Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
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I don't there's a single person who couldn't say the same. I know there are days when I just think "N. stop acting like such a bitch."
Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
I don't there's a single person who couldn't say the same. I know there are days when I just think "N. stop acting like such a bitch."
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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Hahahahahaha.....
muir
Banned
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Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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Are Poltergeists Real? British Researcher Says Yes
In a 1995 book titled Bizarre Beliefs, the authors emphatically stated that “there are no ghosts, no poltergeists, and no hauntings. They are all mistaken, imaginary or fakes.” Much of mainstream science shares this view, but Guy Lyon Playfair, a British journalist, author, and psychical researcher, knows better, as he has been involved in investigating a number of poltergeists, including the Enfield Poltergeist, one of the most intriguing cases in the annals of psychical research. He will agree with the “bizarre” part, but definitely not with the denial of such phenomena.
“Some take the easy way out of the dilemma and simply put their heads back in the sand,” Playfair writes in his book, This House is Haunted, which is about the Enfield Poltergeist, first published in 1980 and recently updated and republished by White Crow Books.
The Enfield case took place during 1977 and ’78 in the northern London suburb of Enfield. It involved a divorced mother, Peggy Harper, and her four children, Rose, 13, Janet, 11, Pete, 10, and Jimmy, 7. The phenomena included large pieces of furniture being overturned, objects flying through the air and floating through walls, dancing slippers, levitations, coins falling from the ceiling, strange voices that often responded to questions, people thrown from their beds and chairs, mysterious writing on the walls, electronic disturbances, a number of ghostly apparitions, stones seemingly falling from the sky, excreta appearing in the sink and on walls, inexplicable outbreaks of fire, and mysterious knocks and footsteps.
As a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Playfair, a Cambridge graduate who spent many years as a freelance journalist for The Economist, Time, and the Associated Press, was, along with fellow SPR member Maurice Grosse, asked to investigate the anomalous activity at the Harper home. Beginning in September 1977, the two researchers devoted some 14 months to investigating the case, often spending nights at the Harpers’ home and observing first hand some of the bizarre phenomena, which gradually declined and ended in early 1979.
I recently had the opportunity to put some questions to Playfair by e-mail. Here is our exchange, with apologies to Playfair for converting the King’s English to the more crude American English.
Guy, your book gives a lot of detail relating to your observations in Enfield, but I am wondering if there is one thing among the many things you experienced and witnessed that stands out more than the others.
“Yes, indeed — what we call the passage of matter through matter, or if you prefer de- and rematerialization. I’ve observed this directly (on another case) and several times indirectly at Enfield — the book that turned up in the house next door and the cushion that appeared on the roof in full view of a tradesman who was walking towards the house, to name just two of the best witnessed incidents. This is a real challenge to science, and pretending the evidence isn’t there is not the way science advances. I don’t just believe it happens, I know it does. I’ve seen it happen. It never seems to be discussed sensibly and it’s time it was. The scientific community has just ignored it.”
As you point out in the book, the two leading theories concerning poltergeists are that they are spirits of the dead or dissociated fragments of the personality of someone living in the home, in this case Janet, the 11-year-old. You concluded that the truth is probably a combination of the two. Would you mind elaborating on that a little?
“I’m a writer with a journalistic background, not a scientific one, so I concentrate on reporting the evidence as accurately as I can and leave the theorizing to the scientists. I definitely think there has to be what we might call a discarnate component. I mean — how can a dissociated fragment of a living person make a book go through a wall? There has to be another level of reality and another dimension of space involved. That’s what makes people uncomfortable and go to the lengths that they do to deny the evidence. (I like making scientists uncomfortable).”
I was most intrigued by the voice or voices. You describe them as being loud and guttural, nothing like Janet’s normal voice. Ventriloquism was considered and ruled out. Although different entities communicated, did they all sound the same?
“Yes, they were intriguing. The speech therapist we brought in was totally freaked out. We established that Janet was using her false vocal folds (plica ventricularis), which you can’t normally use for long without doing damage to your vocal cords.
That’s just one of the things we discovered that should be of scientific interest and it’s a pity the so-called expert wasn’t interested. She just wanted to get out of the house. She might have written an interesting journal paper, but no doubt was scared of losing her job if she had.
“The voices did vary, yes. Some were very convincing, giving the impression of a confused earthbound entity, and saying things that proved to be true although nobody in the family knew it at the time, such as the bit about going blind and dying in the armchair downstairs, as the previous owner did. That was only verified years after the case ended. How would Janet have known that? But yes, some of the Voices did seem to be coming from bits of her unconscious. This deep voice coming from a young girl phenomenon is well known. Oesterreich’s ‘Possession Demoniacal and Other’ gives several examples from the 19th century. It does take time for science to catch up with real life.”
So much of this sounds like the Fox sisters of early Spiritualism history — knocks and raps, a man who had died in the house communicating, and then the newspapers offering bribes for a confession from the girls. Why do you think the newspapers and so many of your research colleagues would prefer the fraud explanation?
“Yes, there were similarities, and I’m sure the family had never heard of the Fox sisters. They had never even heard of the word poltergeist. Janet called it the ‘polka dice’. As for fraud, it’s quite right to be suspicious. The girls did play some tricks later on, we knew that at the time and they knew we knew. It was no big deal. And as they have repeatedly admitted, we always caught them. The tricks were a sign that things were getting back to normal. But if you go for a fraud explanation, you have to account for every single one of the hundreds of incidents we witnessed, and no critic has attempted to do that. Easier to mutter something vague about ‘later, the girls confessed…’ as if that explained away the whole case. I often wonder just how much evidence you need to change people’s minds.”
You mentioned that just last year there was a breakthrough in poltergeist research, at least to the extent that the rapping sounds made by poltergeists are not the same as normal raps. Would you explain a little more about that research?
“Yes. This is very important, and it’s rather a sad story. I’ll try to keep it short. In 1973, on a poltergeist case in São Paulo (Brazil), I managed to record some very loud bangs on the floor that weren’t made by anybody living. Then my colleague Suzuko Hashizume and I decided to do some banging ourselves for comparison. I’d hoped that somebody could study the sounds and see if ours were in any way different from those made by the Thing. We never managed to do this, and we didn’t know that several other people had recorded poltergeist raps including the BBC.
In 2009 a colleague from the Society for Psychical Research named Barrie Colvin decided to look into the matter, and I helped him compile a collection of about 12 tapes from different cases. He ran them through his oscilloscope and saw at once that the poltergeist raps were quite unlike normal ones. You can find the details in the Journal of the SPR for April 2010. That was the good news.
The bad news is that we sent out a press release to about 35 papers, magazines, radio and TV programs hoping that they would be interested in our instrumentally recorded and easily repeated hard evidence for an unexplained effect.
They weren’t. Only two mentioned Barrie’s work, and they were the two where I had a personal contact. Many of them devoted whole pages to a book by Richard Wiseman that came out a few months later and rubbished the whole psi research scene. That’s what I’ve come to expect from the media today, although back in 1977-78 we had massive coverage of the Enfield case, mostly very positive. But that was before the professional wreckers moved in.”
In 2010 there was a major breakthrough in poltergeist research when Dr Barrie Colvin published the results of his study of tape recordings from a dozen cases in five countries in which rapping sounds presumed to be of poltergeist origin were recorded on tape. Comparing these with raps made by normal means, he found that the acoustic signatures were quite different, as can be seen in the above charts of raps recorded at Enfield.
The bottom chart shows what three raps made by Playfair on the living room ceiling look like. The top chart shows the signature of a rap from the bedroom above, recorded on the same tape shortly afterwards. In all of the normal raps Colvin studied when he tapped wineglasses, struck piano keys, or made any other kind of percussive sound, the signature began at full amplitude and rapidly declined. All of the poltergeist raps he examined, without exception, did not, and reminded experts of signatures recorded during earthquakes. This discrepancy awaits explanation. Colvin’s findings were published in the April 2010 issue of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and are reproduced here with his permission.
You wrote that it was becoming apparent to you at some point in your investigation that paranormal events only take place in the presence of people who believe them to be possible. Why do you think that is?
“I have no idea, but it’s something I keep noticing. Parapsychologists like to talk about the ‘experimenter effect’ which I am sure is much stronger than they think. All the really successful experimenters I know began their careers not just believing in the possibility of psi (telepathy, etc.) but knowing it from their own or their parents’ experience. Maurice Grosse had considerable experience of anomalous phenomena before he went to Enfield, as I also had from my time in Brazil.”
I gather that you have investigated other poltergeist cases, especially in Brazil. Were they similar to the Enfield case?
“No two cases are identical, but there does seem to be a poltergeist syndrome with about 15-20 common symptoms. You don’t get all the same symptoms on all cases but the symptoms themselves don’t vary much from case to case. You do get national variations — Brazilian poltergeists are far more violent and destructive than ours. Nearly all the cases I was involved in there showed signs of black magic at work, which British poltergeists don’t as a rule.”
Do you really think that science will someday have a better answer for us as to what poltergeists really are?
“Not if scientists continue to ignore the evidence, as they did when Barrie Colvin published his findings, and when I published mine thirty years earlier. In fact there is more than a thousand years of it. You may have gathered by now that I’m not very impressed by scientists.”
And what do you feel about the case now, more than 30 years later?
“Huge gratitude to Peggy H. for letting me invade her home for more than a year, and equally huge admiration for her immense resilience at a time of prolonged and severe stress that would have left many weaker women in hospital with nervous breakdowns, and equally grateful to Maurice Grosse for the way he managed to combine the roles of investigator, counsellor and friend of the family. Both are sadly missed. Dsillusion with the scientific establishment for refusing even to examine instrumentally recorded and properly documented evidence for anomalous events, of which there is plenty from Enfield. The Greeks, of course, had a word for it - Misoneism (hatred of new ideas).”
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
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An interesting take on Christianity…a short except from the book -
[TD="align: center"] Natural and Supernatural: The New Testament [/TD]
[TD="align: left"] The Christian Church had grown from shamanist roots; and as described by the gospel writers, Jesus is the most accomplished diviner-magician of them all. His destiny has been marked out for him in Joseph’s precognitive dream even before he was born; his birth is heralded by many signs and wonders, notably the star in the east which the Magi - themselves shamans - correctly interpret; and his baptism represents a recognition of his vocation, prompting him to undergo the traditional apprenticeship of self-denial - forty days and forty nights in the wilderness wrestling with the temptations of the flesh for fear that they would impede his spiritual development.
After subduing sensual lusts, however, Jesus is subjected to another form of temptation. Spiritual rebirth, he finds, has endowed him with psychic powers. Having the ability to convert a stone into bread, or to translocate himself to the top of a mountain or the pinnacle of the temple, he is tempted to use them for self-satisfaction, or self-aggrandisement. At first he is hesitant about using them at all. ‘Mine hour is not yet come,’ he tells the importunate woman when drink runs out at the Cana wedding feast; but he allows himself to be persuaded to do the kindly thing, and turn the water into wine. Later he uses his powers with more abandon: calming the sea, walking on the water, feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, and performing countless cures. Only in the region where he has grown up, and where his family still live, is he unsuccessful. In the face of local scepticism, ‘he can do no mighty work’.
Attracted by these powers, Jesus’s disciples had a further inducement to stay with him: the promise of a continued life after death. In Greek mythology some humans had been carried up after death to live on in the abode of the gods; but the Greek gods had been choosy. Jesus offered the prospect of a life after death to anybody, however humble, who followed him. And he clinched this pledge by his resurrection. While he lived supernatural manifestations had continued to testify to his, or his god’s, powers. He had shown precognitive knowledge of his impending arrest and execution, and of episodes connected with it, like Judas’s treachery and Peter’s spinelessness under questioning (‘before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice’); and at the moment of his death the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from top to bottom. But such signs would hardly have sufficed to convince the disciples had Jesus not afterwards appeared in their midst, and demonstrated that he had materialised by eating broiled fish and honey, and allowing Thomas to put his finger into the wound in his side left by the spear.
At this point it has to be stated that for none of these psychic manifestations is there a shred of historical evidence. Not merely were the gospels written half a century or more after the events they recorded; they were written with a deliberate propagandist purpose, to confirm that Jesus really had been the Christ - the Messiah promised by the prophets. They consequently presented him as a miracle worker who had fufilled all the earlier expectations and forecasts. It is, of course, still possible to argue that even if the gospels cannot be accepted as an historical source, they could hardly have been written unless there had been a Jesus with some shamanist powers to create the beliefs; in which case, as the parapsychologist Louis Anspacher urged, he can and ought to be studied as a psychic personality, ‘the most powerful medium and perhaps the greatest psychic sensitive who has ever walked down the aisles of history’.
Due weight has to be given, too, to the experience of the anthropologist M. J. Field, who realised from her field-work in Ghana how similar the New Testament record was to her own experience, suggesting that on a psychic level the disciples were part of ‘an age-old, worldwide pattern persistently exhibited’ - in other words, the New Testament record is not incongruous, anthropologically speaking. Nevertheless there is no way of knowing which, if any, of the supernatural manifestations recorded in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles occurred.
The belief that they had occurred, though, remains of profound historical importance. The effects of Jesus’s resurrection was to confirm disciples in the expectation that they, too, would be resurrected, as he had promised, and thereafter dwell in heaven: lending moral support of a kind that no faith had enjoyed before. Humiliations, torture and even death could be viewed with relative equanimity, granted the prospect of eternal bliss thereafter. On earth, too, disciples were given a reassurance that they were the elect of the Lord.
He had assured them that they would be able to heal the sick, cast out devils, speak with tongues, pick up serpents or drink poison without coming to any harm. And at Pentecost, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it lay upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance.
They were not drunk, Peter explained to the bewildered onlookers. They were fulfilling the words of the prophet that the spirit would pour forth; ‘your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’.
St. Paul Epidemics of psychic hysteria of this kind had been reported before; in their Bacchic frenzies Dionysius’s followers had been given to prophecy. But Pentecost appeared to offer something more; an instantaneous transition from man to shaman. Self-discipline was still required; worldly goods were to be put away, and worldly ambitions, and the lusts of the flesh. But it was no longer necessary to undergo the traditional apprenticeship of self-denial and self-mortification. By materialising on earth, and allowing himself to be crucified, Jesus had redeemed men from the sins of his forefathers, enabling them to become possessed by God through the holy spirit, and to enjoy psychic powers, simply by embracing the faith.
It was the lesson of Pentecost which gave the early Christians their sense of a common identity, and a common purpose; and in the Acts they can be seen flexing their new shamanist muscles. Natural and supernatural elements constantly overlap and interact. Ordered by an angel to go far out of his way into a desert to find and baptise an Ethiopian, Philip the Evangelist is miraculously carried back to the region of Caesarea so that he need waste no time before resuming his mission; and an angel liberates some of the disciples from prison so that they can preach in the temple, to the embarrassment of the prison officers, who find the cells still locked and guarded, but empty.
And the most influential of the new-style shamans emerges: Saul. His conversion is attended by the traditional signs: a great radiance; a voice-‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’; a trance; and the appearance of the Lord in a vision to a disciple, Ananias, telling him to go to the street called Straight in order to welcome Saul (who himself would see what was to happen in a precognitive vision) into the Christian fold. Paul, as he was henceforth known, needed no apprenticeship: he soon found he had psychic powers, worsting a hostile magician in combat by depriving him for a time of his sight, and performing miracles - including, apparently, materialisations (‘from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs, or aprons, and the diseases departed from them’). When Paul and Timothy tried to depart from Bythinia, ‘the spirit suffered them not’; and he was later reluctantly compelled to obey the spirit’s insistence that he must stay on in Corinth, and risk the consequences of stirring up the wrath of the Jews there by testifying in their synagogue.
The Acts, like the gospels, were a propaganda exercise, so that what is related in them of Paul’s early career cannot be relied upon. The Epistles, though, and particularly those to the Corinthians, describe his own experiences, and give his own views, revealing him to be a dedicated spiritist, relying on his daemon. He thought of it not as a spirit, but as the spirit - the holy spirit, revealing the word of God to him. When he went to Jerusalem in the middle of the first century A.D. to tell Jesus’s followers there that they were wrong to insist that converts must submit to the Jewish rite of circumcision, Paul did not argue with them: according to his account in the Epistle to the Galatians he simply told them that he knew they were wrong. ‘I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, nor was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.’
For Paul, then, Christianity was shamanist, relying on inspiration rather than doctrine: ‘if you are led by the spirit you are not under the law’. But thanks to Jesus’s intervention, there was no longer any need to rely on shamans: any Christian could take advantage of the holy spirit’s gifts. To some, Paul explained, the spirit might bring wisdom, or faith; to some, the gift of healing: ‘to another, the working of miracles; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, divers kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretations of tongues’.
Some individuals might even begin to live a spiritual existence: Paul described one of his acquaintances as having so much spirituality that he had attained to the third heaven while still on earth; ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell,’ Paul remarked, ‘God knoweth’. But all such manifestations were to be valued. When somebody received the gift of tongues, what emerged might sound unintelligible, but it could still be meaningful if it were interpreted. Above all, Paul added - anticipating the neo-Platonists - what mattered was the attitude in which the spirit was invoked, and utilised. Its gifts would serve no good purpose unless suffused with love for others; ‘though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have faith, so I could move mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing’. That being understood, Paul felt, it was right to welcome spirit possession; ‘wherefore, brethren, covet to prophesy, and forbid not to speak with tongues’.
Paul’s advice revealed the existence of a problem. Suppose the voices were not endowed with charity? He and Timothy had already suffered as a consequence of the jealousy of rivals, as on the occasion in Thyatira when ‘a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination’ followed them around; her employers, who had been making a lot of money out of her, hauled Paul and Timothy before the magistrates, and they were flogged and imprisoned. Yet what she had been saying was not inherently diabolic; ‘these men are the servants of the most high God, and show unto us the way of salvation’.
It was at this point that a growing conviction began to harden among Christians into a certainty; that there was an anti-Christ - Satan, or the devil - with a contingent of evil spirits capable of masquerading as the holy spirit, and performing the full repertory of miracles. In Greek mythology it had been the gods themselves who had given lying advice to humans, or materialised for their own lascivious purposes; and in the Old Testament, Satan had needed the Lord’s permission to play Job’s tempter. But the notion had grown that Satan and his spirits were acting in their own right. When Jesus reminded Peter, ‘Satan hath desired to have you’ he went on to say not that he had refused the request, but that he had managed to stop Satan by prayer.
Jesus had dealt with Satan’s evil spirits by a kind of psychic shock treatment; and Paul followed his example by exorcising the evil spirit in the woman of Thyatira. It could be identified as an evil spirit because of the woman’s profession; as a paid clairvoyant, she was obviously not eligible to receive her information from the holy spirit.
Satan, in other words, was crafty enough to make those he possessed utter the most impeccably Christian sentiments, if it suited his purpose. ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit,’ John the Evangelist warned in his first Epistle General: ‘But try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world.’
As a simple test John suggested that the holy spirit could be distinguished from a false prophet by putting a simple doctrinal question: ‘Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God; and this is that spirit of anti-Christ.’ But Satan, being crafty, could surely answer such questions to the satisfaction of the listeners. ‘The sin against the holy spirit’ had initially been the sin of refusing to listen to its promptings; but how could any ordinary Christian be sure he was being prompted by the holy spirit, when it might be the devil in disguise?
[/TD]
|
[TD="align: center"] Natural and Supernatural: The New Testament [/TD]
[TD="align: left"] The Christian Church had grown from shamanist roots; and as described by the gospel writers, Jesus is the most accomplished diviner-magician of them all. His destiny has been marked out for him in Joseph’s precognitive dream even before he was born; his birth is heralded by many signs and wonders, notably the star in the east which the Magi - themselves shamans - correctly interpret; and his baptism represents a recognition of his vocation, prompting him to undergo the traditional apprenticeship of self-denial - forty days and forty nights in the wilderness wrestling with the temptations of the flesh for fear that they would impede his spiritual development.
After subduing sensual lusts, however, Jesus is subjected to another form of temptation. Spiritual rebirth, he finds, has endowed him with psychic powers. Having the ability to convert a stone into bread, or to translocate himself to the top of a mountain or the pinnacle of the temple, he is tempted to use them for self-satisfaction, or self-aggrandisement. At first he is hesitant about using them at all. ‘Mine hour is not yet come,’ he tells the importunate woman when drink runs out at the Cana wedding feast; but he allows himself to be persuaded to do the kindly thing, and turn the water into wine. Later he uses his powers with more abandon: calming the sea, walking on the water, feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, and performing countless cures. Only in the region where he has grown up, and where his family still live, is he unsuccessful. In the face of local scepticism, ‘he can do no mighty work’.
Attracted by these powers, Jesus’s disciples had a further inducement to stay with him: the promise of a continued life after death. In Greek mythology some humans had been carried up after death to live on in the abode of the gods; but the Greek gods had been choosy. Jesus offered the prospect of a life after death to anybody, however humble, who followed him. And he clinched this pledge by his resurrection. While he lived supernatural manifestations had continued to testify to his, or his god’s, powers. He had shown precognitive knowledge of his impending arrest and execution, and of episodes connected with it, like Judas’s treachery and Peter’s spinelessness under questioning (‘before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice’); and at the moment of his death the veil of the temple was rent in twain, from top to bottom. But such signs would hardly have sufficed to convince the disciples had Jesus not afterwards appeared in their midst, and demonstrated that he had materialised by eating broiled fish and honey, and allowing Thomas to put his finger into the wound in his side left by the spear.
At this point it has to be stated that for none of these psychic manifestations is there a shred of historical evidence. Not merely were the gospels written half a century or more after the events they recorded; they were written with a deliberate propagandist purpose, to confirm that Jesus really had been the Christ - the Messiah promised by the prophets. They consequently presented him as a miracle worker who had fufilled all the earlier expectations and forecasts. It is, of course, still possible to argue that even if the gospels cannot be accepted as an historical source, they could hardly have been written unless there had been a Jesus with some shamanist powers to create the beliefs; in which case, as the parapsychologist Louis Anspacher urged, he can and ought to be studied as a psychic personality, ‘the most powerful medium and perhaps the greatest psychic sensitive who has ever walked down the aisles of history’.
Due weight has to be given, too, to the experience of the anthropologist M. J. Field, who realised from her field-work in Ghana how similar the New Testament record was to her own experience, suggesting that on a psychic level the disciples were part of ‘an age-old, worldwide pattern persistently exhibited’ - in other words, the New Testament record is not incongruous, anthropologically speaking. Nevertheless there is no way of knowing which, if any, of the supernatural manifestations recorded in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles occurred.
The belief that they had occurred, though, remains of profound historical importance. The effects of Jesus’s resurrection was to confirm disciples in the expectation that they, too, would be resurrected, as he had promised, and thereafter dwell in heaven: lending moral support of a kind that no faith had enjoyed before. Humiliations, torture and even death could be viewed with relative equanimity, granted the prospect of eternal bliss thereafter. On earth, too, disciples were given a reassurance that they were the elect of the Lord.
He had assured them that they would be able to heal the sick, cast out devils, speak with tongues, pick up serpents or drink poison without coming to any harm. And at Pentecost, suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it lay upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance.
They were not drunk, Peter explained to the bewildered onlookers. They were fulfilling the words of the prophet that the spirit would pour forth; ‘your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams’.
St. Paul Epidemics of psychic hysteria of this kind had been reported before; in their Bacchic frenzies Dionysius’s followers had been given to prophecy. But Pentecost appeared to offer something more; an instantaneous transition from man to shaman. Self-discipline was still required; worldly goods were to be put away, and worldly ambitions, and the lusts of the flesh. But it was no longer necessary to undergo the traditional apprenticeship of self-denial and self-mortification. By materialising on earth, and allowing himself to be crucified, Jesus had redeemed men from the sins of his forefathers, enabling them to become possessed by God through the holy spirit, and to enjoy psychic powers, simply by embracing the faith.
It was the lesson of Pentecost which gave the early Christians their sense of a common identity, and a common purpose; and in the Acts they can be seen flexing their new shamanist muscles. Natural and supernatural elements constantly overlap and interact. Ordered by an angel to go far out of his way into a desert to find and baptise an Ethiopian, Philip the Evangelist is miraculously carried back to the region of Caesarea so that he need waste no time before resuming his mission; and an angel liberates some of the disciples from prison so that they can preach in the temple, to the embarrassment of the prison officers, who find the cells still locked and guarded, but empty.
And the most influential of the new-style shamans emerges: Saul. His conversion is attended by the traditional signs: a great radiance; a voice-‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’; a trance; and the appearance of the Lord in a vision to a disciple, Ananias, telling him to go to the street called Straight in order to welcome Saul (who himself would see what was to happen in a precognitive vision) into the Christian fold. Paul, as he was henceforth known, needed no apprenticeship: he soon found he had psychic powers, worsting a hostile magician in combat by depriving him for a time of his sight, and performing miracles - including, apparently, materialisations (‘from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs, or aprons, and the diseases departed from them’). When Paul and Timothy tried to depart from Bythinia, ‘the spirit suffered them not’; and he was later reluctantly compelled to obey the spirit’s insistence that he must stay on in Corinth, and risk the consequences of stirring up the wrath of the Jews there by testifying in their synagogue.
The Acts, like the gospels, were a propaganda exercise, so that what is related in them of Paul’s early career cannot be relied upon. The Epistles, though, and particularly those to the Corinthians, describe his own experiences, and give his own views, revealing him to be a dedicated spiritist, relying on his daemon. He thought of it not as a spirit, but as the spirit - the holy spirit, revealing the word of God to him. When he went to Jerusalem in the middle of the first century A.D. to tell Jesus’s followers there that they were wrong to insist that converts must submit to the Jewish rite of circumcision, Paul did not argue with them: according to his account in the Epistle to the Galatians he simply told them that he knew they were wrong. ‘I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, nor was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.’
For Paul, then, Christianity was shamanist, relying on inspiration rather than doctrine: ‘if you are led by the spirit you are not under the law’. But thanks to Jesus’s intervention, there was no longer any need to rely on shamans: any Christian could take advantage of the holy spirit’s gifts. To some, Paul explained, the spirit might bring wisdom, or faith; to some, the gift of healing: ‘to another, the working of miracles; to another, discerning of spirits; to another, divers kinds of tongues; to another, the interpretations of tongues’.
Some individuals might even begin to live a spiritual existence: Paul described one of his acquaintances as having so much spirituality that he had attained to the third heaven while still on earth; ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell,’ Paul remarked, ‘God knoweth’. But all such manifestations were to be valued. When somebody received the gift of tongues, what emerged might sound unintelligible, but it could still be meaningful if it were interpreted. Above all, Paul added - anticipating the neo-Platonists - what mattered was the attitude in which the spirit was invoked, and utilised. Its gifts would serve no good purpose unless suffused with love for others; ‘though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have faith, so I could move mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing’. That being understood, Paul felt, it was right to welcome spirit possession; ‘wherefore, brethren, covet to prophesy, and forbid not to speak with tongues’.
Paul’s advice revealed the existence of a problem. Suppose the voices were not endowed with charity? He and Timothy had already suffered as a consequence of the jealousy of rivals, as on the occasion in Thyatira when ‘a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination’ followed them around; her employers, who had been making a lot of money out of her, hauled Paul and Timothy before the magistrates, and they were flogged and imprisoned. Yet what she had been saying was not inherently diabolic; ‘these men are the servants of the most high God, and show unto us the way of salvation’.
It was at this point that a growing conviction began to harden among Christians into a certainty; that there was an anti-Christ - Satan, or the devil - with a contingent of evil spirits capable of masquerading as the holy spirit, and performing the full repertory of miracles. In Greek mythology it had been the gods themselves who had given lying advice to humans, or materialised for their own lascivious purposes; and in the Old Testament, Satan had needed the Lord’s permission to play Job’s tempter. But the notion had grown that Satan and his spirits were acting in their own right. When Jesus reminded Peter, ‘Satan hath desired to have you’ he went on to say not that he had refused the request, but that he had managed to stop Satan by prayer.
Jesus had dealt with Satan’s evil spirits by a kind of psychic shock treatment; and Paul followed his example by exorcising the evil spirit in the woman of Thyatira. It could be identified as an evil spirit because of the woman’s profession; as a paid clairvoyant, she was obviously not eligible to receive her information from the holy spirit.
Satan, in other words, was crafty enough to make those he possessed utter the most impeccably Christian sentiments, if it suited his purpose. ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit,’ John the Evangelist warned in his first Epistle General: ‘But try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world.’
As a simple test John suggested that the holy spirit could be distinguished from a false prophet by putting a simple doctrinal question: ‘Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God; and this is that spirit of anti-Christ.’ But Satan, being crafty, could surely answer such questions to the satisfaction of the listeners. ‘The sin against the holy spirit’ had initially been the sin of refusing to listen to its promptings; but how could any ordinary Christian be sure he was being prompted by the holy spirit, when it might be the devil in disguise?
[/TD]
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Here is another interesting take, free e-book.
Christianity As Mystical Fact
and the Mysteries of Antiquity
By Rudolf Steiner
GA 8
and the Mysteries of Antiquity
By Rudolf Steiner
GA 8
[SIZE=-1]What is the connection between early Christianity and its contemporary counterparts and its antecedents? The comparison is not to Roman emperor worship, but rather to the practices of the Mystery Religions. One interesting comparison which can be made is the raising of Lazarus to the traditional temple sleep of three days and three nights.
[/SIZE]
[/SIZE]
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
A fascinating article...
In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer.
A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden handle had begun the metamorphosis into coal. The hammer’s head, made of more than 96% iron, is far more pure than anything nature could have achieved without assistance from relatively modern smelting methods.In 1889 near Nampa, Idaho, whilst workers were boring an artesian well, a small figurine made of baked clay was extracted from a depth of 320 feet.
To reach this depth the workers had to cut through fifteen feet of basalt lava and many other strata below that. That in itself does not seem remarkable, until one considers that the very top layer of lava has been dated to at least 15 million years old!
It is currently accepted by science and geology that coal is a by-product of decaying vegetation. The vegetation becomes buried over time and is covered with sediment. That sediment eventually fossilises and becomes rock. This natural process of coal formation takes up to 400 million years to accomplish.
Anything that is found in lumps of coal or in coal seams during mining, had to have been placed or dropped into the vegetation before it was buried in sediment.In 1944, as a ten year old boy, Newton Anderson, dropped a lump of coal in his basement and it broke in half as it hit the floor. What he discovered inside defies explanation based upon current scientific orthodoxy.Inside the coal was a hand crafted brass alloy bell with an iron clapper and sculptured handle.
When an analysis was carried out it was discovered that the bell was made from anunusual mix of metals, different from any known modern alloy production (including copper, zinc, tin, arsenic, iodine, and selenium).
The seam from whence this lump of coal was mined is estimated to be 300,000,000 years old!
A hand crafted bell found in a 300 million year old lump of coal!
These extraordinary discoveries although bizarre, are not unique or even uncommon.
There are literally thousands of them collecting dust, locked away from public scrutiny in the vaults of museums throughout the world.There are many other unusual reported finds including the following:The Morrisonville, Illinois Times, on June 11, 1891, reported how Mrs. S. W. Culp found a circular shaped eight-carat gold chain, about 10 inches long, embedded in a lump of coal after she broke it apart to put in her scuttle. The chain was described as “antique” and of “quaint workmanship.”
Displayed in a museum at Glen Rose, Texas, is a cast iron pot reportedly found in a large lump of coal in 1912 by a worker feeding coal into the furnace of a power plant. When he split open the coal the worker said the pot fell out, leaving its impression in the coal.Yet another report found in the Epoch Times told of a Colorado rancher who in the 1800’s broke open a lump of coal, dug from a vein some 300 feet below the surface, and discovered a “strange-looking iron thimble.”
A cast iron pot found in a lump of coal.
The Salzburg Cube is yet another ancient puzzle found by a worker named Reidl, in an Austrian foundry in 1885.
Like the others, this man broke open a block of coal and found a metal cube embedded inside. Recent analysis established the object was of forged iron and obviously hand crafted. The coal it was found in was millions of years old.The list of such items goes on and on and on.
Welcome to the world of Ooparts, or Out of Place Artefacts.Out of place artefacts (Ooparts) are so named because conventional scientific wisdom (an oxymoron if ever there was one) states that these artefacts shouldn’t exist based upon currently accepted beliefs regarding our origins and history. These discoveries are “out of place” in the orthodox timeline of human history.
The usual methods of the conformist scientific community, when faced with such anomalies is to attempt to debunk their reported age, or perhaps endeavour to discredit the source of the report or even the reporter. If this approach fails then usually the artefacts themselves are banished to the shadowy vaults of museums and warehouses, never to be seen again.
If these unusual artefacts were “one offs” then perhaps one could be forgiven for accepting the view espoused by the mainstream scientific and archaeological community that they are hoaxes or misreported stories. However, when one realises that thousands upon thousands of these anomalous artefacts have been discovered and reported over the years, then one may need to re-evaluate ones acceptance of the integrity of mainstream archaeology and science.
Occasionally an honest archaeologist will attempt to reveal to the public the true age and origin of such anomalous objects. They will question the accepted beliefs of their mainstream peers. They usually find that their career ends quite abruptly.
Unfortunately, the majority just accept what they are taught in school and university without question. That is how our educational system is designed. It does not encourage individuality and originality. It purely indoctrinates one with established beliefs and dogma.
If one requires evidence of this “mainstream” mentality, one need look no further than the realms of psychiatry. Modern psychiatry seeks to demonize and declare mentally ill anyone who deviates from what is regarded as the norm.These so called “mental health professionals” have even invented a new mental disorder named Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or ODD (love the irony of the abbreviation).
This newly invented condition is listed in the latest instalment of the industry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which dubs people who do not conform to what those in charge declare to be normal, as mentally insane.So there you have your proof – I’m obviously an unmitigated nutter and completely insane. At least that is what those in authority would like everyone to believe!
Anyway, I digress.On one side of the field we have the Darwinists and their theory of evolution, trying to establish the extremely flawed view that we have somehow evolved into highly intelligent sentient beings from a primordial blob of gunge, miraculously brought to life by an electrical storm billions of years ago. (Perhaps one of this cults followers could explain to me when “consciousness” evolved, and provide proof – I await with baited breath!)
On the other side we have the creationists with the belief that some omnipotent invisible being who lives in the clouds, waved his magic wand about 7,000 years ago and created the earth and everything on it. Again the adherents of this equally flawed theory rely on nothing more than a book called the Bible for their “proof” of this concept. The fact that this book has been bastardised during translation numerous times during its existence, has been re-written to certain individuals personal preference on a number of occasions, and has had many complete chapters omitted, is irrelevant to its followers.
All they require is “faith”. Proof and evidence is not a prerequisite!One couldn’t get more opposing beliefs if one tried, and both camps adhere to their beliefs voraciously, and with unshakable fervour. Yet neither are based on any kind of factual or hard evidence.
The reality is that the origin of the human race is a total enigma. No one, anywhere, actually knows how old humanity is or how and where it originated. It is a complete mystery. Yet from birth one is indoctrinated into one or the other of the above factions, with no questions asked or alternative opinions allowed.
The problem the mainstream has with these anomalous Ooparts is that they throw into question every single established belief there is regarding our past.
It seems that everywhere we look, we find things that contradict much of the scientific orthodoxy of today. The scientific establishment will never acknowledge or admit that these artefacts are authentic. To do so would be to admit that they are completely wrong about our origins, and consequently, invalidate all of the text books used to indoctrinate us and our children.
The discovery of Ooparts completely annihilates the [comparatively recent] theory of evolution. If, as this hypothesis would have us believe, modern humans only evolved 200,000 years ago (or thereabouts), one has to ask how man made artefacts, found in substrata originating millions of years ago, could be explained?Alternatively, the advocates of creationism have a very quaint way of “acknowledging” the existence of Ooparts, and bizarrely, actually believe that Ooparts substantiate their world view.
Creationists just completely disregard the established dating methods, and declare every single recognized archaeological and geological process null and void. They would have us all believe that coal seams, rock strata, fossils, minerals, precious stones and every other antediluvian element, took only a few thousand years to form.
Yet the psychiatric establishment would have me labelled as the loony for questioning this baloney. Go figure!There will no doubt be readers who, similar to predictable conservative archaeologists, and probably due to their indoctrinated belief system, will also dismiss the aforementioned Ooparts as hoaxes or forgeries. Perhaps they would like to consider and offer an explanation for the following.
It is an accepted belief that humans and dinosaurs did not co-exist.
According to conventional academia, dinosaurs roamed the earth between 65 and 225 million years ago, whereas the earliest upright biped humanoid, homo erectus, only appeared about 1.8 million years ago.However, in 1968 a palaeontologist named Stan Taylor began excavations of fossilised dinosaur footprints, discovered in the bed of the Paluxy river near Glen Rose, Texas. What he unearthed shocked and dumbfounded the scientific community.
Alongside the dinosaur tracks, in exactly the same cretaceous fossilised strata, were well preserved human footprints.
Human footprints crossing 3 toed dinosaur footprints fossilised in the Paluxy river bed.
The immediate reaction of evolutionists, archaeologists, and science in general, was to debunk the find as a hoax. “They were carved into the rock by hoaxers” or “They are not human footprints, but more dinosaur footprints that have been eroded to look human” were the arguments most commonly proposed.
However, their line of reasoning falls somewhat flat when one asks why only the human prints were eroded and not also the 3 toed dinosaur prints? Additionally one has to consider, if the human prints were carved as a hoax, how did the hoaxers manage to carve further human footprints that continued under bedrock that was later removed from the side of the river bed?
Since the initial discovery, hundreds more human footprints have been discovered and unearthed, both in Paluxy and in many other places around the globe. Either those hoaxers have unlimited time and budget – or someone is telling porkies!Next one needs to consider another find discovered in 100 million year old cretaceous limestone. A fossilised human finger, which was found along with a childs tooth and human hair.
This finger has been subjected to numerous scientific tests and analysis. Sectioning revealed the typical porous bone structure expected in a human finger. Additionally a Cat-scan and MRI scan identified joints and traced tendons throughout the length of the fossil. This is one find that science cannot explain away as a hoax.
Cat-scan of a human fossilised finger shows dark areas showing the interior of bones and bone marrow, along with tendons.
There is however another find of recent years that blows all of the others into a cocked hat regarding age.
Over the past few decades, miners near the little town of Ottosdal in Western Transvaal, South Africa, have been digging up hundreds of mysterious metal spheres. These spheres measure between 25 and 100 mm in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running completely around the equator.
Two types of spheres have been found. One is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white, the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance.These spheres are reportedly so delicately balanced that even with modern technology, they would need to be made in a zero gravity environment to attain these characteristics.
These objects have become known as the Klerksdorp spheres.
A Klerksdorp sphere
Geologists have attempted to debunk these artefacts as natural formations or “limonite concretions”.
They fail to explain sufficiently how these formations occurred naturally with perfectly straight and perfectly spaced grooves around the centres.Perhaps the real reason for such fervent attempted debunking by the scientific community, is that the rock in which these spheres where found is Precambrian – and dated to 2.8 billion years old!
Whether one wishes to accept these out of place artefacts as genuine or not is I suppose, down to personal beliefs.
Evolutionists refuse to accept them as to do so would mean re-evaluating their whole indoctrinated belief system. They will even stoop to producing outright fantasy in their attempts to discredit these discoveries. If that fails then they will just pretend that they do not exist, and then hide them away – forever.
Creationists on the other hand willingly accept them as some bizarre kind of proof that the universe is only about 7,000 years old, and totally ignore any evidence, from any source, to the contrary. They continue to cling to a medieval belief system based purely on blind faith.
How quaint.
Personally, I don’t belong to either camp.
I keep an open mind regarding our origins. I don’t have any particular “philosophy” on the subject but rather prefer to adapt my understanding as new evidence becomes available. My only current belief based upon all of the available facts to date is that the human race has inhabited this planet for millions of years longer than is presently accepted.
I realise that I will never discover the answer to the question of our origin. The human race has been searching for this answer since the dawn of time, and it still evades us.
Everything we have been taught in our schools and universities about our origin and history, is based upon nothing more than speculation and hypothesis.
There is not a single provable fact out there that conclusively answers the question “where do we come from”What I will continue to do however is question everything, and not just blindly accept any mainstream viewpoint because it happens to be fashionable at the time.
If that means one day I get a knock at my door from men in white coats holding a straightjacket, then so be it……
Everything We Have Been Taught About Our Origins Is A Lie
- A half billion year old hammer embedded in rock that formed 400 million years ago.
In June 1936 Max Hahn and his wife Emma were on a walk beside a waterfall near to London, Texas, when they noticed a rock with wood protruding from its core. They decided to take the oddity home and later cracked it open with a hammer and a chisel. What they found within shocked the archaeological and scientific community. Embedded in the rock was what appeared to be some type of ancient man made hammer.
A team of archaeologists analysed and dated it. The rock encasing the hammer was dated to more than 400 million years old. The hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old. Additionally, a section of the wooden handle had begun the metamorphosis into coal. The hammer’s head, made of more than 96% iron, is far more pure than anything nature could have achieved without assistance from relatively modern smelting methods.In 1889 near Nampa, Idaho, whilst workers were boring an artesian well, a small figurine made of baked clay was extracted from a depth of 320 feet.
To reach this depth the workers had to cut through fifteen feet of basalt lava and many other strata below that. That in itself does not seem remarkable, until one considers that the very top layer of lava has been dated to at least 15 million years old!
It is currently accepted by science and geology that coal is a by-product of decaying vegetation. The vegetation becomes buried over time and is covered with sediment. That sediment eventually fossilises and becomes rock. This natural process of coal formation takes up to 400 million years to accomplish.
Anything that is found in lumps of coal or in coal seams during mining, had to have been placed or dropped into the vegetation before it was buried in sediment.In 1944, as a ten year old boy, Newton Anderson, dropped a lump of coal in his basement and it broke in half as it hit the floor. What he discovered inside defies explanation based upon current scientific orthodoxy.Inside the coal was a hand crafted brass alloy bell with an iron clapper and sculptured handle.
When an analysis was carried out it was discovered that the bell was made from anunusual mix of metals, different from any known modern alloy production (including copper, zinc, tin, arsenic, iodine, and selenium).
The seam from whence this lump of coal was mined is estimated to be 300,000,000 years old!
A hand crafted bell found in a 300 million year old lump of coal!
These extraordinary discoveries although bizarre, are not unique or even uncommon.
There are literally thousands of them collecting dust, locked away from public scrutiny in the vaults of museums throughout the world.There are many other unusual reported finds including the following:The Morrisonville, Illinois Times, on June 11, 1891, reported how Mrs. S. W. Culp found a circular shaped eight-carat gold chain, about 10 inches long, embedded in a lump of coal after she broke it apart to put in her scuttle. The chain was described as “antique” and of “quaint workmanship.”
Displayed in a museum at Glen Rose, Texas, is a cast iron pot reportedly found in a large lump of coal in 1912 by a worker feeding coal into the furnace of a power plant. When he split open the coal the worker said the pot fell out, leaving its impression in the coal.Yet another report found in the Epoch Times told of a Colorado rancher who in the 1800’s broke open a lump of coal, dug from a vein some 300 feet below the surface, and discovered a “strange-looking iron thimble.”
A cast iron pot found in a lump of coal.
The Salzburg Cube is yet another ancient puzzle found by a worker named Reidl, in an Austrian foundry in 1885.
Like the others, this man broke open a block of coal and found a metal cube embedded inside. Recent analysis established the object was of forged iron and obviously hand crafted. The coal it was found in was millions of years old.The list of such items goes on and on and on.
Welcome to the world of Ooparts, or Out of Place Artefacts.Out of place artefacts (Ooparts) are so named because conventional scientific wisdom (an oxymoron if ever there was one) states that these artefacts shouldn’t exist based upon currently accepted beliefs regarding our origins and history. These discoveries are “out of place” in the orthodox timeline of human history.
The usual methods of the conformist scientific community, when faced with such anomalies is to attempt to debunk their reported age, or perhaps endeavour to discredit the source of the report or even the reporter. If this approach fails then usually the artefacts themselves are banished to the shadowy vaults of museums and warehouses, never to be seen again.
If these unusual artefacts were “one offs” then perhaps one could be forgiven for accepting the view espoused by the mainstream scientific and archaeological community that they are hoaxes or misreported stories. However, when one realises that thousands upon thousands of these anomalous artefacts have been discovered and reported over the years, then one may need to re-evaluate ones acceptance of the integrity of mainstream archaeology and science.
Occasionally an honest archaeologist will attempt to reveal to the public the true age and origin of such anomalous objects. They will question the accepted beliefs of their mainstream peers. They usually find that their career ends quite abruptly.
Unfortunately, the majority just accept what they are taught in school and university without question. That is how our educational system is designed. It does not encourage individuality and originality. It purely indoctrinates one with established beliefs and dogma.
If one requires evidence of this “mainstream” mentality, one need look no further than the realms of psychiatry. Modern psychiatry seeks to demonize and declare mentally ill anyone who deviates from what is regarded as the norm.These so called “mental health professionals” have even invented a new mental disorder named Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or ODD (love the irony of the abbreviation).
This newly invented condition is listed in the latest instalment of the industry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which dubs people who do not conform to what those in charge declare to be normal, as mentally insane.So there you have your proof – I’m obviously an unmitigated nutter and completely insane. At least that is what those in authority would like everyone to believe!
Anyway, I digress.On one side of the field we have the Darwinists and their theory of evolution, trying to establish the extremely flawed view that we have somehow evolved into highly intelligent sentient beings from a primordial blob of gunge, miraculously brought to life by an electrical storm billions of years ago. (Perhaps one of this cults followers could explain to me when “consciousness” evolved, and provide proof – I await with baited breath!)
On the other side we have the creationists with the belief that some omnipotent invisible being who lives in the clouds, waved his magic wand about 7,000 years ago and created the earth and everything on it. Again the adherents of this equally flawed theory rely on nothing more than a book called the Bible for their “proof” of this concept. The fact that this book has been bastardised during translation numerous times during its existence, has been re-written to certain individuals personal preference on a number of occasions, and has had many complete chapters omitted, is irrelevant to its followers.
All they require is “faith”. Proof and evidence is not a prerequisite!One couldn’t get more opposing beliefs if one tried, and both camps adhere to their beliefs voraciously, and with unshakable fervour. Yet neither are based on any kind of factual or hard evidence.
The reality is that the origin of the human race is a total enigma. No one, anywhere, actually knows how old humanity is or how and where it originated. It is a complete mystery. Yet from birth one is indoctrinated into one or the other of the above factions, with no questions asked or alternative opinions allowed.
The problem the mainstream has with these anomalous Ooparts is that they throw into question every single established belief there is regarding our past.
It seems that everywhere we look, we find things that contradict much of the scientific orthodoxy of today. The scientific establishment will never acknowledge or admit that these artefacts are authentic. To do so would be to admit that they are completely wrong about our origins, and consequently, invalidate all of the text books used to indoctrinate us and our children.
The discovery of Ooparts completely annihilates the [comparatively recent] theory of evolution. If, as this hypothesis would have us believe, modern humans only evolved 200,000 years ago (or thereabouts), one has to ask how man made artefacts, found in substrata originating millions of years ago, could be explained?Alternatively, the advocates of creationism have a very quaint way of “acknowledging” the existence of Ooparts, and bizarrely, actually believe that Ooparts substantiate their world view.
Creationists just completely disregard the established dating methods, and declare every single recognized archaeological and geological process null and void. They would have us all believe that coal seams, rock strata, fossils, minerals, precious stones and every other antediluvian element, took only a few thousand years to form.
Yet the psychiatric establishment would have me labelled as the loony for questioning this baloney. Go figure!There will no doubt be readers who, similar to predictable conservative archaeologists, and probably due to their indoctrinated belief system, will also dismiss the aforementioned Ooparts as hoaxes or forgeries. Perhaps they would like to consider and offer an explanation for the following.
It is an accepted belief that humans and dinosaurs did not co-exist.
According to conventional academia, dinosaurs roamed the earth between 65 and 225 million years ago, whereas the earliest upright biped humanoid, homo erectus, only appeared about 1.8 million years ago.However, in 1968 a palaeontologist named Stan Taylor began excavations of fossilised dinosaur footprints, discovered in the bed of the Paluxy river near Glen Rose, Texas. What he unearthed shocked and dumbfounded the scientific community.
Alongside the dinosaur tracks, in exactly the same cretaceous fossilised strata, were well preserved human footprints.
Human footprints crossing 3 toed dinosaur footprints fossilised in the Paluxy river bed.
The immediate reaction of evolutionists, archaeologists, and science in general, was to debunk the find as a hoax. “They were carved into the rock by hoaxers” or “They are not human footprints, but more dinosaur footprints that have been eroded to look human” were the arguments most commonly proposed.
However, their line of reasoning falls somewhat flat when one asks why only the human prints were eroded and not also the 3 toed dinosaur prints? Additionally one has to consider, if the human prints were carved as a hoax, how did the hoaxers manage to carve further human footprints that continued under bedrock that was later removed from the side of the river bed?
Since the initial discovery, hundreds more human footprints have been discovered and unearthed, both in Paluxy and in many other places around the globe. Either those hoaxers have unlimited time and budget – or someone is telling porkies!Next one needs to consider another find discovered in 100 million year old cretaceous limestone. A fossilised human finger, which was found along with a childs tooth and human hair.
This finger has been subjected to numerous scientific tests and analysis. Sectioning revealed the typical porous bone structure expected in a human finger. Additionally a Cat-scan and MRI scan identified joints and traced tendons throughout the length of the fossil. This is one find that science cannot explain away as a hoax.
Cat-scan of a human fossilised finger shows dark areas showing the interior of bones and bone marrow, along with tendons.
There is however another find of recent years that blows all of the others into a cocked hat regarding age.
Over the past few decades, miners near the little town of Ottosdal in Western Transvaal, South Africa, have been digging up hundreds of mysterious metal spheres. These spheres measure between 25 and 100 mm in diameter, and some are etched with three parallel grooves running completely around the equator.
Two types of spheres have been found. One is composed of a solid bluish metal with flecks of white, the other is hollowed out and filled with a spongy white substance.These spheres are reportedly so delicately balanced that even with modern technology, they would need to be made in a zero gravity environment to attain these characteristics.
These objects have become known as the Klerksdorp spheres.
A Klerksdorp sphere
Geologists have attempted to debunk these artefacts as natural formations or “limonite concretions”.
They fail to explain sufficiently how these formations occurred naturally with perfectly straight and perfectly spaced grooves around the centres.Perhaps the real reason for such fervent attempted debunking by the scientific community, is that the rock in which these spheres where found is Precambrian – and dated to 2.8 billion years old!
Whether one wishes to accept these out of place artefacts as genuine or not is I suppose, down to personal beliefs.
Evolutionists refuse to accept them as to do so would mean re-evaluating their whole indoctrinated belief system. They will even stoop to producing outright fantasy in their attempts to discredit these discoveries. If that fails then they will just pretend that they do not exist, and then hide them away – forever.
Creationists on the other hand willingly accept them as some bizarre kind of proof that the universe is only about 7,000 years old, and totally ignore any evidence, from any source, to the contrary. They continue to cling to a medieval belief system based purely on blind faith.
How quaint.
Personally, I don’t belong to either camp.
I keep an open mind regarding our origins. I don’t have any particular “philosophy” on the subject but rather prefer to adapt my understanding as new evidence becomes available. My only current belief based upon all of the available facts to date is that the human race has inhabited this planet for millions of years longer than is presently accepted.
I realise that I will never discover the answer to the question of our origin. The human race has been searching for this answer since the dawn of time, and it still evades us.
Everything we have been taught in our schools and universities about our origin and history, is based upon nothing more than speculation and hypothesis.
There is not a single provable fact out there that conclusively answers the question “where do we come from”What I will continue to do however is question everything, and not just blindly accept any mainstream viewpoint because it happens to be fashionable at the time.
If that means one day I get a knock at my door from men in white coats holding a straightjacket, then so be it……
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
A Physicist’s Explanation of Why the Soul May Exist
The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge. In "Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects stories about these strange phenomena to stimulate the imagination and open up previously undreamed of possibilities. Are they true? You decide.
Henry P. Stapp is a theoretical physicist at the University of California–Berkeley who worked with some of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He does not seek to prove that the soul exists, but he does say that the existence of the soul fits within the laws of physics.
It is not true to say belief in the soul is unscientific, according to Stapp. Here the word “soul” refers to a personality independent of the brain or the rest of the human body that can survive beyond death. In his paper, “Compatibility of Contemporary Physical Theory With Personality Survival,” he wrote: “Strong doubts about personality survival based solely on the belief that postmortem survival is incompatible with the laws of physics are unfounded.”
He works with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics—more or less the interpretation used by some of the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Even Bohr and Heisenberg had some disagreements on how quantum mechanics works, and understandings of the theory since that time have also been diverse. Stapp’s paper on the Copenhagen interpretation has been influential. It was written in the 1970s and Heisenberg wrote an appendix for it.
Stapp noted of his own concepts: “There has been no hint in my previous descriptions (or conception) of this orthodox quantum mechanics of any notion of personality survival.”
Why Quantum Theory Could Hint at Life After Death
Stapp explains that the founders of quantum theory required scientists to essentially cut the world into two parts. Above the cut, classical mathematics could describe the physical processes empirically experienced. Below the cut, quantum mathematics describes a realm “which does not entail complete physical determinism.”
Of this realm below the cut, Stapp wrote: “One generally finds that the evolved state of the system below the cut cannot be matched to any conceivable classical description of the properties visible to observers.”
So how do scientists observe the invisible? They choose particular properties of the quantum system and set up apparatus to view their effects on the physical processes “above the cut.”
The key is the experimenter’s choice. When working with the quantum system, the observer’s choice has been shown to physically impact what manifests and can be observed above the cut.
Stapp cited Bohr’s analogy for this interaction between a scientist and his experiment results: “[It's like] a blind man with a cane: when the cane is held loosely, the boundary between the person and the external world is the divide between hand and cane; but when held tightly the cane becomes part of the probing self: the person feels that he himself extends to the tip of the cane.”
The physical and mental are connected in a dynamic way. In terms of the relationship between mind and brain, it seems the observer can hold in place a chosen brain activity that would otherwise be fleeting. This is a choice similar to the choice a scientist makes when deciding which properties of the quantum system to study.
The quantum explanation of how the mind and brain can be separate or different, yet connected by the laws of physics “is a welcome revelation,” wrote Stapp. “It solves a problem that has plagued both science and philosophy for centuries—the imagined science-mandated need either to equate mind with brain, or to make the brain dynamically independent of the mind.”
Stapp said it is not contrary to the laws of physics that the personality of a dead person may attach itself to a living person, as in the case of so-called spirit possession. It wouldn’t require any basic change in orthodox theory, though it would “require a relaxing of the idea that physical and mental events occur only when paired together.”
Classical physical theory can only evade the problem, and classical physicists can only work to discredit intuition as a product of human confusion, said Stapp. Science should instead, he said, recognize “the physical effects of consciousness as a physical problem that needs to be answered in dynamical terms.”
How This Understanding Affects the Moral Fabric of Society
Furthermore, it is imperative for maintaining human morality to consider people as more than just machines of flesh and blood.
In another paper, titled “Attention, Intention, and Will in Quantum Physics,” Stapp wrote: ”It has become now widely appreciated that assimilation by the general public of this ‘scientific’ view, according to which each human being is basically a mechanical robot, is likely to have a significant and corrosive impact on the moral fabric of society.”
He wrote of the “growing tendency of people to exonerate themselves by arguing that it is not ‘I’ who is at fault, but some mechanical process within: ‘my genes made me do it’; or ‘my high blood-sugar content made me do it.’ Recall the infamous ‘Twinkie Defense’ that got Dan White off with five years for murdering San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.”
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
10 effective techniques for experiencing an OBE (Out of Body Experience) a.k.a Astral Projection.
There has been a lot of confusion about Astral Projection, so I figured I’d explain what it is and how to do it. Dreaming, is an unconscious astral projection. When you sleep, your soul leaves your body. It literally leaves our 3D physical reality. This is caused by your pineal gland (the most important part of your brain) releasing Dimethyltryptamine aka DMT.
DMT is what propels your soul out of body when you sleep, and when you’re about to die or have a ‘near death experience’. The thing is, you do not have control over what your soul does when it leaves your body while you sleep… Your subconscious controls it. The difference between normal sleep and astral projection is, when you astral project, you are able to consciously control your soul, and where it goes.
Astral projection is basically just Conscious Sleep. When you start to fall asleep, but wake up right before it happens, you can literally feel your soul coming back into body. That is why you sometimes feel like you’re falling. The ‘head exploding sensation’ (as some people describe it), is the first step to starting an astral projection. That is one of the signs you know that you’re doing it right. You feel pressure in your brain, and your body starts to tingle. Then, your whole body goes limp, and if you can control it, your soul will leave your body shortly after.
Let me put it this way so it’s easier to understand.. If I were to astral project, and I wanted to communicate with someone that is sleeping, it would be difficult for me to do so. I could easily find that person in the ‘spirit realm’ aka 4th dimension, but I wouldn’t really be able to have a deep conversation with that person because they would appear drunk to me. That’s because they’re not really conscious. If I spoke to them, they may remember me being in their dream a little bit, but they wouldn’t remember most of it.
However, if two people are astral projecting at the same time, they CAN INDEED meet up in 4D, have a conversation together (they can even have sex! Yes, Astral sex is a REAL THING! Google it!) and both people will remember everything that happened.Through astral projection you can do MANY, MANY things. You can speak with friends and family that are living, friends and family that are long dead, your spirit or animal guides, beings from other dimensions, extraterrestrials that tend to reside in other dimensions such as the Pleiadians and Andromedans, or you can just fly around and see the world like Superman.
I realize this probably sounds crazy to people who are new to this concept, but I have done it myself so I know you can do it too. NOTHING has expanded my awareness and my consciousness like astral projection has. I hope you give it a try.
Before we get into techniques, you should know that there are hundreds if not thousands of different techniques to get your soul out of body. We are all unique. One technique that works for some people, may not work for others. I recommend you try one for little while, and move on to a different one if you don’t succeed.
1. The Rope Technique:
This technique has been formulated by Robert Bruce and is one of the most effective techniques around. A key ingredient to this projection technique is an invisible, imaginary ROPE hanging from your ceiling. This ROPE will be used to exert dynamic pressure at a single point on your astral body to force its separation from the physical.
Reach out with your imaginary HANDS and pull yourself, hand over hand, up the strong, invisible, imaginary ROPE hanging above you. You will feel a slight dizzy sensation inside you as you do this. This feeling of vertigo will intensify the more you pull on the rope.
Keep climbing, hand over hand, ever upwards, and you will feel the vibrations start. Your whole body will seem to be vibrating and you will feel paralyzed. Concentrate single minded, on climbing your rope. Don’t stop.
Next you will feel yourself coming free of your body. You will exit your body in the direction of your imaginary ROPE and will be hovering above your body. You’re free at last!
2. Watch yourself going to sleep:
Lie down comfortably on your back, facing the ceiling. Relax your body and clear your mind of unwanted thoughts. Relax even more.
Tell yourself that you are going to watch yourself in the act of going to sleep. You must be very clear about your intent. You’re going to let your body sleep while your mind will remain alert throughout the entire process. Tell yourself you will retain consciousness even while your body is going to be in complete “trance”.
As you relax completely, you must learn to recognize the rather strange, distinctive sensations you feel as your body moves into the sleep state. You MUST stay aware as this unfolds. At a certain point, you will feel that your body is feeling heavy and numb.
You are on the right track! Pay close attention to all your bodily sensations. You may feel yourself swaying or floating. You might even find certain parts of your body tingling. There might be vibrations running from your head to toe. You might even hear a strong buzzing sensation in your ears. Whatever the sensations, do not panic as these are very good signals that you are on the verge of experiencing an OBE.
You have to then visualize that you are rising up from your bed and floating towards the ceiling. How would it feel if you could actually float? Try to make the experience as real as possible. Hold this image for as long as you can. If everything goes on well, you might suddenly find yourself outside the body, floating near the ceiling!
3. The Monroe Technique:
Dr Robert Monroe, one of the foremost authorities on Astral Projection devised this method.
You have to first relax your body. This is a very important step.
Then try to go to sleep, but don’t fall asleep. Maintain your awareness between sleep and wakefulness. This is known as the hypnagogic state. Then deepen this hypnagogic state and start to clear your mind of unwanted thoughts. Simply look through your closed eyelids at the blackness in front of you.
Then you must enter an even deeper state of relaxation. The next step is to induce vibrations throughout your body and intensify them. These vibrations have to be controlled and intensified further. This is the moment when the Astral body will separate from the Physical body. You then simply have to “roll-over” and you will find yourself out of your body.
4. OBE From lucid dreams:
Lucid dreams are dreams in which the dreamer is aware that he is dreaming. In a Lucid Dream a person is already “out” of his body.
In order to achieve Astral Projection from Lucid Dreams, you have to first become obsessed with OBEs and you must really DESIRE it. You must read everything you can about it. You must think about it every free moment that you have.
Once your mind is besotted with the thought of OOBEs we will need triggers and affirmations so that you have a Lucid Dream. During the day keep thinking: ‘Tonight I’m going to have a Lucid Dream’. Remind yourself of this all day long. And — and this is the important part — keep asking yourself during the day “Am I dreaming now?”
With a few days of practice, you’ll have programmed your sub-conscious to induce a Lucid Dream.
Once you are in a Lucid Dream, and know that you are dreaming, you would also know that you are not in your body. You can then will yourself to see your bedroom. In most cases, when you do this, your dreamland will suddenly disappear and you will find yourself in your bedroom, floating above your body.
5. Displaced-awareness technique:
Close your eyes and get into your usual trance-state. Try to sense the entire room, at once. Feel yourself just above your shoulders and seeing all around. Be very passive about what is going on.
Then imagine that your Astral Body is slowly rotating by 180 degrees. Once you finish your mental rotation, your astral head should be where your physical feet are, and your astral feet would be where your physical head is! With this firmly in your mind, try visualizing the room from this new direction.
The idea is to forget about where you really are, and displace your sense of direction. When you do this correctly, you will find yourself getting dizzy. This is normal.
When you are comfortable with this, the next step is to imagine floating towards the roof. Try to make it as real as possible. You may suddenly find yourself “popped” out of your physical body!
6. The Jump Technique:
The Jump Technique, when done well, can wake up anyone in their dreams and make them Lucid. However, it does need to be done well.
This is how the technique works: We repeatedly need to ask ourselves during the day whether we are in a dream or not. It is important that we do this not just for the sake of asking ourselves the question, but because we really want to know where we are.
We should really doubt that we are in the Physical. So in order to prove where we are, we jump as if we were going to fly. If we are in the Physical, we will land back on the ground. But during a dream, when we jump, we will defy gravity and float.
When this is done for a few days, you will soon find yourself in a dream in which you are jumping to check whether you are in a dream or not. As soon as you jump, you will find yourself floating, thus triggering a Lucid Dream and an OOBE.
7. Muldoons Thirst Technique:
This is not one of the most pleasant or effective methods designed by Sylvan Muldoon.
In order to use this technique, you must refrain from drinking for some hours before going to bed. Throughout the day increase your thirst by every means you can. Keep a glass of water in front of you and stare into it, imagining drinking, but not allowing yourself to do so!
Then before you sleep, eat a pinch or two of salt. Place the glass of water at some convenient place away from your bed and rehearse in your mind all the actions necessary to getting it: getting up, crossing the room, reaching out for the glass, and so on.
You must then go to bed, still thinking about your thirst and the means of quenching it. At night, you might awaken in your dream and you will find yourself walking towards the glass of water. With any luck the suggestions you have made to yourself will bring about the desired OBE.
8. The Stretch Out Technique:
Lie down, shut your eyes and relax your body. Imagine your feet stretching out and becoming longer by just an inch or so. Once you have this picture in your mind, let your feet go back to normal. Do the same with his head, stretching it out an inch beyond its normal position. Then, get it back to normal.
Then alternate all between head and feet, gradually increasing the distance until you can stretch out both your feet and head to about two feet or more. At this stage imagine stretching out both at once. This exercise will make you feel dizzy and often start the vibrations.
After some practice, you will experience floating sensations and you can then tell yourself to rise up towards the ceiling. You are out!
9. The Hammock Technique:
Visualize yourself lying in a bright white hammock, stationed between two palm trees on a secluded beach. Imagine the feeling of swaying in the wind, and recreate that feeling now as you visualize yourself swaying from side to side in the hammock.
Repeat this visualization for as long as it takes to bring forth the vibrations, and when you feel the vibrations, just “roll-out” of your body.
10. Do the relaxing thing.
Get to where you can’t feel your body. Repeat this saying in your head, and focus on it as much as possible. Don’t get discouraged! Say it slow if you have to…
“I am going to have an out of body experience.
I am going to let myself go to sleep, but I am going
to bring this waking consciousness with me wherever
I go. I am going to leave my body with full awareness.”
Keep saying the phrase even when you feel tired and you feel like rolling over….
Roll over if you have to in order to stay comfortable, and keep doing it. If you feel any tingles or see any lights that seem to flash, don’t let them throw you off.
They are perfectly natural. If when you’re tired you struggle to remember the words, just recite something shorter like ‘Mind awake, body asleep’, and do it until you lose consciousness.
Whichever technique you choose, you are unlikely to get a result on the very first night, or even on the first few nights — so take your time with them and try not to get frustrated when nothing happens at first. I promise you will soon start to see some results. If you don’t experience results with a week or two, don’t let it frustrate you.
There could be mental or physical blockages preventing you from getting out of body.
(Such as undealt with past trauma, an unhealthy pineal gland due to excessive sodium fluoride and bad diet, etc. It could be many different things.)
If you are struggling, I recommend working with crystals that assist astral projection, or perhaps even Binaural Beats that assist A/P.
Here is a good one I have found.
[video=youtube;NQP2EFqrlr0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NQP2EFqrlr0[/video]
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
Do you think that it is possible that Professor Tyndall could have created an experiment that has not been repeated to this day?
A curious story nonetheless.
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Tyndall filled an experimental glass tube with the vapours of certain acids, iodides, and nitrites. The tube was then turned on its side in a level horizontal position, and so arranged that the axis of the tube and parallel concentrated beams of electric light or focussed sunlight were coincident. Adjustments were made to the focus until the vapors began to react. Gradually, and to Tyndall's astonishment these clouds of vapor began to coalesce, forming into colored three dimensional images of animals, plants, and other shapes including geometric patterns of spheres, cubes, and pyramids. At one stage during the experiment Tyndall was amazed to see the swirling clouds suddenly change into the shape of a "serpent's head," and as the serpent's mouth slowly opened a long tendril of cloud emerged forming into a perfect tongue. No sooner had this image faded than it was immediately replaced by another, this time of a perfectly formed fish complete with gills, feelers, scales, and eyes.
Tyndall commenting on the "completeness" of this figure said: "The twoness of the animal form was displayed throughout, and no disc, coil, or speck existed on one side (of the figure) that did not exist on the other."
This "twoness" as Tyndall put it could lend some credibility to the experiment. The fact that every "twin" detail of an image is faithfully reproduced, i.e., both eyes, both ears, etc., suggests that the image is being purposely generated and is not just a coincidental occurrence like watching the clouds in the sky form rough caricatures of known objects.
Regarding the "focusing" of the beams, is it possible that once the knack of "tuning" the beams of light had been mastered certain images might then be pre-selected at will?
Tyndall's detractors had a field day, they pointed out that the phenomena could easily be explained by the mechanical action of a beam of light which would normally stir up molecules of vapor into certain shapes like globes and spindles, a process, which they said was recently demonstrated by the physicist Sir William Crookes. Yet they omitted to mention the precisely shaped images of flowers, vases, seashells, fish, serpent's head, and a number of other forms that the experiment produced.
Did Tyndall's own thoughts physically interfere with the experiment or do the vapors of certain chemicals have a propensity to form images? No one at this point in time seems to know.
Tyndall, it must be realized, was a scientist of some repute, a fellow and Director of the Royal Institute, President of the British Association, and disciple and confidante of Michael Faraday. He was a modest and charitable man, according to his peers, whose research work, writings, and lectures were greatly appreciated by the scientific community. Not the sort of fellow that was wont to seeing things that weren't really there.
Another experiment sounding very similar to Tyndall's was performed by Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th century physician and author. Browne called it amongst other things: "Palingenesis...the re-individuality of an incinerated plant..."
Browne, after reducing a plant to ashes by calcination, separated the salts from its ashes and after "special fermentation" placed them in a glass vial. He then made the following observations: "...by the heate of embers, or the natural heate of one's body the very forme and idea (of the plant) will bee represented; whiche will suddenly vanish away, the heate being withdrawn from the bottom of the glasse."
A witness described the experiment as it was being performed on a flower: "...having ... by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture (reaction) acted on it, till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust thus excited by heat, shoots upward into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes. The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable phoenix thus lies concealed in its cold ashes."
Shades of Semyon Kirlian! Talk about photographing phantom leaves and limbs!
Imagine the revolution these experiments could cause in modern science. These experiments, if proven true, could present the unique possibility of being able to view nature's storehouse of "bio-blueprints" or "life-ideas" before (and after) she clothes them in flesh.
Take forensic medicine, for example; burnt evidence could be visually resurrected. And in archaeology, those old ashes and coals of burnt remains could show us how the people actually lived (and died). And would the skin or bone samples of Egyptian mummies and other ancient people properly treated allow us to gaze once more on the finely chiseled features of beautiful Nefretiti, or see again that Hellenic smile that once launched a thousand ships?
Another interesting experiment similar in some respects to those mentioned above, was performed during the 1940's using the Wilson expansion cloud chamber. This chamber which is filled with a gas or vapor (usually water vapor) is normally used to track the path of atomic, and sub-atomic particles.
Dr. R.A. Watters, director of the William Bernard Johnston Foundation for Psychological Research in Reno, Nevada, theorized that the human or animal soul exists in the "intra-atomic space between the atoms of human cells." He decided to test his theory using the cloud chamber.
A large grasshopper was placed in the chamber and dispatched with ether. At the precise moment of death, expansion of the water vapor occurred which in turn triggered a camera and a photograph was taken of the condensation figure. In all, around 40 experiments were carried out using frogs and white mice. According to Watters, in all the tests where the creature permanently died, even after eight hours of observation, a "shadow phenomenon" appeared in the chamber coinciding with the shape of the creature. However, if the animal revived, no condensation figure would appear on the photograph.
Did Watters photograph the soul of those creatures? Is the soul more easily captured on film as it is leaving its body (with some small amount of the material world still clinging to it) than some time afterwards?
A brief tantalizing account of a French scientist's experiments clearly shows how easily momentous discoveries can be made, and then how just as easily, they can fade into obscurity.
In 1856 Dr. Jobard of Paris declared to a startled press: "I hold a discovery which frightens me. There are two kinds of electricity; one, brute and blind is produced by the contact of metals and acids; the other is intelligent and clairvoyant. The brute (one) ...has followed Jacobii, Bonelli, and Moncal, while the intellectual one was following Bois-Robert, Thilorier, and Chevalier Duplanty. The electrical ball or globular electricity (ball lightning?) contains a thought which disobeys Newton (gravity?) and Mariotte (?) to follow its own freaks.... we have in the annals of the academy thousands of proofs of the intelligence of the electric bolt...but I remark that I am permitting myself to become indiscreet. A little more and I would have disclosed to you the key which is about to discover to us the universal spirit."
What other potential world-shaking discoveries lie concealed and forgotten in dusty tomes sitting in equally dusty out-of-the-way bookshops and libraries?
WORKS CONSULTED
L'Ami Des Sciences, March 2 1856, Page 56
Sir Thomas Browne, Works Vol II, London 1883.
S.W. Tromp, Psychical Physics, London 1949.
H.P Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, California 1950.
[/TD]
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A curious story nonetheless.
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FORGOTTEN EXPERIMENTS
by John Mount
Professor John Tyndall, the noted British physicist of last century whose forté was molecular physics, acoustics, and heat radiation, performed a little known experiment in the late 1800's. by John Mount
Tyndall filled an experimental glass tube with the vapours of certain acids, iodides, and nitrites. The tube was then turned on its side in a level horizontal position, and so arranged that the axis of the tube and parallel concentrated beams of electric light or focussed sunlight were coincident. Adjustments were made to the focus until the vapors began to react. Gradually, and to Tyndall's astonishment these clouds of vapor began to coalesce, forming into colored three dimensional images of animals, plants, and other shapes including geometric patterns of spheres, cubes, and pyramids. At one stage during the experiment Tyndall was amazed to see the swirling clouds suddenly change into the shape of a "serpent's head," and as the serpent's mouth slowly opened a long tendril of cloud emerged forming into a perfect tongue. No sooner had this image faded than it was immediately replaced by another, this time of a perfectly formed fish complete with gills, feelers, scales, and eyes.
Tyndall commenting on the "completeness" of this figure said: "The twoness of the animal form was displayed throughout, and no disc, coil, or speck existed on one side (of the figure) that did not exist on the other."
This "twoness" as Tyndall put it could lend some credibility to the experiment. The fact that every "twin" detail of an image is faithfully reproduced, i.e., both eyes, both ears, etc., suggests that the image is being purposely generated and is not just a coincidental occurrence like watching the clouds in the sky form rough caricatures of known objects.
Regarding the "focusing" of the beams, is it possible that once the knack of "tuning" the beams of light had been mastered certain images might then be pre-selected at will?
Tyndall's detractors had a field day, they pointed out that the phenomena could easily be explained by the mechanical action of a beam of light which would normally stir up molecules of vapor into certain shapes like globes and spindles, a process, which they said was recently demonstrated by the physicist Sir William Crookes. Yet they omitted to mention the precisely shaped images of flowers, vases, seashells, fish, serpent's head, and a number of other forms that the experiment produced.
Did Tyndall's own thoughts physically interfere with the experiment or do the vapors of certain chemicals have a propensity to form images? No one at this point in time seems to know.
Tyndall, it must be realized, was a scientist of some repute, a fellow and Director of the Royal Institute, President of the British Association, and disciple and confidante of Michael Faraday. He was a modest and charitable man, according to his peers, whose research work, writings, and lectures were greatly appreciated by the scientific community. Not the sort of fellow that was wont to seeing things that weren't really there.
Another experiment sounding very similar to Tyndall's was performed by Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th century physician and author. Browne called it amongst other things: "Palingenesis...the re-individuality of an incinerated plant..."
Browne, after reducing a plant to ashes by calcination, separated the salts from its ashes and after "special fermentation" placed them in a glass vial. He then made the following observations: "...by the heate of embers, or the natural heate of one's body the very forme and idea (of the plant) will bee represented; whiche will suddenly vanish away, the heate being withdrawn from the bottom of the glasse."
A witness described the experiment as it was being performed on a flower: "...having ... by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture (reaction) acted on it, till in the fermentation they assumed a bluish and spectral hue. This dust thus excited by heat, shoots upward into its primitive forms; by sympathy the parts unite, and while each is returning to its destined place, we see distinctly the stalk, the leaves, and the flower arise; it is the pale spectre of a flower coming slowly forth from its ashes. The heat passes away, the magical scene declines, till the whole matter again precipitates itself into the chaos at the bottom. This vegetable phoenix thus lies concealed in its cold ashes."
Shades of Semyon Kirlian! Talk about photographing phantom leaves and limbs!
Imagine the revolution these experiments could cause in modern science. These experiments, if proven true, could present the unique possibility of being able to view nature's storehouse of "bio-blueprints" or "life-ideas" before (and after) she clothes them in flesh.
Take forensic medicine, for example; burnt evidence could be visually resurrected. And in archaeology, those old ashes and coals of burnt remains could show us how the people actually lived (and died). And would the skin or bone samples of Egyptian mummies and other ancient people properly treated allow us to gaze once more on the finely chiseled features of beautiful Nefretiti, or see again that Hellenic smile that once launched a thousand ships?
Another interesting experiment similar in some respects to those mentioned above, was performed during the 1940's using the Wilson expansion cloud chamber. This chamber which is filled with a gas or vapor (usually water vapor) is normally used to track the path of atomic, and sub-atomic particles.
Dr. R.A. Watters, director of the William Bernard Johnston Foundation for Psychological Research in Reno, Nevada, theorized that the human or animal soul exists in the "intra-atomic space between the atoms of human cells." He decided to test his theory using the cloud chamber.
A large grasshopper was placed in the chamber and dispatched with ether. At the precise moment of death, expansion of the water vapor occurred which in turn triggered a camera and a photograph was taken of the condensation figure. In all, around 40 experiments were carried out using frogs and white mice. According to Watters, in all the tests where the creature permanently died, even after eight hours of observation, a "shadow phenomenon" appeared in the chamber coinciding with the shape of the creature. However, if the animal revived, no condensation figure would appear on the photograph.
Did Watters photograph the soul of those creatures? Is the soul more easily captured on film as it is leaving its body (with some small amount of the material world still clinging to it) than some time afterwards?
A brief tantalizing account of a French scientist's experiments clearly shows how easily momentous discoveries can be made, and then how just as easily, they can fade into obscurity.
In 1856 Dr. Jobard of Paris declared to a startled press: "I hold a discovery which frightens me. There are two kinds of electricity; one, brute and blind is produced by the contact of metals and acids; the other is intelligent and clairvoyant. The brute (one) ...has followed Jacobii, Bonelli, and Moncal, while the intellectual one was following Bois-Robert, Thilorier, and Chevalier Duplanty. The electrical ball or globular electricity (ball lightning?) contains a thought which disobeys Newton (gravity?) and Mariotte (?) to follow its own freaks.... we have in the annals of the academy thousands of proofs of the intelligence of the electric bolt...but I remark that I am permitting myself to become indiscreet. A little more and I would have disclosed to you the key which is about to discover to us the universal spirit."
What other potential world-shaking discoveries lie concealed and forgotten in dusty tomes sitting in equally dusty out-of-the-way bookshops and libraries?
WORKS CONSULTED
L'Ami Des Sciences, March 2 1856, Page 56
Sir Thomas Browne, Works Vol II, London 1883.
S.W. Tromp, Psychical Physics, London 1949.
H.P Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, California 1950.
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
sprinkles
Well-known member
- MBTI
- xxxx
There's always been the capacity to make things. Maybe there were humans before, or something like humans, but civilization was lost somewhere and had to start over.
I have to say though that alloys are not impressive. Bronze is an alloy and has been around since at least 3000 bc, so one doesn't need "modern methods" to make alloys. Same with brass.
Proto-porcelain was invented in China around 1600 bc, and became porcelain around 200 bc using a process that was unknown to everyone else. How this kind of porcelain was created remained a mystery outside China until around 1700 ad.
Also I have to say that if that picture of the Klerksdorp sphere is a real one, then those lines are nowhere near perfect nor evenly spaced.
Skarekrow
~~DEVIL~~
- MBTI
- Ni-INFJ-A
- Enneagram
- Warlock
I’m not going to defend the article…I take it with a grain of salt…if what they have found is truly dated to when it was made..then we as humans (or another intelligent creature) existed much earlier than once thought…that’s all.
sprinkles
Well-known member
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Or the objects somehow moved to impossible locations. Or they went back in time. Or rode in on bits of another planet. Or something else.
Skarekrow
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All those cold very well be the scenario…I was actually thinking about the time travel thing…maybe they fell “out of time” somehow…who knows….it seems the more we discover about quantum physics, the wilder the possibilities become!
Kanamori
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As far as quantum physics, I'm starting to have my doubts. A unified field theory seems neater, although 'teleportation' etc may still have been observed or done, just less like magic (at least, imho). Which would still be a fundamental change in the accepted conception of space-time and matter.
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They are starting to think that they may actually be one and the same thing…here is an article talking about it.
Physicists from the Max Planck Institute and the Perimeter Institute in Canada have developed a new approach to the unification of the general theory of relativity and quantum theory.
Present-day physics cannot describe what happened in the Big Bang. Quantum theory and the theory of relativity fail in this almost infinitely dense and hot primal state of the universe. Only an all-encompassing theory of quantum gravity which unifies these two fundamental pillars of physics could provide an insight into how the universe began.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Golm/Potsdam and the Perimeter Institute in Canada have made an important discovery along this route. According to their theory, space consists of tiny “building blocks”. Taking this as their starting point, the scientists arrive at one of the most fundamental equations of cosmology, the Friedmann equation, which describes the universe. This shows that quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity really can be unified.
For almost a century, the two major theories of physics have coexisted but have been irreconcilable: while Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity describes gravity and thus the world at large, quantum physics describes the world of atoms and elementary particles. Both theories work extremely well within their own boundaries; however, they break down, as currently formulated, in certain extreme regions, at extremely tiny distances, the so-called Planck scale, for example. Space and time thus have no meaning in black holes or, most notably, during the Big Bang.
Daniele Oriti from the Albert Einstein Institute uses a fluid to illustrate this situation: “We can describe the behavior of flowing water with the long-known classical theory of hydrodynamics. But if we advance to smaller and smaller scales and eventually come across individual atoms, it no longer applies. Then we need quantum physics.” Just as a liquid consists of atoms, Oriti imagines space to be made up of tiny cells or “atoms of space”, and a new theory is required to describe them: quantum gravity.
Continuous space is broken down into elementary cells
In Einstein’s relativity theory, space is a continuum. Oriti now breaks down this space into tiny elementary cells and applies the principles of quantum physics to them, thus to space itself and to the theory of relativity describing it. This is the unification idea.
A fundamental problem of all approaches to quantum gravity consists in bridging the huge dimensional scales from the space atoms to the dimensions of the universe. This is where Oriti, his colleague Lorenzo Sindoni and Steffen Gielen, a former postdoc at the AEI who is now a researcher at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, have succeeded. Their approach is based on so-called group field theory. This is closely related to loop quantum gravity, which the AEI has been developing for some time.
The task now consisted in describing how the space of the universe evolves from the elementary cells. Staying with the idea of fluids: How can the hydrodynamics for the flowing water be derived from a theory for the atoms?
This extremely demanding mathematical task recently led to a surprising success. “Under special assumptions, space is created from these building blocks, and evolves like an expanding universe,” explains Oriti. “For the first time, we were thus able to derive the Friedmann equation directly as part of our complete theory of the structure of space,” he adds.
This fundamental equation, which describes the expanding universe, was derived by the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman in the 1920s on the basis of the General Theory of Relativity. The scientists have therefore succeeded in bridging the gap from the microworld to the macroworld, and thus from quantum mechanics to the General Theory of Relativity: they show that space emerges as the condensate of these elementary cells and evolves into a universe which resembles our own.
Quantum gravity could now answer questions regarding the Big Bang
Oriti and his colleagues thus see themselves at the start of a difficult but promising journey. Their current solution is valid only for a homogeneous universe — but our real world is much more complex. It contains inhomogeneities, such as planets, stars and galaxies. The physicists are currently working on including them in their theory.
And they have planned something really big as their ultimate goal. On the one hand, they want to investigate whether it is possible to describe space even during the Big Bang. A few years ago, former AEI researcher Martin Bojowald found clues, as part of a simplified version of loop quantum gravity, that time and space can possibly be traced back through the Big Bang. With their theory, Oriti and his colleagues are hoping to confirm or improve this result.
If it continues to prove successful, the researchers could perhaps use it to explain also the assumed inflationary expansion of the universe shortly after the Big Bang as well, and the nature of the mysterious dark energy. This energy field causes the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate.
Oriti’s colleague Lorenzo Sindoni therefore adds: “We will only be able to really understand the evolution of the universe when we have a theory of quantum gravity.” The AEI researchers are in good company here: Einstein and his successors, who have been searching for this for almost one hundred years.
Publication: Steffen Gielen, et al., “Cosmology from Group Field Theory Formalism for Quantum Gravity,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 031301 (2013);DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.031301
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Time Travel From Ancient Mythology to Modern Science
The universe is full of mysteries that challenge our current knowledge.
Time travelling and time machines have been a topic of science fiction and countless movies for many decades. In fact, it appears that the possibility to travel in time, either into the future or into the past, has appealed to the imagination of mankind for centuries. While many may think it is absurd to believe that we could travel back or forwards in time, some of the world’s most brilliant scientists have investigated whether it could one day be made a reality.
Albert Einstein for example, concluded in his later years that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, and most are familiar with his well-known concept of relativity. That is, that time is relative and not absolute as Newton claimed. With the proper technology, such as a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. Yet the wisdom of Einstein’s convictions had very little impact on cosmology or science in general. The majority of physicists have been slow to give up the ordinary assumptions we make about time.
However, if time travel really was possible, one can hardly contemplate what this may mean for humanity for whoever has the power to move through time, has the power to modify history. While this may sound attractive, it would be impossible to know the consequences of any alteration of past events, and how this would affect the future.
Time Travel in Ancient Mythology
Portrait of Urashima Tarō, part of a Japanese legend involving time travel, painted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Wikimedia Commons)
Portrait of Urashima Tarō, part of a Japanese legend involving time travel, painted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi (Wikimedia Commons)
If we look into ancient texts we can find a number of references to time travelling. In Hindu mythology, there is the story of King Raivata Kakudmi who travels to meet the creator Brahma. Even if this trip didn’t last long, when Kakudmi returned back to Earth, 108 yugas had passed on Earth, and it is thought that each yuga represents about 4 million years.
The explanation Brahma gave to Kakudmi is that time runs differently in different planes of existence. Similarly, we have references in the Quran about the cave of Al-Kahf. The story refers to a group of young Christian people, who in 250 AD tried to escape persecution and retreated, under God’s guidance, to a cave where God put them to sleep. They woke up 309 years later. This story coincides with the Christian story of the seven sleepers, with a few differences.
Another story comes from the Japanese legend of Urashima Taro. Urashima Taro was an individual who was said to visit the underwater palace of the Dragon God Ryujin. He stayed there for three days, but when he returned to the surface, 300 years had passed. In the Buddhist text, Pali Canon, it is written that in the heaven of the thirty Devas (the place of the Gods), time passes at a different pace where one hundred Earth years count as a single day for them. And there are many more references.
Scientific Research
Probably the most well-known story of accidental time travel is the Philadelphia experiment which allegedly took place in 1943 with the purpose of cloaking a ship and making it invisible to enemies’ radar. However, it was said that the experiment went terribly wrong – the ship not only vanished completely from Philadelphia but it was teleported to Norfolk and went back in time for 10 seconds. When the ship appeared again some crew members were physically fused to bulkheads, others developed mental disorders, a few disappeared completely, and some reported travelling into the future and back.
Allegedly, Nikola Tesla, who was the director of Engineering and Research at Radio Company of America at the time, was involved in the experiment by making all the necessary calculations and drawings and also providing the generators (however he wasn’t alive when the experiment took place, he died a few months before the experiment took place).
In 1960, we have another interesting case report of scientist Pellegrino Ernetti, who claimed that he developed a machine that would enable someone to see in the past, the Chronivisor. His theory was that anything that happens leaves an energy mark that can never be destroyed (something like the mystical Akashic Records). So he allegedly developed this machine that could detect, magnify and convert this energy into an image – something like a TV showing what happened in the past.
In the 1980s, there are reports of another controversial experiment, the Montauk project, which again allegedly experimented with time travel among other things. Whether the Philadelphia and Montauk experiments actually took place is still under debate. However, it is common sense to assume that the military would definitely be interested in the possibility of time travel and would engage in extensive research on the subject.
Moving on, in 2004, Marlin Pohlman applied for a patent for a method of gravity distortion and time displacement. Marlin Pohlman is a scientist, engineer, and member of Mensa with a Bachelor, MBA and PhD. And only last year, Wasfi Alshdaifat filed another patent for a space compression and time dilation machine that could be used for time travel.
Physicist Professor Ronald Lawrence Mallett of the University of Connecticut, is working on the concept of time travel, based on Einstein’s theory of relativity, and is absolutely convinced that time travelling is feasible. He predicts that human time travel will be possible in our century. Particle physicist Brian Cox agrees that time travel is possible but only in one direction.
We have the mysterious story of Ali Razeqi, managing director of the Iranian Centre for Strategic Inventions, who claimed that he developed a device that can see anywhere from 3 to 5 years in the future. His initial story disappeared from the internet a few hours after it was published.
In theory, time travel is possible, even if it is difficult to comprehend. Has the research cited above brought us closer towards making time travel a reality? If so, we can only hope that the technology does not get into the wrong hands.
Republished with permission from Ancient Origins. Read the original.
sprinkles
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[MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION]
Forward time travel is entirely possible. Just hop on an airplane to somewhere and you're doing it - and I don't mean the time zones, I mean literal change in time relativity. This is how the theory was tested, by atomic clocks being taken onto airliners and travelling around the world.
If you fly in an airplane your experience of time will be different based on your proximity to Earth's gravity. Being in a plane is enough to make a difference, and a further difference comes from the direction you fly. If you go east, time slows down even more for you than if you fly west.
This has been proven by repeated experiments. The difference would be on the order of nanoseconds, but it is there.
Forward time travel is entirely possible. Just hop on an airplane to somewhere and you're doing it - and I don't mean the time zones, I mean literal change in time relativity. This is how the theory was tested, by atomic clocks being taken onto airliners and travelling around the world.
If you fly in an airplane your experience of time will be different based on your proximity to Earth's gravity. Being in a plane is enough to make a difference, and a further difference comes from the direction you fly. If you go east, time slows down even more for you than if you fly west.
This has been proven by repeated experiments. The difference would be on the order of nanoseconds, but it is there.