, just on the cusp of the ‘occult revival’ of the 1960s, a renaissance of magical thinking that he did much to bring about. He was also directly responsible for the “journey to the East” that many took then, and continue to take today. Along with the I Ching, Jung gave his imprimatur to such hitherto arcane items as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Taoism and Zen, and without his intervention it’s debatable if these Eastern imports would have enjoyed their modern popularity. That he was in many ways a founding father of the Love Generation is seen by his inclusion on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, although Jung himself would have thought “flower power” sadly naïve. Although for all his efforts he has never been accepted by mainstream intellectuals, his effect on popular culture has been immense, and our contemporary grass roots, inner-directed spirituality, unfortunately associated with the New Age, has his name written all over it. Jung himself may have been equivocal about his relationship with mysticism, magic, and the occult, but the millions of people today who pay attent*ion to their dreams, notice strange coincidences and consult the I Ching have the Sage of Küsnacht to thank for it.




Notes
[1] Quoted in Vincent Brome: Jung: Man and Myth, Scientific Book Club, 1979, p277.
[2] Brome, op. cit. p68.
[3] Deidre Bair: Jung: A Biography, Little Brown, 2004, p48.
[4] Ibid. p49.
[5] Gerhard Wehr: Jung: A Biography, Shambhala, Boston, 1987, p72.

 

[Skarekrow]

If anyone is interested, I found a link to “The Red Book” online...

https://archive.org/stream/LiberNovus-TheRedBookjung/JungC.g.-TheRedBook#page/n3/mode/2up

 

[Skarekrow]

Physicists probe the paranormal


"The question of whether paranormal phenomena actually exist probably divides educated members of modern Western civilization as sharply as any other single issue. If it is true that the human brain can receive messages and control things in ways that cannot be explained normally, then this undermines the belief of most scientists and runs contrary to the belief of most of us who actually investigate the brain."
It was with these remarks that Horace Barlow, a physiologist from Cambridge University, opened a unique interdisciplinary conference in Cambridge last month. The meeting brought together some 50 scientists from a range of disciplines, including psychology, psychiatry and physics, to discuss "rational perspectives on the paranormal".
Many of the delegates at the conference, including Barlow, are highly sceptical of the existence of paranormal phenomena. Claims of ghosts, alien abductions and spoon-bending are often based on dubious evidence, while attempts by parapsychologists to reproduce paranormal phenomena under controlled laboratory conditions are fraught with difficulty. Positive results are not unusual, but are rarely repeatable. Moreover, many seemingly weird phenomena have subsequently been explained by conventional science.
Most readers of Physics World will probably dismiss paranormal phenomena as either utter nonsense or not worthy of serious study, but over the years the subject has attracted the interest of a number of eminent physicists. Lord Rayleigh, J J Thomson and Oliver Lodge, for example, were all early members of the Society for Psychical Research, which was founded in 1882 by fellows of Trinity College to study "those faculties of Man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis".
According to Bernard Carr, who organized last month's meeting and is a cosmologist at the University of London, paranormal phenomena fall into three main categories. First there are "pseudo-psychic phenomena", which may in fact have a very simple physical explanation. Some kinds of poltergeist phenomena, for example, may fall into this category. "These phenomena are not really psychic, but are often misinterpreted as such," Carr explains.
Second, there are phenomena - such as out-of-body and near-death experiences, hypnosis and apparitions - that may be entirely within the mind and do not necessarily involve any interaction with the physical world. "No doubt, people have these experiences," says Carr, "but the question is how do we interpret them? Do they correspond to some form of higher-order reality, or are they just illusions? It would be easy to dismiss ghosts, for example, as no more than visual hallucinations, but sometimes apparitions are shared by more than one person or contain information about the real world, which makes them more interesting."
The third type of paranormal phenomenon involves the direct interaction of the mind with the physical world, including telepathy, extrasensory perception and "psychokinesis". One example of the latter effect was given at the meeting by Fotini Pallikari, a physicist from the University of Athens in Greece. She has analysed data from a group of German psychologists, who tried to see if people can influence supposedly random physical processes. The psychologists used electronic "noise" from a semiconductor diode, which consisted of a series of random positive and negative pulses that were digitized as 0 and 1. The signals were fed into a computer, and people were then asked to mentally "influence" the statistical distribution of millions of such bits.
Although conventional statistics found that the operators had no influence on the average, an alternative statistical approach, which looks for long-range correlations and periodicities in the time series, gave a different picture. It appeared to suggest that the mind could weakly sustain the "direction" of any naturally occurring localized deviations from chance, such as a run of ones and zeroes. In other words, the operator could affect the patterns by which the bits are arranged in time, even though their average value remained unchanged.
Brian Josephson, the Nobel-prize winning physicist from the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, is attempting to elucidate the physical mechanisms behind such phenomena. These include the possibility that organisms can learn to bias the statistics through having a better understanding of its patterns than non-living matter, or that some "critical fluctuation" is involved.
The interaction between mind and matter in this way is one of the main reasons why physicists are interested in the paranormal. "Quantum mechanics, after all, is the first theory in physics in which the role of the observer has to be taken into account," explains Carr. "You cannot separate the observer from the system being observed, although the precise role of consciousness in this process remains controversial."
The mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who was not at the meeting, has already tried to use quantum mechanics to explain the nature of consciousness in the normal mind, and some physicists believe that quantum mechanics only needs to be tweaked to incorporate paranormal effects. Henry Stapp from the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the US, who has developed a quantum-mechanical theory of how the normal brain interacts with the mind, believes that his theory could be altered to accommodate certain paranormal effects, if they exist. "But such a tweaking greatly disrupts the logical and aesthetic unity of quantum theory, and I would be very reluctant to believe that any such thing actually occurs," he says.
But Basil Hiley, a theoretical physicist from Birkbeck College, London, believes that conventional quantum mechanics will not be able to account for paranormal phenomena, if they exist. "Quantum processes provide a clue for understanding the mind, but we must go beyond that. We need an extended quantum physicalism," he says.
Carr defends physicists who study paranormal phenomena, pointing out that much of "conventional" modern physics is itself highly speculative. "Some might say there is less evidence for superstrings than there is for ESP and at least we can try to replicate paranormal phenomena in the laboratory," he says.
One problem for researchers with an interest in the paranormal is that the subject is not generally deemed to be academically respectable. That may change as related topics, such as consciousness, enter the mainstream, but for now many researchers study the paranormal as a "hobby" or as a sideline to their main research.
The final word goes to Barlow: "I do not believe the subject will make any progress unless we are sufficiently open-minded to accept the possibility of supernormal powers, and sufficiently critical to abandon claims shown to be false."

 

[muir]

http://sciencefocus.com/feature/physics/incredible-truth-about-time

[h=1]The incredible truth about time[/h]
Theories of science have ignored time... until now. A new idea reveals how it created the Universe - and you, writes Robert Matthews.



Time: it rules our lives, and we all wish we had more of it. Businesses make money out of it, and scientists can measure it with astonishing accuracy. Earlier this year, American researchers unveiled an atomic clock accurate to better than one second since the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.
But what, exactly, is time? Despite its familiarity, its ineffability has defied even the greatest thinkers. Over 1,600 years ago the philosopher Augustine of Hippo admitted defeat with words that still resonate: “If no-one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
[h=2]

[/h]

What exactly is the true nature of time? (Illustrator: Magictorch)​

​

Yet according to theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, the time has come to grapple with this ancient conundrum: “Understanding the nature of time is the single most important problem facing science,” he says.
As one of the founders of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, which specialises in tackling fundamental questions in physics, Professor Smolin has spent more time pondering deep questions than most. So why does he think the nature of time is so important? Because, says Smolin, it is central to the success of attempts to understand reality itself.
To most people, this may sound a bit overblown. Since reality in all its forms, from the Big Bang to the Sunday roast, depends on time, isn’t it obvious that we should take time seriously? And didn’t scientists sort out its mysteries centuries ago?
[h=2]Timeless physics[/h] Prepare for a shock. Scientists have indeed tackled the mystery of time and reached an astounding conclusion. They insist that the most successful theories in physics prove that time does not exist.
But now Smolin has news for these scientists. He thinks they’ve been led to dismiss the reality of time by a mix of deep-seated beliefs and esoteric mathematics. And in a controversial new book Time Reborn, he sets out the dangers of persisting with this folly, and the promise of accepting time’s fundamental importance. If he’s right, it means far from being irrelevant, time is of crucial importance to explaining how the Universe works and is even responsible for our very existence.
Smolin is under no illusions about what he’s taking on. “The scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable,” he says. “The core of the case against time relies on the way we understand what a law of physics is.” He isn’t saying the laws are wrong, just that scientists don’t understand their true origins. “According to the standard view, everything that happens in the Universe is determined by laws,” he says. “Laws are absolute – they don’t change with time”. It’s this attribute that makes laws so powerful in predicting the future: plug in the Earth’s position today into the law of gravity, and it’ll give a pretty accurate location for its position a million years from now.
The laws also seem to reveal the true nature of time: “They suggest the flow of time is just a convenient illusion that can be replaced by computation,” says Smolin. In other words, time is just a trick that makes the equations spit out the right answers.

The Time Lord: Prof Lee Smolin is championing the existence of time​

​

Emboldened by the seemingly limitless power of their laws and concept of time, physicists have sought to understand the properties of everything – including the Universe as a whole, in all its infinite majesty. But time and again, when they’ve attempted this, they’ve run into problems.
Over 300 years ago, Sir Isaac Newton tried to apply his law of universal gravity to the whole Universe, only to see it collapse when dealing with the infinite extent of space. A century ago, Albert Einstein applied his far more powerful theory of gravity, General Relativity, to the cosmos, but it broke down at the large scale – when explaining the Big Bang.
[h=2][/h] [h=2]Quantum conundrum[/h] In the mid-1960s, the American theorist John Wheeler and his collaborator Bryce DeWitt decided to see what insights might emerge from applying the most successful theory in all science – quantum theory – to the cosmos. Most often applied to the sub-atomic world, quantum theory can – in principle at least – be applied to everything, even the large-scale workings of the Universe.
Wheeler and DeWitt succeed in producing a nightmarishly complex equation that, according to quantum theory, captures the true nature of the Universe. But the equation spawned a shocking insight. Of all the quantities it contained, one that everyone expected it to include had simply vanished: ‘t’ for time. “According to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, the quantum state of the Universe is just frozen,” says Smolin. “The quantum Universe is a Universe without change. It just simply is.”
The contrast with apparent reality could hardly be more stark. Astronomers insist the Universe began in a Big Bang and is still expanding. Stars are constantly being born and dying – along with ourselves. Clearly, something is wrong.

​

Scientists have long searched for a theory of time that's consistent with the Big Bang​

​

Many theorists have tried to find ways of getting what we perceive to be time to emerge from the ‘timeless’ Universe described by the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “I’ve pondered these approaches”, says Smolin, “and I remain convinced none of them work.” He believes only a fundamental re-think about time can solve the crisis.
Not everyone agrees, however. Some insist that the Wheeler-DeWitt equation reveals the truth about time – no matter how unpalatable we find it. Chief among them is the British theoretical physicist Dr Julian Barbour, Visiting Professor at Oxford University. He has spent decades wrestling with the meaning of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, and is renowned for his 1999 magnum opus The End Of Time.
Unlike Smolin, Barbour insists the Wheeler-DeWitt equation’s implication for time cannot be dismissed. He argues that the Universe is really a vast, static array of ‘nows’, like frames on some cosmic movie-reel. At any given moment, or ‘now’, time does not need to be factored in to explanations of how the Universe works. The sense of time passing comes from our minds processing each of these frames – or ‘time capsules’, as Barbour calls them. Time itself, however, doesn’t exist.
Smolin greatly admires Barbour’s efforts: “It’s the best thought-through approach to making sense of quantum cosmology,” he says. He has even incorporated some of Barbour’s latest ideas into his own. But he believes it suffers from the same flaws as all ‘timeless’ theories of the Universe: it struggles to make testable predictions, and it can’t explain where the timeless laws of physics come from in the first place.
[h=2][/h] [h=2]Radical thinking[/h] Smolin thinks he can do all this, and more. And to do it, he calls on the properties of the most extraordinary objects in the Universe today: black holes.
Formed from the collapse of giant stars, black holes are notorious for having gravitational fields so strong not even light can escape them. Exactly what happens inside them isn’t known for sure, but there are hints from quantum theory that the centre of black holes may be the birth-places of whole new universes, each with different laws of physics.
Smolin points out that if this is correct, then a kind of cosmic version of Darwinian natural selection could apply, in which the most common universes will be those most suitable for producing black holes. And this, he says, can be put to the test in our Universe. After countless aeons of cosmic evolution, our Universe should by now be ruled by laws of physics well-suited to producing black holes. According to Smolin, astrophysicists can check to see if this is actually true – and to date the evidence suggests it is.

An artist's impression of a black hole. Could it give birth to another Universe? (Image credit: Alain R)​

​

The most striking evidence, though, may be our own existence. Black holes are formed from the death of huge stars in supernova explosions. Intriguingly, these are the very same stars that produce the carbon, oxygen and other elements required for life. If there were no giant stars, there would be no universe-spawning black holes and no evolving laws of physics – and no us, either.
Smolin is thus suggesting that our very existence may be evidence for cosmic evolution. And since evolution can only happen over time, that in turn suggests time is real. It’s an astonishing line of argument for the reality of time – and one that doesn’t convince everyone. “I find these ideas very speculative – to say the least,” says theorist Prof Claus Kiefer of the University of Cologne in Germany. He doubts even the starting point for Smolin’s argument for the reality of time: “There is no evidence whatsoever that new universes are born inside black holes.”
[h=2][/h] [h=2]A matter of time[/h] What everyone agrees on, however, is that time certainly seems real. And there can be no disputing the boldness of Smolin’s arguments.
If he’s right, our Universe is just the latest in an endless series. Over time, over successive universes, the laws of physics have been evolving to the point where the conditions are just right to form not just black holes – the birthplaces of new universes – but also the building blocks of life, including us. In other words, time explains the apparent fluke that our Universe has just the right combination of conditions to allow our existence.
So is Smolin right about all this – or is time really an illusion, as most theorists insist? Only time will tell.

 

[muir]

This type of ego is what most of us experience. Almost all of us identify with our physical body, or feelings and emotions and feel pride in our intellect. This is due to various impressions in the centres of the subtle-body like temperamental characteristics, desires, likes and dislikes, etc.Refer to the presentation on the functional structure of the mind.Depending on thoughts and emotions, this ego can be either sāttvik (Sattva predominant), rājasik (Rajapredominant) or tāmasik (Tama predominant).

• Tamasik ego: The ego which is subtle basic Tama component predominant is called tamasik ego, e.g. believing only in one’s own capability.
• Rajasik ego: Subtle basic Raja component predominant ego is called rajasik ego, e.g. constantly striving for happiness.
• Sattvik ego: Ego which is predominant in the subtle basic Sattva component is called sattvik ego, e.g. ego about sacrifice is sattvik in nature.

I thought these 3 types of ego in the article you posted were very interesting because they seem to correspond to the 3 estates

There was the aristocracy (and at their head the royalty), the priesthood and then the common people

This caste system goes way back to the proto indo europeans and can be seen today still in europe and in the caste system of india where there are the priest caste the warrior caste and then the artisan caste

If you think about the first type of ego mentioned..the 'tamssik' ego which is someone believeing in their own capability....that would correspond with the el-ite who run our society....the top caste. They don't trust anyone else to run things except themselves

Then if you take the second one the 'rajasik' ego where the person is constantly struggling for happiness that would correspond to the middle class who have most of the material things that they want and yet are still not spiritually fulfilled

Then the third ego , the 'satvik' could be people further down the social scale and perhaps further down the VALs system who are basically resigned to their fate with no great expectations from life

Perhaps i've read these wrong...i'm just musing

 

[Skarekrow]

[MENTION=1871]muir[/MENTION]
Wow!

It is so very interesting how some discoveries and idea are formed...to suggest that time exists only in our mind and that there is only “now” is intriguing to say the least.
Funny how that ties into the Buddhist teachings that there is only “now” and that we should focus on that, and this theory by some very intelligent quantum physicists...I have a sneaking suspicion that one day we will have a more well-formed idea of the nature of reality, and things that previously only were thoughts and beliefs in the metaphysical realm will be explained.
Thanks for the post!

 

[Skarekrow]

I thought these 3 types of ego in the article you posted were very interesting because they seem to correspond to the 3 estates

There was the aristocracy (and at their head the royalty), the priesthood and then the common people

This caste system goes way back to the proto indo europeans and can be seen today still in europe and in the caste system of india where there are the priest caste the warrior caste and then the artisan caste

If you think about the first type of ego mentioned..the 'tamssik' ego which is someone believeing in their own capability....that would correspond with the el-ite who run our society....the top caste. They don't trust anyone else to run things except themselves

Then if you take the second one the 'rajasik' ego where the person is constantly struggling for happiness that would correspond to the middle class who have most of the material things that they want and yet are still not spiritually fulfilled

Then the third ego , the 'satvik' could be people further down the social scale and perhaps further down the VALs system who are basically resigned to their fate with no great expectations from life

Perhaps i've read these wrong...i'm just musing

No...not at all...those seem like perfectly reasonable understandings of the subject!

 

[Skarekrow]

Something I came across that I found interesting....maybe you will too (I once wanted to be an archeologist in another life...lol).
Enjoy! ( @muir these are in your backyard btw)


The Buried Gods of Gogmagog

There is still much to say about Britain's white fill figures, most cut from the turf to reveal the chalk beneath. Most controversial are the Gogmagog "giants", which Tom Lethbridge claimed to have found near a hillfort in Cambridgeshire. Terry Welbourn reports.

Between 1923 and 1957, Thomas Charles Lethbridge was honorary keeper of Anglo-Saxon antiquities at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge. Whilst working there, he heard tales that a giant figure once existed on the banks of Wandlebury hillfortEarly Cambridgeshire antiquarians John Layer (1586—1640) and William Cole (1714—82) claimed to have seen the hill figure, and 19th century oral tales stated that it was once visible from the nearby village of Sawston (though these have since been disproved). In 1911 Arthur Gray, master of Jesus College, Cambridge, had published a translation of a local folktale recorded by the medieval historian Gervase of Tilbury. It told of an ancient moonlit battle in the Wandlebury ring between Obsbert, son of Hugh and a fearsome knight. Lethbridge decided the Wandlebury giant had immortalised this mythical knight.He thought the Cambridgeshire figure would have been similar to the chalk-cut Cerne Abbas giant in Dorset, which he had visited in 1928. In a letter to The Times in 1936 he suggested it might have been inside the hillfort. He concluded that the Wandlebury figure had fallen into disrepair and vanished from view in the 19th century.He finally set out to solve the mystery in autumn 1954. After a survey he thought the most likely site of the lost hill figure was on the south-facing slope below the hillfort. Rather than conduct a labour-intensive dig, he decided to ram a metal probe into the turf. He hoped the depth the rod penetrated, and the sound and vibrations it made on impact with the chalk, would allow him to detect the giant.

As these investigations would involve only minor disturbance, the owners of the Wandlebury estate — the Cambridge Preservation Society (CPS) — granted him permission to proceed.In a letter to Sir Cyril Fox that November, Lethbridge declared: "I have found Gogmagog". He sketched not a Cerne Abbas "indecency", but "a gent in a bowler hat" wielding a spear and shield. His investigations continued throughout the Christmas period and on into the following year.In April he was part of a team of archaeologists, led by Brian Hartley, investigating the Wandlebury ditches. But consumed by his "discovery", Lethbridge found the dig mundane and gravitated back to his own research on the lower slopes. Many of those at the excavation were scornful of his undertaking, and believed that his "figure" could be explained by solifluction in the chalk (under permafrost conditions in the last ice age, fractured chalk and soil could be sorted into an expansive polygonal pattern), or even an over-active imagination. He was astounded at the criticism: he considered it incredulous that his efforts should have ignited such vitriol.He eventually revealed three figures: a pre-Norman warrior with a round shield, that he recognised as the knight in Gervase's tale; a hooded goddess on a steed; and a sun god. The CPS allowed him to commence a formal excavation, and he and his appointed helpers, including CF Tebbutt, began the process of exposing the figures.

Henry Urmston Willink — master of Magdalene College and vice chancellor of Cambridge University — was kept frequently updated by Lethbridge. Initially he was quite excited by the discoveries, though he urged caution. An outsider report requested by the CPS from Mr BW Sparks (who was to become a major figure in British geomorphology) and Mr WV Lewis, had concluded the depressions discovered by Lethbridge were most likely natural, not man-made. In response to a further request from the chairman of the CPS for an independent opinion on the features Lethbridge was exposing, the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) formed a committee comprising Ian Cornwall, WF ("Peter") Grimes, Christopher Hawkes and Stuart Piggott. Sensing that some of these eminent archaeologists would oppose theexcavation, Willink made clear his own position: he would have to remain impartial at all times.

Lethbridge chose to ignore Willink's prudence, and embarked on a worldwide publicity campaign. Headlines such as "The goggle-eyed mother of god", and a story in The Times about the discovery of a 3,000- year-old hill figure, caused concern with some academic colleagues. Lethbridge set off on a lecture tour and conducted a number of interviews with the BBC. Terence Grey, the owner of the Wandlebury estate, was enraged at Lethbridge's methodology and discourteous attitude. Yet despite the furore, excavations continued throughout the Christmas period of 1955 and on into the new year.In May 1957, renowned Egyptologist and anthropologist Margaret Murray joined the debate. In a letter to The Times she launched a scathing attack on the academic fraternity. Her anger was largely aimed at Grimes and Piggott for their refusal to acknowledge Lethbridge's discovery. She appeared to be reacting to what she considered to be the straight-jacket methodology of 1950s scholarship.Grimes responded that Murray was out of touch with current archaeological thinking. Grahame Clark and Geoffrey Bushnell added levity to the debate, suggesting "...that a League of Unscientific Antiquarians be formed to combat the menace ofthese scientific archaeologists". Throughout proceedings, Bushnell, like Willink (who in 1955 had urged Grimes and Fox to discuss the figures), always attempted to arbitrate, and kept an honest and straightforward dialogue between all parties. After Murray's public proclamation, Fox wrote to Lethbridge expressing his disdain at Murray's attack on Grimes.The CBA committee eventually concluded that Lethbridge had unwittingly excavated natural features dating from the last ice age. Its majority report was submitted to Willink on 18 September 1957, signed by Grimes, Piggott and Cornwall, with renowned ice age geologist Frederick Zeuner's support. Hawkes's more cautious conclusions were attached as a minority report: he felt his colleague's findings did not necessarily disprove Lethbridge's thesis.​

That same year Lethbridge's book Gogmagog — The Buried Gods (Routledge & Kegan Paul) presented the layman with his case for the hill figures' authenticity. The book contained a line of enquiry into the lost gods of Albion, suggesting that Gogmagog was a name aligned to the Great Goddess herself. He also controversially championed Margaret Murray, who had argued that modern witch cults were survivals from a prehistoric religion.Sir Thomas Kendrick, director of the British Museum, reviewed The Buried Gods in The Times. This prompted aflurry of responses, including one from MA Pinhorn of Hatfield who referred to Dr Dale's sighting of a figure in 1730: "Wandlebury hath three ramparts and two grafts between and a giant figure of Gogmagog cut on the turf in the middle of the camp". This added weight to a growing suspicion: a figurehad indeed once existed at Wandlebury, but within the earthwork and not on the lower slopes as Lethbridge was now suggesting.The CBA committee's inspection had revealed contemporary ploughmarks cutting through the exposed goddess. Lethbridge admittedthat these marks were present, but he attributed them to the stone and iron ages, claiming that the figures he had uncovered were well below disturbances made by any modern plough. This fact, he said, had already been published in the Archaeological News Letter, long before he carried out his excavations.

Despite thecommittee's misgivings, Lethbridge appears to have maintained a healthy and friendly dialogue with the CPS administrators. VJ Gastor, assisting master of the CPS, requested that he present them with a copy of Gogmagog — The Buried Gods. He duly obliged, including with his book a number of aerial photographic postcards of his excavations.In the autumn of 1957, disillusioned with Cambridge and the continued criticisms, Lethbridge and his wifeMina moved from their home in Sedley Taylor Road, Cambridge, to the Devonshire village of Branscombe. His ally Tebbutt continued to fight his corner, and even Miles Burkitt suggested consulting periglacial geologists at the Sedgwick Museum. Two reports by CL Forbes were eventually submitted, but neither reached a firm conclusion as to whether Lethbridge's figures were natural or artificial. In May 1958, Tebbutt even took Mr Greenfield from the Ministry of Works over to Wandlebury, and petitioned him to involve the ministry into solving the conundrum in the chalk.

In a letter to the CBA, Tebbutt suggested that two camps had arisen: Grimes and Piggott locked in opposition against Hawkes's more sympathetic appraisal. In January 1959, Gastor tried to appease Lethbridge, stating that although the majority report appeared to the contrary, the CPS was not saying that it disputed his claims of a hill figure at Wandlebury.Fifty six years have now passed since Lethbridge's "discovery". Recent research by Cambridge University and WA Clark, former head warden at Wandlebury Country Park, has cast further doubt on the figures. There are, however, factions who still trust in Lethbridge's findings, and — even amongst those in opposition —many still believe that a giant did once exist at Wandlebury. But its whereabouts have yet to be discovered.

Lethbridge's final map of his Wandlebury figures (coloured by British Archaeology). Excavated areas are depicted by a continuous line; broken lines show where he sounded with an iron bar.

Terry Welbourn is the co-author, with Simon Brighton, of Echoes of the Goddess: A Quest for the Sacred Feminine in the British Landscape (Ian Allen Publishing 2010). He is seeking a publisher for his recently completed TC Lethbridge biography. Wandlebury Country Park is owned by Cambridge Past, Present and Future (formerly Cambridge Preservation Society).​

 

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What Is The Real God? Deciphering ‘Un-Natural’ Religion

For millennia, it has been one of the most sensitive subjects known in the dialogue of man, one which has caused more division, war and death than any other topic in history.
Religion.
Over time the true meaning of religion has been woven into obscurity, masked by the various prevalent monotheistic factions that dominate our world today. Spiritual speaker Tobias Lars addresses this subject in one of his YouTube videos, titled “natural vs. un-natural religions.”So what is a ‘natural’ religion and what constitutes a religion as ‘un-natural’ ?
According to Lars, the answer is quite is simple, “there is a natural religion which connects us all,” as well a more assertive un-natural religion which disconnects the masses. The natural religion is comprised of the same force that sprouts trees, flowers and grass. It exists within every atom in the universe. The natural religion is expressed through the perfection of nature. Conversely, the un-natural religion is one that denies its follower the true connection to nature. These religions hold the belief that their way is the only way. It promotes forceful conversion and division. It denies the most fundamental aspects of life, the human body, sex and freedom.

Dominant religions today dictate that any god associated with nature, i.e. Pan, is the ‘devil’ (They depict Pan with horns). Adam and Eve were told to stay away from the “Tree of Knowledge” -the devil was also represented as a serpent who wanted Adam and Eve to utilize the Tree of Knowledge. Un-natural religions want us to judge ourselves, undergo unconsented surgery (circumcision), and in some cases even cover ourselves up so that only our eyes are showing.Other signs of an un-natural religion include violent conversions, dominating characteristics, ‘special’ revelations within the sector, and any Jehovah-inspired religion. (Jehovah was a Sumerian King, who was actually an Anunnaki).
In his video, Lars goes on to discuss the story of Abraham, who was ordered by ‘God’ to murder one of his sons, but in the last moment before he was about to commit the act, God revealed that he was just trying to test Abraham’s faith. Shouldn’t anyone be untrusting of a sadomasochistic god?In contrast, we look at the message from Jesus, who came to teach people about love and brotherhood. Jesus’s mission was to clear old karmic energies. He taught the famous golden rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” as well as educating people to love everyone, including ourselves first. He advocated that the ‘kingdom of heaven’ is within everyone. Jehovah/YHWH didn’t agree with these teachings, however, co-opting Jesus’s name and creating a violent religion-ism with it, the basis of which Christianity was founded. Un-natural religions state that only their followers will go to ‘heaven,’ creating a reliance based on fear.

Natural religions would never ostracize someone for choosing their own way. Shamans would never say “you must come and do ayahuasca to be holy,” but instead believe that people will come if they are ready, and if and/or when they do, the Shamans will gladly share their knowledge. This isn’t to say that all tribal cultures have always followed this kind of philosophy, as many ancient native cultures were deceived into believing they must perform sacrificial rituals to honour their gods. Many cultures from the past were manipulated by intelligent beings, or ETs.
The real god exists within the empty space of every molecule, every atom. It is the humble vibration emanating from every corner of the universe. It expresses itself through the blossoming of a flower, nature’s orgasm. It is the heart center within all of us, the Kundalini spine that connects us to source. This is the ‘natural’ religion. We’ve been fooled into thinking this exists outside of us by a system that runs on mass fear.

We must learn to discern for ourselves, rather than accept trans-generational philosophies and attitudes. The knowledge of the universe exists within every person on the planet. Fortunately this knowing is spreading. The days of deception, war and judgement are coming to an end. If we want the restoration of the natural, we can have it. It’s as simple as saying it, feeling it, and then creating it. Our power to manifest is more astounding than you probably know. Much love <3!
Check out Tobias Lars’ YouTube Channel here.

 

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Scientists Quantify & Graphically Chart Alignment Of Human Chakras In Various Emotional States

Electrophotonic analysis in medicine is something that’s been gaining more attention from scientists and researchers from all over the world. It’s another case -of many -that demonstrates how humanity is continually moving toward a scientific understanding of what is considered Ancient Eastern Mysticism.
In the mid-nineties, Konstantin Korotkov, Professor of Computer Science and Biophysics at Saint-Petersburg Federal University of Informational Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, developed a scientific device based on the ancient Chinese system of energy meridians. It’s for measuring the bio-energy of living organisms, as well as the environment. The device provides a painless evaluation that can highlight potential health (physiological and psycho-emotional) abnormalities, it’s called the GDV. (1)
It does this by using a completely painless electrical current applied to the fingertips, which takes less than one millisecond. How the body responds is measured in the form of an “electron cloud” that’s composed of light energy photons. The glow of this discharge is invisible to the human eye, (humans can only see one percent of the entire electromagnetic spectrum) and is captured by an optical CCD camera system and then translated into a digital computer. For more information on this device, please examine references (2),(1) and (3).
In the GDV software programs, the glow from the different sectors of the finger images is projected onto the shape of a human body in correspondence with the location of the different organs and systems. As a result, energy field images are produced that allow for intuitive analysis of the physiological level of human body functioning.It has been approved and received registration as a routine medical diagnostic device by the Russian Ministry of Health upon recommendation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
According to eastern metaphysical theories of Ayurvedic Indian medicine, there are seven “Chakras” or integrated energy centers that are considered to be correlated with physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well being. These energy Chakras are positioned or embedded into the spinal column at various locations beginning with the coccyx, rising all the way to the crown of the head.“Each Chakra is considered to resonate at a different frequency level. With new BioWell software, it is now possible to quantitatively estimate the energy of Chakras and graphically display their level of activation, and indicate whether this level of activation is above or below the level found from large numbers of subjects.” Dr. Pradeep B. Deshpande (1)
Below are the results from a case study done by Dr. Pradeep B. Deshpande, a professor emeritus at the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Louisville, which had over 100 participants in attendance. Please keep in mind that clinical studies of more than 10,000 patient cases with various health challenges have also been well documented in Russia. (1)

The aligned Chakras indicate that the subject was calm, relaxed and nourished from their participation in the case study, which involved information on meditation, breathing practices, love, kindness and intention. You can also observe a smoothing of the energy field before and after the case study work shop. Results like this were consistent with a number of volunteers.
“Each individual sector or portion of the fingertip is connected energetically with specific organs and organ systems such as the respiratory system. When the data of the 10 individual BIO-grams are collated and interpolated, an image of the entire full body energy field is created. An example of the full body energy field from both a healthy and unhealthy/emotionally unbalanced individual are shown below. The gaps, reduced emissions and out of balance Chakras for the unhealthy individual are quite obvious.” Dr. Pradeep B. Deshpande (1)
In this case, a healthy and balanced emotional state is correlated with truthfulness, honesty, steadfastness, equanimity, unconditional love, compassion, gratitude, the ability to discern truth from falsehood, spontaneous affection, and the capacity to remain calm despite what’s occurring in the external world. An unhealthy and emotionally unbalanced state is correlated with attachment, ego, greed, lying, fear, anger, irritation, sorrow and more.This is another example of how consciousness is directly correlated with our physical material world, with regards to health and much more.
Click here to view 10 other scientific studies that prove consciousness can alter our physical material world.I find it intriguing how our world deems the realm of science as absolute truth, yet phenomenon deemed to be 100 percent truth seems to need scientific validation behind it. Although I disagree with this notion, the scientific studies now emerging that prove these intuitive ‘knowings,’ still hold great importance, and can help open the minds of those who look for this type of validation. As we move forward, no doubt we will be moving into an ancient understanding with a modern day scientific twist. Ancient wisdom is returning to humanity, and we must be able to clearly see how acting from a place of peace is vital to transforming our external world. Fighting any type of system we want to change is useless, it’s time to ignore the old and create the new.

Sources:(1) Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research | November 2013 | Vol. 4 | Issue 9 | pp. 977-987 Deshpande, P. B., Madappa, K. P., & Korotkov, K., Can the Excellence of the Internal Be Measured? – A Preliminary Study
(2) Jakovleva E, Korotkov K., Electrophotonic Analysis in Medicine. GDV Bioelectrography research. 2013. 160 p. Amazon.com.
(3) Pehek J. O., Kyler, H. J., and Foust, D.L., Image Modulation in Corona Discharge Photography, Science, Vol. 194, 263-270, October 1976.

 

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The Enigmatic Occultists Series Part I: “The Sleeping Prophet”

The Enigmatic Occultist Series will explore the lives of some of the world’s most interesting early-century occult and new-age philosophers. Their infamy stems from our fascination with the unacquainted world of metaphysics, occultism and new-age doctrines which still maintain their obscurity and prevalence today. Some of them mystifying prophets, others the leaders of controversial theological refutations, this list of gifted seers experienced perilous criticism during a time when most opponents of the status-quo were silenced. Let us now venture into the world of the enigmatic occultists.

Part 1 “The Sleeping Prophet”​

“It is not all of life to live, nor yet all of death to die. For life and death are one, and only those who will consider the experience as one may come to understand or comprehend what peace indeed means.” Edgar Cayce​

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Edgar Cayce in his mid 30s
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There is one man who’s prophetic and predictive talents continue to baffle even the most hard-nosed of skeptics. With his 8[SUP]th[/SUP] grade education he discovered secrets of our past that no historian could have known. He predicted wars, diagnosed and cured illnesses, and saw cataclysmic changes to our planet that only scientists could describe, and the strangest part of all, he did it all in his sleep.For over 40 years of his life, a man named Edgar Cayce had the ability to put himself in a trance and provide individuals with detailed information about virtually anything they asked about the present, the past, or the future. Edgar Cayce is perhaps the most profoundly important clairvoyant of all time, at the very least one of the most gifted psychics of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century. He predicted the details of the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] world war, the death of presidents, the future of medicine and diagnosed illnesses in his sleep.

Over 14 000 of Cayce’s readings were documented by his stenographer, which are now archived at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

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His psychic readings, 14306 of them, are all documented and catalogued at the Association for Research & Enlightenment in Virginia Beach, Virginia. They remain the most massive collection of psychic material collected from a single source.Cayce was very sought after in his lifetime, but always remained humble about his ability. He was a man who was committed to a life of compassion and servitude to others, with a perked interest in healing and health.

A Gift Is Born

Edgar Cayce’s story takes root in 1877 near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a small rural town thriving off of the tobacco industry. Cayce’s family was a typical middle-class, church-going farming family. At a young age, Cayce was surprised to discover that other children’s experience was different from his own. As a boy, Cayce often had visions as he sat in the woods reading the bible. After his grandfather drowned in a nearby pond, Cayce began to report seeing him around the farm. Cayce also was known to have the remarkable ability to memorize entire books by sleeping on them. His most amazing talent, which earned him the title “sleeping prophet,” would surface years later while Cayce was in his early 20′s.
After battling an unrelenting case of laryngitis which overtook his life, Cayce sought out professional help. Cayce had developed a relationship with a local homeopathic physician, Dr. Al Layne, who offered his unique services to the distressed Cayce. Dr. Layne placed Cayce under hypnosis, and what happened next would set his destiny in motion. Under a meditative state, Cayce shocked everyone as he described, in an off kilter but clear tone, all the details about his medical condition and then offered the cure. News about Cayce’s strange hypnotic abilities spread quickly, and soon many people came to see Cayce to receive answers about their illnesses.
People were shocked by the piercing accuracy Cayce possessed when reading a client, and the terminology he was using was so beyond his education that no one could explain how it was all possible. In 1906 Cayce told surgeons how to fix the broken leg of a man named George Dalton by inserting a nail into the break, helping Dalton walk once again even though it was pronounced it would never be possible. It was the first time a nail was used in such a manner.

Reenactment of a typical Cayce reading while under hypnotic trance. His wife took on the role as the person who asked Cayce questions during client readings.

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Years later, Cayce’s wife was told by doctors that she would die due to a severe case of tuberculosis, but after following advice from Cayce she quickly recovered. His fame as a healer began to grow fast. The New York Times raved about Cayce, stating that his terminology would do credit to any professor of nervous anatomy, while in his normal state he was illiterate, especially along the line of medicine, surgery, or pharmacy.
Cayce’s process was simple but strange indeed. He would unbutton his collar and lay down with his hands across his stomach, after which his eyes would flutter and he would be ready to read a client. He would only require their name. Oddly enough, no matter what he would say while under the deep state, he would forget it all once his eyes opened.It didn’t take long for Cayce to start being used by people who wanted to make money off of his predictions, and as this progressed Cayce began to suffer from strange and severe migraine headaches. He likened his pain to the greedy intentions of the people who were using him, and so he packed up and took his family to Alabama where he would return to a normal life and job.

A New Wave of Visions

Cayce and his two sons

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It was only a short while after Cayce and his family had oriented themselves in Alabama when one of his sons suffered a harsh fire injury in which his face and eyes were scorched by ignited lighter fuel. Having no choice, Cayce once again turned to his hypnotic abilities, which helped heal his son’s injuries in no time. He realized once again that he could help people, and decided to reignite his career as a prophet. This time however, he organized his wife to be present during all readings to oversee any questions that were to be asked. Little to his knowing, Cayce was about to envision an entirely new wave of prophecies which would soon coin him as one of the greatest psychics of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century.
It was the 1920′s, Europe was still reeling from the first world war, and across the waters America was enjoying its ascendance to global super power. It was a time of fun, and rapid change. Big corporations were forming, technologies were on the rise, and society was becoming more complex. Cayce was being approached by some of the era’s most infamous minds of the time, such as Thomas Edison, Woodrow Wilson and Nelson Rockefeller.Cayce began to foresee impending images of war, destruction and poverty. It was almost as if he was seeing clear headlines 4 years in advance. In 1925 while under a trance, a client asked about the future of business, when Cayce warned to take his stocks out.

“In the adverse forces that will come then in 1929, care should be taken lest this be taken from the entity,”
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Cayce predicted the great stock market crash of 1929 years before it happened.
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Cayce saw the onset of the stock market crash 4 years before it happened, and in 1931 he foretold the end to the hard times that continued to plague the country.

“In the Spring of 33’, will be the real definite improvements.”

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Cayce also foresaw the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] world war, long before anyone could have predicted it. In 1935 Cayce was giving a reading to a freight agent who wanted to know about affairs of an international nature. Cayce warned there would be an alliance between the Austrians, the Germans and the Japanese.

Cayce foresaw the union of Austria, Germany, and Japan before the 2nd world war broke out.

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“And unless there is interference from the divine, the whole world will be set on fire.”
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In 1935 no one had any idea that this was about to happen. With the League of Nations still in force, another war seemed impossible. Cayce predicted to end to the war as well.

“The new order of peace is to be established in 44’ and 45’.”
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In one of Cayce’s readings, he foretold the assassination of president John F Kennedy.

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Cayce also foresaw social upheavals that would appear long after his death in 1945 such as the fight to end racial segregation. He also spoke about John F Kennedy’s assassination,

“Ye are to have a division in thine own land before there is the second of the presidents that will not live through his office, a mob rule”.
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In April 1945, president Roosevelt died in office, Kennedy’s assassination would follow in 1963 as the civil rights movement raged on.

A Recorded Legacy: Cayce’s Insights Into Philosophy

In the mid-1920s, Cayce hired a secretary name Gladys Davis to record every word of his client sessions. In 1923, Arthur Lammers, a wealthy printer and student of metaphysics, persuaded Cayce to give readings on philosophical subjects. Cayce was told by Lammers that, while in his supposed trance state, he spoke of Lammers’ past lives and of reincarnation, something Lammers believed in. Reincarnation was a popular subject of the day but not an accepted part of Christian doctrine. Because of this, Cayce questioned his stenographer about what he said in his trance state and remained unconvinced. He challenged Lammers’ charge that he had validated astrology and reincarnation.

Gladys Davis, Cayce’s Stenographer
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Cayce’s stenographer recorded the following:

“In this we see the plan of development of those individuals set upon this plane, meaning the ability to enter again into the presence of the Creator and become a full part of that creation.
Insofar as this entity is concerned, this is the third appearance on this plane, and before this one, as the monk. We see glimpses in the life of the entity now as were shown in the monk, in this mode of living. The body is only the vehicle ever of that spirit and soul that waft through all times and ever remain the same.”
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Cayce reported that his conscience bothered him severely over this conflict. His readings of reincarnations were going against his biblical teachings and at one point he wanted to cease his channeling sessions. Once again Cayce lost his voice and in a reading for himself he was informed if Cayce was no longer going to be a channel, his mission in this life was complete. Ultimately his trance voice, the “we” of the readings, dialogued with Cayce and finally persuaded him to continue with these kinds of readings.

Controversy Over Lost Civilizations

Dead Sea Scrolls
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Cayce’s trances took him throughout time and space, revealing information about medicine, health, war, philosophy, and in some cases, helping him re-write history. Although many of his visions foretold of present or future events, there were a slew of recorded sessions where Cayce spoke of secrets of our past that only high-tech instruments could reveal.Long before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Cayce spoke of an ancient sector of Judaism called the Essenes, which historians believed were a group of solely men. Cayce announced that the group was comprised of men, women and even children. People remained skeptical of Cayce’s words, but years after his death in the 1950s, experts uncovered the remains of female skeletons near the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Cayce stated that at one point the Nile River ran across the Sahara and emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. Satellites eventually revealed that this prediction was indeed possible at one time.
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Cayce also suggested that the Nile River once flowed in the opposite direction and emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. Amazingly, in the 1980s satellite images revealed unknown river valleys underneath the driest parts of the Sahara. More research and excavation revealed that the Nile might have indeed flowed through the Sahara desert and into the Atlantic.

One of Cayce’s most controversial topics was the existence of the lost continent of Atlantis, a land mass which Cayce predicted had sunk in a cataclysmic disaster thousands of years ago.
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Probably the most debated theory from Cayce’s reading is his statements about the lost city of Atlantis. According to Cayce, Atlantis was the first great Eden on Earth, pre-dating the more known Eden of the Christian doctrine. He saw it as a giant continent in the middle of the Atlantic, and the beings that inhabited the continent had a deep understanding of life and the universe and were highly advanced in the technological sense. However, the Atlanteans abused their power over nature, and Atlantis disappeared in a cataclysmic disaster 10 000 years agne of Cayce’s predictions also saw the rise of the lost continent in the year 1968. This obviously did not happen, but interestingly that year a series of land masses surfaced in the Bahamas. Skeptics ruled the set of Bimini islands as natural beach rock, yet many still believe it to be a man-made structure.

In 1968, the year that Cayce had predicted Atlantis would begin to arise from the ocean’s depths once again, a peculiar set of rocks located in the Bimini islands surfaced causing many to wonder if there was any correlation to the lost land of Atlantis.

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Cayce also mentioned that the history of Atlantis was written and concealed across the world before its fall. One of these locations was the Yucatan Peninsula, the other underneath the front paw of the Great Sphinx in Egypt. In the early 1990′s, Professor Robert Schoch conducted geological and seismic studies on the Sphinx and discovered a chamber sitting about 25 meters below its paws.

“We were able to model what was underneath the Great Sphinx. We found under the left paw what we think is a chamber. Based on its regularity, it looks like it was human carved… it seems to have something in it, the way it resonated, the way it ringed. It seems to indicate there is something in the chamber.”
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Is it the Atlantean Hall of Records that Cayce spoke of? Unfortunately, no one has explored it further. And as intriguing as they are, so far Cayce’s Atlantis prophecies have come up short with regards to enough evidence or backing.

Foresight Of Cataclysm

It wasn’t just Edgar Cayce who foretold of coming Earth changes. Nostradamus, the Mayans, and many other prophets discuss a cataclysmic time where the Earth will undergo a major physical transformation. Earthquakes, raging oceans, drought and famine have all been foreseen as an imminent destiny for Earth and its inhabitants.Cayce’s predictions for the new millennium are as dire as the predictions of the prophets before him. He discussed the Earth’s rotational axis changing, which would have unimaginable repercussions. Some of Cayce’s visions imagined Japan being engulfed by the ocean, as well as the south eastern United States being overtaken by water.

Cayce also talked about the east coast of the U.S. no longer being visible,

“Portions of the now east coast of New York, or New York City itself, will in the main disappear.”
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Cayce, who knew nothing about plate tectonics, said signs within the Earth would warn us of the coming pole shift. He talked about the extreme weather that would escalate over the decades, with hurricanes and volcanoes increasing in numbers.In the past few years we’ve experienced some of the most extreme disasters and weather conditions in recorded history. Could what Cayce predicted already be playing out right in front of us? Or is the timing of these climate events mere coincidence?

The Hidden Ability In All Of Us
In 1945, at the age of 67, Cayce passed away from a stroke in Virginia Beach. Some suggest that it is Cayce’s method, not his abilities, that will have the most far reaching effect on our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In fact, Cayce suggests that with enough practice, anyone can do what he did.

“I do not believe that there is a single individual that does not possess the same ability that I have. If they would only be willing to pay the price of detachment from self-interest that it takes to develop those abilities.”
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Cayce said that when under trance, he was tapping into a collective consciousness of knowledge that we all have the ability to access. Perhaps this helps to explain the paranormal abilities of other psychics, channelers and clairvoyants. He stated that from the highest dimension, there is no time and space, no future or past, all is occurring in one fascinating moment of expression, and that time is an illusion that has a purpose.

Cayce passed away in 1945, yet his legacy still lives on.
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Cayce also advocated that the future is malleable – we have the ability to change our planet’s timeline. The prophecies of cataclysm serve to teach us to step back and truly analyse our relationship with the planet, our relationship with nature, and perhaps more importantly our relationship with each other.References:
1.) http://www.edgarcayce.org/are/edgarcayce.aspx
2.) Thurston, Mark A.. The Essential Edgar Cayce. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2004.

 

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The Enigmatic Occultists Series Part II: “The Secret Doctrine Of Madame Blavatsky”

Part II“The Secret Doctrine Of Madame Blavatsky”

She was altruistic and destined to attract the attention of the world. Considered a genius by the people of her time, nobody before her had the audacity to try a global reinterpretation of spirituality in the way that she did. On the other hand, there were those who saw her as a fraud and advocated that her only real talent was that she knew how to tell an enticing tale. She was a talented conversationalist who attracted people wherever she went. Given her life-long interest in the metaphysical and spiritual, it’s perhaps surprising to discover that she had an effect on the world in ways that most could hardly imagine. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, more commonly known as Madame Blavatsky, was a larger than life woman, and few would contest her rights to be called the “mother of the new age.”

A Woman Against Convention

Eastern philosophies had not yet become rooted in Western society in the 1800s.

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It was the late 1800’s, and the majority of Europe saw the ideologies of the East as superstitious, and that followers of such dogmas were gullible members of less superior races. Blavatsky would make it common to see Eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, as important sacred teachings, and as some might consider, superior to those of the Christian West.Few in the Toronto of the 19[SUP]th[/SUP] century would have ever heard of Yoga, let alone practised it. Today, in almost any city, you can choose between dozens of flavours of the spiritual and physical practice out of India. Whether you prefer it stripped of its religious implications, or in a more traditional form, you can buy your specialized Yoga clothes and gear and none of your friends would blink an eye. It’s not just Yoga that has become assimilated into Western life, it’s everything from crystals to religious icons, to books on esoteric secrets of the East and West. Not that long ago, these concepts would have seemed very odd to us indeed.

Blavatsky was one of the first to try and establish a global spirituality

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The most important thing about Madame Blavatsky’s work was her synthesis of a global spirituality that aimed to explain all religions to help make sense out of our place and expression within the universe. It is something that is almost standard today among gurus of sorts, but she was one of the first people to take on the entire gambit of explaining human spirituality, embodying what she had learned in a path that transcended and incorporated all of them.

“There is a road, steep and thorny, beset with perils of every kind, and it leads to the heart of the Universe, I can show you where to find those who will show the secret gateway, that leads inward only. For those who win onwards there is reward past all telling, the power to bless and save humanity, for those who fail, there are other lives in which success can come.” Madame Blavatsky,The Theosophical Society​

Helena’s mother in her younger years.

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She began life as Helena Petrovna von Hahn, born in 1831 in what is today the Ukraine.
She came from a fairly prominent family – her father was a military officer who traveled frequently, and who often took his family with him across the expanding Russian empire. Her mother was one of Russia’s most respected writers, touching upon subjects such as women’s circumstances in society. Blavatsky showed tenancy towards what we would call psychic phenomena, and was a rather impetuous child who in her adolescence was exposed to Russian occultism in the form of Freemasonry and Rosacrucianism because of her grandfather’s collection of texts which she had said she had devoured every one of.

Because of her father’s job in the Russian military, Blavatsky traveled often as a child.

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Blavatsky had a taste for the exotic because of her cosmopolitan family life. As a child, she portrayed sometimes unusual behaviour, having disturbing visions, speaking to beings, and told great tales in which she was the heroine. The stories were so vivid that her sister was sure she actually had these experiences, perhaps in a previous incarnation, though her family was often concerned about her future.

The Quest For The Ultimate Dogma

Blavatsky embarked on her world travels at the age of 17, which saw her in fantastic tales of war and survival, at least according to Blavatsky.

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Around the age of 17, Blavatsky married an older man of whom she quickly realised she had nothing in common with, and it wasn’t long until she decided to leave him. This marked Blavatsky’s documented spiritual quest of knowledge and divinity that continued for an estimated length of 20 years. The question of who, what and where is God, and what is the immortal spirit were questions that had always troubled her. And so, she used this yearning to pursue the mysteries of the truth. At the time, Blavatsky would have been one of the very few women who traveled alone, and her behaviour was definitely outside the norm for a woman who wasn’t royalty.

There is not much said about what she was doing during this time, except that she traveled to areas where esoteric knowledge was prominent. She traveled to India and North and South America, investigating traditions of various cultures and indigenous people. The reason for the lack of understanding of exactly what Blavatsky was doing during her travels comes from the conflicting stories told from her own perspective and those told from others.
One of stories involved her taking part in a military battle in Italy where she was left for dead. Another had Blavatsky alongside a political radical and Hungarian opera singer who involved Blavatsky in the struggle against the Catholic domination of Italy. Blavatsky stated they were both on a cargo ship that was transporting gun powder which ended up exploding and sinking off the coast of Greece. Most ended up dying, although Blavatsky survived. Unfortunately she was left with nothing, and at the age of 40 she migrated to Cairo to start a new life.

 

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Blavatsky discovered the paranormal community in Cairo, where she would become known to host infamous seances.

To make money, Blavatsky connected with the community in Cairo who were into the paranormal and hosted séances in which she practised mediumship -the ability to communicate with spirits. Her understanding of the process was different than traditional mediums, but she explored the world intently and fascinatingly to many, produced manifestations. She was said to have the ability to slow down time, make things disappear, and whether or not they were tricks, many would believe they were real.

A Paranormal Attraction In America

Blavatsky arrived in New York in 1873; it was a time when the fascination with the occult was at its prime.

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In 1873, Madame Blavatsky continued her spiritual journey, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the shores of America and joining the hundreds of thousands who were told of the better land. At that time, spiritualism was a very exciting topic – people with psychic abilities were touring on the Vaudeville Circuit, and spectators were lined up to see their performances. Blavatsky thought this may be somewhere she could fit in, and she did.

People lined up to see metaphysical and paranormal performances in America during the late 1800s.

Henry Olcott, a journalist and lawyer of New York, became infatuated with Blavatsky after their meeting at a haunted estate.

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One day Blavatsky was looking in the paper, and saw a story from a man named Henry Olcott, a respected journalist/ lawyer of New York society, one of the selected few who was appointed investigator of the Lincoln assassination. He also shared an interest in the paranormal, and found himself examining a case which reported a series of spirit manifestations that were occurring at a farmhouse in Vermont. He wrote about his experiences in the local paper. The farmhouse was owned by two mediums who would host payed visits from people that were intrigued by the idea of physical manifestations. Blavatsky was also intrigued by these occurrences, longing to continue her spiritual quest of knowledge.

Blavatsky traveled to the farmhouse and eventually met Olcott, who became completely fascinated by her peculiar attractiveness. Not only was he interested in Blavatsky, but the manifestations which he experienced with her convinced him that she was extraordinary. According to Blavatsky, the spirits they encountered during their séances were numerous, and many were even familiar to her.“There was a Georgian boy, dressed in historical Caucasian attire, I recognized and questioned him upon circumstances known only to myself, I was understood and answered.”

Their friendship solidified and the two returned to New York. Soon after their arrival they moved in together, not as a couple, but more as kindred spirits, an unusual decision for most in their time. They were both comrades and professional colleagues, and Blavatsky truly earned her title as spiritual teacher after her union with Olcott. They became the forerunners in New York spiritualism.

“It is my duty to expose what [spiritualism] is and what it is not…. and I’m afraid it is so, for people seem to care everyday less for truth, and every hour more for gold.” Helena Blavatsky.
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Olcott and Blavatsky became professional colleagues of occult phenomena.
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[Skarekrow]

They would host social gatherings at their home in New York, and she would tell grandeur stories showcasing her collections from India and elsewhere, becoming very well known among the elite and the intellectuals.

Communicating With “The Masters” & The Formation Of The Theosophical Society

“Isis Unveiled” became Blavatsky’s first published work, and brought with it controversy.

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Blavatsky soon became a book author in her own right, slowly beginning to write Isis Unveiled. It was her first piece of work, which offered an insight into Eastern and Western philosophy.

Olcott helped Blavatsky write her books, but there was something strange about the process which Olcott quickly caught onto. According to Blavatsky, during the writing process there were beings that were helping her, beings that were apparently a part of a brotherhood of enlightened spirits. Strangely enough, Olcott reported hands appearing in the night and writing while Blavatsky was sleeping. The composition of Isis Unveiled was only the first case of the authorship being elusive, as both she and Olcott remained consistent in their account of other beings helping them write behind the scenes.
Isis Unveiled explored all conceivable subjects of importance in areas of religion, philosophy, and science, written with inherently trusted knowledge. Many were perplexed of how someone could write with skill in such a way. According to Blavatsky, she communicated with two Tibetan ascended masters who disseminated information they wished to reveal to the world at the time. It was said that these spirits believed they could do more for the world communicating in an energetic form. They were a part of a brotherhood of ascended souls here to help.
These reported masters who Blavatsky was speaking with revealed to her that they possessed answers to scientific, philosophical and spiritual questions which mankind needed to know, knowledge of what we really are and where we came from. These masters were said to represent the “hidden hand theory,” that is a group of beings who are controlling things; they stem from all over the world and are said to be controlling the progress of the planet while spreading wisdom.

While living in New York, many guests visited Blavatsky’s quarters and were entertained by her stories. They were also touched by something profoundly important in her words, the fascination with the occult. Olcott and Blavatsky began to formulate the idea of a club, or society, which would study the occult phenomenon further. The Theosophical Society was formed in 1875, and still exists today with branches all over the world. The original objective of the society was very simple, “To collect and diffuse the knowledge and the laws of the Universe.”

“Once a student abandons the old taught highway of routine and enters into the solitary path of independent thought, god word is a theosophist, an original thinker after the eternal truth with the inspiration of his own and the universal problems.” Blavatsky, The Theosophical Society

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According to Blavatsky, Theosophy, or “divine wisdom”, refers to the ultimate truth of the supreme, the cosmos and humanity. It is a truth that has existed since the dawn of time.

“Theosophy is in some way a connection between the world, and the divine. And what it is in the world reflects the divine and is the divine. So the idea is a unified teaching in which everything literally is god.” Professor James Santucci, CSU Fullerton, Dept. of Comparative Religion.”

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There has been some question on how the masters communicated with Blavatsky from their relative homes across the world. Along with Olcott, many of Blavatsky’s followers claimed to see these masters as well. Some explained this as examples of astral projection,

“It seems to me that if you put this together with the notion of the masters, it could very well be that the masters were perceived to be human beings who projected themselves out of the body, and that was the reason why they could go anywhere in the entire world to communicate with individuals” Prof. James Santucci.

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A New Chapter For Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine

Isis Unveiled was released in 1877 with mixed reviews. The New York Herald called it “one of the most remarkable productions of the century,” while The Sun called it “discarded rubbish.” Reviews aside, Blavatsky was pleased her message was reaching a wider audience. Eventually the decision was made to spread the message of Theosophy further. Remaining in New York until 1878, Olcott and Blavatsky soon set sail to India, the land of the sacred wisdom.
They were received with open arms by the native populous as the two were respected as traveling to investigate Eastern religion, as opposed to trying to convert people to Christianity, the usual at the time. The British had ruled India since 1838, and many Indians believed their culture to be in danger. Olcott was interested in reviving Buddhism in the East, and to a large extent Olcott was successful. They ended up purchasing a property in Madras, and that became the future head-quarters of the Theosophical Society.

Blavatsky and Olcott migrated to the East with a mission of restoring Buddhist philosophy and establishing a new headquarters for the Theosophical Society

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As word spread of Blavatsky and Olcott’s work, they attracted the attention of a well-known scientific group at the time, The Society For Psychical Research (SFPR), a British group which was the closest thing at the time to scientists who were interested in exploring the paranormal. They were a very respectable group, and decided to investigate the Theosophical Society.

This group sent someone to India who snooped around for months, speaking to anyone he could find. He eventually issued a report (which many were concerned about due to a lack of understanding and experience) that stated there were no “masters” and that it was all fraudulent. This report forever condemned Blavatsky as one of the most ingenious imposters of the century. As a result of this upheaval, Blavatsky and Olcott turned against each other, blaming one another for the sensationalism that was destroying the Theosophical name.
It wasn’t long until the two founders of the society parted ways.At the time, the report made by the SFPR was a scandal for the Theosophical Society. Ironically, it wasn’t until 100 years later that the SFPR retracted the report, claiming that it was deeply flawed, and that there were still many questions that were unanswered about Madame Blavatsky. The damage was done, however, and in 1885 Blavatsky left India with a heavy heart and eventually settled down in London, England.

“My heart is broken physically and morally, for the first I do not care, Masters shall take care so long as I do not burst. In the second case there is no help, I was ready to shed the last drop of life in me and give up every hope for the last shred of, I shall not say happiness, but rest and comfort in this life of torture, for the cause I serve, and every true Theosophist.” Madame Blavatsky

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“The Secret Doctrine” included two official volumes, written and published by Blavatsky.

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Fortunately, there was still a large group of people who were interested in Blavatsky’s teachings, and her lodge in London served as a gathering ground for a large variety of people who were infatuated with the occult and metaphysical. In the last two years of her life Blavatsky drew the attention of a well-known British woman named Annie Besant, a feminist, union organizer and writer – a person who was enormously admired in British society. Getting the approval of Annie Besant brought Blavatsky an enormous number of new converts, and much better press than she had before. Before Blavatsky’s passing, she left the Theosophical Society to Besant, and with that achieved the ultimate respectability.

Blavatsky’s sincerity increased over the last few years of her life, and she learned from her mistakes, becoming a more careful and responsible writer compared to her previous years of propaganda and controversy. During this time in her life she wrote The Secret Doctrine, a synthesis of science/religion/philosophy, which came to be her magnum opus. The book covered cosmic, planetary and human evolution as well as science, religion and mythology.
Critics to this day scorn the text as not having valid sourcing, however Blavatsky did try to give proper citations and was adhering to the standards of the day as best as she was able to. The Secret Doctrine never deliberately discussed religious or philosophical teachings out of context; Blavatsky wanted to be taken seriously as a prominent figure participating in the intellectual debates of her time.
Interestingly, National Geographic’s documentary Hitler and the Occult explored the occult influences of Nazi philosophy, and revealed that Hitler considered Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine a masterpiece, so much that he kept a personal copy at his bedside. Opponents of Blavatsky’s work condemn her for any involvement in influencing Hitler’s notion of racial purity, a subject touched upon in The Secret Doctrine. However it couldn’t have influenced Hitler’s racial beliefs very thoroughly; Hitler believed that the New Man would emerge out of Germany and that this emergence would be owing to his racial purity while Blavatsky claimed that the amalgamation of nationalities and interbreading taking place in America would result in the formation of the next root race, a mistaken correlation.

Theosophical knowledge discusses the existence of 7 root races, 5 of which have already inhabited the planet.

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The Secret Doctrine (TSD) touched upon many controversial subjects, including the origins of the human race, Atlantis and Lemuria. Atlantis, in the Theosophical cosmology, was a continent that covered a significant part of what is now the Atlantic Ocean and, similar to most accounts of the lost continent, vanished after a cataclysmic event caused it to sink. Blavatsky wrote that the disaster was caused by the tilting of the Earth’s axis. TSD also discussed the idea that the Earth would only ever have 7 races of beings that would inhabit it. Apparently, we are the transition between the 5th and 6th root races, and before us there were 4 different inhabitants of the Earth.
The first being an ethereal amoeba which existed when the Earth was still cooling.
The second root race was a golden colored race called Kimpurshas, who lived in the Hyperboria region and reproduced by budding.
The third race was the Lemurians, who inhabited a large mass of land in the Indian Ocean and South Pacific during the same time as the dinosaurs. Their island also ended up sinking due to massive volcanic eruptions.
The fourth race was the Atlanteans, who inhabited the infamous lost continent of Atlantis starting about one million years ago.
This race thrived for about one million years until they became tainted by materialism, after which their continent sank in the Atlantic Ocean.
The 5th race are the Aryans, descendants of the surviving Atlanteans.
The 6th race are said be born in the 21st century, a race with heightened psychic and cognitive abilities.
The 7th and final race would be born in the 28th century, inhabiting a new land mass in the Pacific Ocean.
Although only speculative, the Theosophical theory of evolution can be connected to many other new age and historical theories and makes it a fascinating idea to consider nonetheless.

Legacy Of A Spiritual Traveler
In May of 1891, Blavatsky died due to a severe case of influenza at the age of 59.Her death would make it across the front page of every major newspaper of the time. Most knew of or had heard of Blavatsky at some point during that time – her passing was a subject of international discourse.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky; controversial, extraordinary, larger than life, harbinger of the new age. Whether a fraud or a messenger of secret wisdom, she has touched our world and lives in ways we may not even realize. Many Theosophists admire Blavatsky’s contributions, but they are also quick to note that they are not followers of Blavatsky, but rather seekers of divine wisdom, the objective of all Theosophists. She was known for her respect to Eastern philosophies, and bringing this wisdom to the West. The very fact that she compared any two religions can be considered one of the main reasons we study comparative religion and philosophy today. Her vision of a global spirituality can serve to inspire us all.

“A mystic force is rising, it is but the first rustling, but it is a super human rustling. It is supernatural only for the superstitious and the ignorant. The spirit of truth is passing now over the face of dark waters, and in parting them is compelling them to reveal their spiritual treasures, and this spirit is a force that cannot be hindered and can never, never, be stopped.” Madame Blavatsky.​

References:
1.) http://www.blavatsky.net/
2.) http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/sd/sd-hp.htm
3.) Cranston, S.L.. HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement. New York: Putnam, 1993. Print
4.) Fields, Rick. How The Swans Came To The Lake. A Narrative History of Buddhism in America, Shambhala, 1992.

 

[Skarekrow]

Carl Sagan’s Two Warnings For Humanity In His Very Last Interview – You Might Want To Hear This.


[video=youtube;jod7v-m573k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=jod7v-m573k[/video]


Carl Sagan was an astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, skeptic and critical thinker. He was the Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the American space program and was a consultant and adviser to NASA since the late 1950′s. He was also responsible for briefing the Apollo astronauts before their flights to the Moon. Many of you might know him from some of his bestselling books, like Cosmos, which was in fact the bestselling science book ever published in the English language.Sagan was responsible for assisting humanity in their knowledge of concepts that are outside of the box, these include multiple dimensions, quantum physics, wormholes, and a wide variety of ideas and concepts about space, science, technology and more. He did so with a great amount of enthusiasm, cheer, and an uplifting type of energy. In his very last interview he left us with words that might give you goosebumps,he issued two warnings to the human race.

His first concern was with regards to science and technology.
Sagan expressed great concern that “if the general public doesn’t understand science and technology, then who is making all of the decisions about science and technology that are going to determine what kind of future our children live in, some members of congress? There are only a handful who have any background in science at all, and some of them don’t even want to know about it.” – Carl Sagan
I love this point, and it holds true. A large majority of our planet, I would say 99 percent of it does not have any idea about who is making all of the decisions regarding science and technology. Sure, we have mainstream science and technology, but the fact remains that a large portion of the world’s science and technology remains classified, and is overseen by the Department of Defense. Not many people know this, and it partially answers Carl’s concerns about the population not knowing about who is making all of the decisions regarding science and technology.
It’s 2013 and a lot has happened since the death of Carl Sagan, one thing in particular that relates are the recent leaks by NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden about the black budget. This is a budget that garnishes trillions and trillions of dollars every year that goes towards projects that the human race knows nothing about, including science and technology. It’s safe to assume that the black budget deals with technology that is vastly superior to that of the “mainstream” world. The ability to explore areas of our world and surroundings presently unavailable to the rest of us is also a high likelihood. Scientific and cosmological understandings that give greater insights into the nature of our world are most definitely already around.
These programs have no oversight from congress, and not too many people have any idea about what is really going on here. How can we know about science and technology when a large portion of it remains classified?

“We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it.” – Carl Sagan
Sagan’s second warning for humanity was that science is more than a body of knowledge, that it is a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe. He expressed that if we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we as a human race are up for grabs. This is a great point, and a great reminder to always question what you are told. 17 years ago, when Sagan was alive, the human race did not ask as many questions as they are asking now.
Questioning leads to answers, and threaten the control structure. Thankfully there are now more and more who are seeking the answers.

We knew the Earth was flat, we knew that we were the centre of the universe, we knew that a man-made piece of machinery could not [fly]. Throughout human history, intellectual authorities have pronounced their supremacy by ridiculing or surpressing elements of reality that simply didn’t fit within the framework of accepted knowledge - Terje Toftenes

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“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” – Carl Sagan

We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity…. Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do.- Ben Rich. – Former Director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works

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He was very concerned about the government controlling the people. Sagan was well ahead of his time, and his concerns 17 years ago are clearly felt by more people today. It’s important to remember if we want change, we have to do it from a place of love and cooperation.


(Personal note on my thread - - Although Sagan dismissed the idea of the paranormal existing, I still agree with just about everything the man says...one could argue that there really isn’t anything metaphysical or paranormal anyhow, just phenomena that science has yet to explain...I believe this was more what he meant than having an out and out disbelief. What he did disagree with were organizations and people dismissing science because it conflicted with the beliefs of their religion for example. We see this over and over again even today when it comes to subjects like evolution, carbon dating, etc.) - Skarekrow

 

[Skarekrow]

A video on what the “self” is....very well done.


[video=youtube;zGv1Nay2z-U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=zGv1Nay2z-U[/video]

 

[Solongo]

I believe this site is relevant to this thread:

http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/