Merkabah

[Skarekrow]

I love this…such an interesting change of perspective!


Our Model Of The Solar System Has Been Wrong This Entire Time!

Written by Amateo Ra|

If you walk into any classroom today, and likely ever since you were a kid yourself , there is one model being taught regarding the structure of our Solar System.
It’s the model that looks like this:

It’s the traditional orbiting model of the Solar System, or the Heliocentric Model, where our planets rotate around the sun.
While this isn’t entirely wrong, it’s omitting one very important fact.
The sun isn’t stationary.
The sun is actually travelling at extremely fast speeds, upward of 828,000 km/hr, or 514,000 miles an hour.
Our whole Solar System is orbiting the Milky Way Galaxy.
In fact it takes 220-Million Years for the Sun to orbit our Galaxy.

Knowing this to be true, our visual model of the Solar System needs to change, and has been inaccurate this whole time.
In fact, our planets are barreling through space with the sun, and literally creating a giant Cosmic DNA Helix, and a vortex similar to our Milky Way Galaxy.
Like this but in space, creating a never ending Sine Wave.

This entails that our Sun & the Planets of our Solar System are never in the same place.
When we make one rotation around the sun, we have already traveled millions of miles through space, meaning these Cosmic Cycles are far grander than we might have previously imagined.
Here are two video examples of the Helical Model of our Solar System:

This is one by Physicist Nassim Haramein, which clarifies the difference:
[video=youtube;zBlAGGzup48]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zBlAGGzup48[/video]

Here is a beautiful digital representation of how our solar system is actually a vortex.

[video=youtube;0jHsq36_NTU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0jHsq36_NTU[/video]

 

[Skarekrow]

And also for the galaxy...

[video=youtube;C4V-ooITrws]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=C4V-ooITrws[/video]

 

[Skarekrow]

More reasons why the concept of Hell is unjust...

What Happens to Christianity When People Stop Believing in Hell?

The appeal of hell as a part of the faith package appears to be in decline, even among Evangelicals.


Three years ago, my sister, who had long struggled with mental illness, hit her limit and jumped off a freeway bridge.
She lived.

She was rushed to the county trauma center, and by the time I arrived from Seattle she was hooked up to an array of life support technologies and monitors.
Brain trauma made it hard to know how much she understood of her situation or our conversations, and to know whether she would live.

One night, while she was in this state, I said to her, “Katha, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I want you to know that we all want for you whatever you want for yourself.
If you want to fight this thing and try again, we want that. If you are sick of fighting and ready to be done, that’s ok too.”

While I spoke to her, a nurse was doing record keeping at a computer terminal near the foot of her bed.
Some time later when I got up to leave, he approached me and said, “You know, if your sister dies right now she will go to hell.”

I was too flabbergasted to respond—incredulous that he would say this to me in a public taxpayer-funded hospital; even more incredulous that he would say it where she could hear, if she could hear.
I thanked him for his concern and left.

The Lake of Fire, Everlasting Punishment, Perdition, Gehenna, the Inferno, the Abyss, Outer Darkness Where There Shall be Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth . . . . Hell has many names and conjures many images—all of them aimed at triggering a sense of horror.

Some of these names and descriptions arguably can be found in the Bible—the Christian New Testament at least—and threats of eternal torture used to be a fine way for Christian ministers and missionaries to win converts or keep “the faithful” faithful.

Famed Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) waxed eloquent on the topic, elaborating why simple annihilation was insufficient punishment to satisfy the demands of divine justice.

Two hundred years later, Billy Graham drove tent revivals across America by pounding pulpits about the threat. Anglican author C.S. Lewis, beloved of modern Evangelicals, said, “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next” (Mere Christianity).

I think of heaven and hell as donkey motivators—carrots and sticks.
What is the most glamorous eternity an Iron Age peasant could dream of?
Streets of gold, gem encrusted walls, white robes, no work, and eternal youth.

How about the most horrific?
Monsters, darkness and agony, burning and thirst that never end.
Give me a drink, the rich man in hell begs Father Abraham in the book of Luke, just a drop on the end of a finger.
But Abraham instead reminds him that he already had his turn at the good things in life.

For two millennia, the threat of hell has been one of Christianity’s core assets.
It provided the recruiting tool known as Pascal’s Wager, defined thus by the Oxford dictionary: The argument that it is in one's own best interest to behave as if God exists, since the possibility of eternal punishment in hell outweighs any advantage of believing otherwise.
Better safe than sorry.

I once knew an elderly lawyer who had been a nontheist for decades though raised in Christian fundamentalism.
As death approached, he confided that although he knew hell couldn’t be real, he couldn’t stop thinking about it and wondering and worrying . . . What if I’m wrong?

I understand the fear; as a child in an evangelical family I asked Jesus into my heart several times, just to be sure.
Hell is a scary place.

For many people the threat of eternal damnation, instilled in childhood, is so powerful that they simply shut out any questions that might undermine their assurance of salvation.

Because the specter of hell is so frightening and has worked so well for two millennia, some Christian leaders are responding to the modern growth of skepticism by doubling down on the threat, working to make it more visual and visceral.

A traveling theatrical production called “Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames” makes its way from megachurch to megachurch illustrating the anguish of the damned.

The website Catholic Answers analyses Church doctrine and assures believers that hell exists and is already populated with sinners.
Come Halloween, we can expect another round of Evangelical “hell houses” aimed at wooing fright-loving, fun-loving teens and then convincing them the danger is real.

Pascal’s wager routinely makes the rounds of the internet as an argument for faith, often coupled with C.S. Lewis’s forced-choice “trilemma”: Jesus was a liar, lunatic, or Lord—Which one are you going to pick? (Note that both the wager and the trilemma are readily dismissed.

Lewis omitted, for example, the fourth possibility that the Jesus of the Bible was mostly legend, while Pascal fails to note that committing to the Christian god may condemn you to another god’s hell.
Eternal ice, anyone?
There are, after all, lots of versions of eternal torture to choose from.

But increasingly, the specter of a divine torture chamber may be something that turns people away from religion rather than chasing sheep into the fold and keeping them there.

Facebook memes compare the Christian god to an abuser who says I love you so much that I’ll hurt you if you don’t love me back.
Vyckie Garrison, founder of No Longer Quivering, uses the “Power and Control Wheel of Abuse” to illustrate her former relationship with Jesus.

New Calvinist fire-brands like women-are-penis-homes mega-pastor Mark Driscoll may wax eloquent about universal human depravity and eternal torture, but Christians broadly are becoming reluctant to say that anyone who doesn’t share their faith is going to be tortured forever—even if that is what they think.

When actor Robin Williams committed suicide in August after a long running battle with cyclical depression, Trent Horn, who writes for Catholic Answers, tweeted, “The rules for talking about Robin Williams: Don't say where he is now, don’t promote your own cause/message, do pray for him and his family.”

I sarcastically translated his tweet as, Don’t say what you think.
Don’t say what you think.
If you absolutely must talk about it, talk to someone who’s not listening.
Because the bottom line is this: for centuries the Catholic Church identified suicide as a mortal sin and denied a Catholic funeral and burial to those who committed suicide.

In actual practice these days, once a suicide has occurred Catholic priests often scramble to avoid blaming (and so condemning) the victim.
They point to mitigating circumstances like depression and suffering, which may diminish the free and conscious choice of the person in question and so his or her eternal culpability.

But even today, the United States Council of Catholic Bishops—acting as god’s authorities here on Earth, so they believe—have pitted themselves against death-with-dignity laws that allow for rational suicide of terminal patients.

They argue instead that dying men and women whose suffering can’t be relieved should be taught to embrace a Christian belief in redemptive suffering. (See Number 5 of the Ethical and Religious Directives that govern Catholic healthcare.)

That brings us back to the topic of hell, because the whole point of the Christian hell is that suffering there is not redemptive.
It is, somehow, simultaneously unendurable and endured eternally and fair, created and administered by a deity who knew in advance that most humans would end up there and yet who created us anyway because loves us so much .

This is where the moral house of cards collapses, and the value of hell as a recruiting device may as well, because it is increasingly difficult to convince educated people that they and their friends and children deserve infinite suffering for finite failings—or that a god who acts like an Iron Age tyrant (or domestic abuser) is the model of perfect love.

A group called Child Evangelism Fellowship aroused intense opposition in Portland last summer in part because outsiders to biblical Christianity were appalled that insiders would try to convert small children by threatening them with torture.

And so, increasingly the time-honored Christian doctrine of hell is being put into a dark closet where the folks most likely to shine a flashlight on it are anti-theists like me who would rather see it exposed to the bright light of reason and compassion or universalist Christians who question whether it was ever biblical to begin with.

The appeal of hell as a part of the faith package appears to be in decline, even among Evangelicals.
According to a 2011 survey, while 92% of Americans claimed some sort of belief in God, only 75% believed in hell.

A 2013 Harris poll put belief in the devil and hell at 58 percent.
As one theology professor, Mike Wittmer, put it: “In a pluralistic, post-modern world, students are having a more difficult time with (the idea of) people going to hell forever because they didn't believe the right thing.”

The decline in hell-belief may be due to the same factors that seem to be causing the decline in Bible belief more broadly—globalization and the internet.
It gets harder to imagine oneself blissfully indifferent to the eternal torture of Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, and atheists when those people have names and faces and are (Facebook) friends.

Even so, for many Christians the notion that sinners will suffer for eternity offers some lingering satisfaction.
This is possible only because most people who believe in hell also believe, at least on the surface, that they are part of an exclusive club that isn’t going there.

When Pentecostal Bishop Carleton Pearson transitioned from preaching hellfire and brimstone to preaching what he called, “the gospel of inclusion,” most of his congregation wasn’t ready for to go there.
He lost church, friends, and livelihood.

Ultimately, Pearson moved with his wife and family to Chicago, where he launched a “radically inclusive spiritual community.”
Retired Anglican bishop, John Shelby Spong, author of Why Christianity Must Change or Diepraised Pearson’s transformation: “The God Bishop Pearson is serving is a God of love, not judgment; a God of universalism, not sectarianism; a God of expansion, not control.” Spong called Pierson’s Gospel of Inclusion “intriguing, provocative and hopeful, a surprising twist in our ancient faith story.”

Radical inclusion means that Pearson opens the door even to even humanists and atheists, not as potential converts but as potential spiritual kin.
Without a hell to send them to, what else is one to do?

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

 

[Skarekrow]

Found this article very interesting…but it contains quite a few videos and so the forum will not let me post them all…so I have just left them as links to the videos instead of embedding the videos in the article.
Enjoy!

10 Things To Make You Believe In An Afterlife

Here’s a cheerful thought for you: You’re going to die.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day your brain will shut down, your heart will stop beating, and you’ll fall into an endless nothing from which no one can ever return. Depressing thought, huh?

Or is it?
While most of us may think death is the ultimate end, there’s plenty of evidence out there to suggest otherwise.

And while we’re not prepared to call it conclusive, it does make you start to wonder whether death really is the grand finale we think it is.


1.) Consciousness Continues After Death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w1JarYYWDfQ

Dr. Sam Parnia is a guy who knows about death. Hugely respected in the field of resuscitation, he’s a driving force in getting word out about procedures that could help revive patients many hours after cardiac arrest.

However, he also has a side line in the paranormal. And what he’s found out about consciousness is interesting, to say the least.
According to multiple interviews he’s given on the subject, Dr. Parnia is convinced human consciousness can survive brain death—the point when there’s zero blood or electrical activity in the brain.

Since 2008, he’s collected multiple accounts of near-death experiences (or, as he calls them, “after-death” experiences), which seem to have taken place when the subject’s brain was about as active as a loaf of bread. (Studying near-death experiences, or NDEs, is about as close as we can reasonably come to studying death or the afterlife, so they’ll feature heavily on this list.)

Very specifically, he reports that there is almost no chance these memories of white lights and tunnels and so on took place immediately before or after brain death; and that the idea of this being some sort of a low-level brain activity is utterly ludicrous.
In other words, they should be impossible.

Now, to be fair, Parnia stops short of actually endorsing any supernatural explanation.
Instead, he suggests we just don’t understand how consciousness works yet.

Still, it does open the doors to the possibility of an afterlife, especially when combined with the other stuff on this list.

2.) Verified Out-Of-Body Experiences

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WNbdUEqDB-k
​

​

In 1991, singer-songwriter Pam Reynolds developed a deadly aneurysm.
Faced with the choice of dangerous surgery or certain death, Reynolds opted for the risky procedure.

Placed in an artificial coma, her body was then super-chilled to 15.5 degrees Celsius (60 F), while literally all the blood was drained from her brain.
At the same time, her eyes were taped shut and her ears plugged with molded speakers that drowned all noise and allowed the monitoring of brain stem activity.
She was, in the words of her neurosurgeon, Robert Spetzler, “as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive.”

It was at this impossible point that Reynolds had her experience .
Suddenly floating above her body, she looked down to see 20 people at work.

A woman by her left groin was saying “her arteries are too small.”
A surgeon was holding a specialized brain saw behind her head.
“Hotel California” by The Eagles was playing.

She watched for a while then left for a tunnel of light, only returning to her body much later.
Months after the operation, she told Spetzler about her experience—and was shocked to hear him verify every detail.

Now, we should point out that Australian researcher Gerald Woerlee (who was not present at the operation) believes he has fully debunked this anecdote.
But we should also point out that Spetzler and cardiologist Michael Sabom refute his findings.

Even if Reynolds could somehow hear conversations, they insist that it would have been biologically impossible for her brain to form or retain memories at that time.
Further, there’s the fact that she managed to perfectly describe a specialized piece of medical equipment she’d never seen before.

As a one-off anecdote, it may not be proof of life after death, but it sure is tricky to dismiss.


3.) Meetings With The Dead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J_qBIw7qyHU

One of the classic components of a near-death experience is meeting dead relatives on the other side.
If most of us were to give this much thought, we’d probably conclude that it was due to extremely vivid hallucinations.
But Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia thinks there’s more to this than meets the eye.

In a paper published in 2013, he noted that the number of patients who record meeting dead people far outweighs those who report meeting live people.
If these were random hallucinations, you’d expect as many people to be welcomed into the afterlife by, say, Barack Obama as their dead grandma.

But even more interesting are the few verified cases where a subject has met a dead relative on the other side, despite having no way of knowing that this person had died.
And that’s before we even get into the cases of people meeting their never-before-seen biological parents and later describing them accurately.

Obviously, these reports are mostly anecdotal and therefore of limited scientific value, but they do raise the disturbing possibility that your long-dead great grandma is watching every time you shower.

4.) Extreme Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Qqc_wJS6-Q

Dr. Steven Laureys is a man who absolutely does not believe in life after death.
A director at the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research, he is firm that all NDEs can be explained away through physical phenomena.
Nonetheless, his research into such experiences has thrown up some facts which are difficult to explain away.

Chief among these is the “hyper-reality” of NDEs.
When Laureys and his team set out to study the memory of these events, they expected to find they worked in the same way as dreams or hallucinations: becoming more faded as time went by.

Instead, they found the exact opposite.
Rather than become dull with age, they found that the memory of an NDE stayed vibrant and fresh no matter how much time had passed—to the extent that it completely eclipsed the memory of real events.

This isn’t supposed to happen.
Generally, the only memories that are meant to stay vibrant are the big ones—like your wedding day or the birth of your kids or watching the Twin Towers come down.

These patients were unanimously reporting that their NDE was more vivid than all of that combined, with the added bonus that it never faded.
They retained perfect recall of that moment, convinced they’d experienced a fragment of heaven.

Dr. Laureys doesn’t believe this is anything supernatural.
However, he does believe all of us probably go through this when we die: an experience of “heaven” more intense than anything we’ve felt in all our waking lives.

In its own way, that might even count as an afterlife of sorts.

5.) Similarities

One of the most peculiar aspects of NDEs is how similar they all are.
If such visions can be accounted for by the random firing of brain cells, then surely they should all be wildly different.
The trouble is, every NDE report is anecdotal.

As such, there’s no telling whether NDEs are the same because that’s what happens when we die, or if they’re the same because people’s memories change and are influenced over time.
At least that was the case until a team of Dutch researchers decided to find out for sure.

In a study published in a highly respectable journal, The Lancet, the team looked at 344 patients who suffered cardiac arrest.
They then got them to talk about their experiences within one week of resuscitation.

Of those questioned, 18 percent could remember at least bits of what happened and 8–12 percent recalled perfect examples of a classic NDE.
That’s roughly between 28 and 41 unconnected people from 10 different hospitals recalling near-identical experiences over a comparatively short period of time.

At the very least, this suggests that such memories aren’t false.
While the team refrained from supernatural explanations, they did hypothesize it meant consciousness doesn’t arise from cell activity alone—potentially meaning our minds don’t always need a body to function.

6.) Personality Changes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YOeLJCdHojU

Remember how we said people who experienced NDEs usually retained perfect recall of the event?
Turns out those memories have consequences—and they’re all positive.

One of the doctors in the Dutch study above, Pim van Lommel, began looking into the effect of such memories in 2001.
He found that they caused a “permanent change” in the subject.

People lost their fear of death, became happier, more positive, and more outgoing.
Nearly all of them reported their NDE as a hugely positive thing that had even more impact on their lives as time passed.

Interestingly, these changes weren’t just restricted to people who were predisposed to positivity or religious belief.
No matter what their personality was before, those who’d experienced NDEs tended to share a very similar psychological profile afterwards.

As Dr. Mario Beauregard noted in an article for Salon, “importantly, these psychological and behavioral changes are not the kind of changes one would expect if this experience were a hallucination.”

According to Dr. Lommel, the most likely explanation is that the nature of consciousness means it can be experienced separately from the body, meaning NDEs are, in effect, real.

7.) Firsthand Experience

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=BtFZxdRiSek

In 2008, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander contracted a form of meningitis that resulted in E. coli bacteria flooding his brain.
He was quickly hospitalized and put in a coma for the best part of a week.
Exactly what happened to him during the course of that week has become the subject of great debate.

According to Dr. Eben himself, his brain essentially became a vegetable.
His neocortex was offline and he was incapable of any higher thought or brain activity.

He was basically due to die any second, at which point his “soul” went on a seven-day journey that is part-NDE and part 60s-style acid trip.
What he claims to have seen sounds at times dangerously like nonsense, but less easily dismissible is his assertion that his brain was being monitored in minute detail every moment of that weird week.

As far as he is concerned, it is a matter of verifiable fact that his brain was offline during his vision, to the point that it should have been incapable of producing even a dim and limited version of consciousness.

However, not everyone was convinced and several impressive attempts have been made to debunk his story.
A representative one can be found here, while Dr. Eben’s response to these criticisms can be found here.

We’ll let you decide whom you find most convincing, but if Eben is telling the truth, then his experience of death and those of others like him should not be ignored.

8.) Visions Of The Blind

Extraordinary claims rarely come more extraordinary than those of Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper in their book Mindsight.
In brief, years of research have convinced the two professors that people who were born blind often regain their sight during an NDE.

According to Salon, the pair interviewed 31 blind people for their study, all of whom claim to have had either an NDE or an OBE (out-of-body experience).
Of them, 14 had been blind from birth.

Yet they all reported a visual component to their experiences, whether in the form of a tunnel of light, seeing dead relatives, or even looking down on their own bodies from above. In other words, they appeared to prove the impossible.

Again, it needs to be noted that this is far from conclusive.
The entire study was based only on what their subjects could tell them, which is not a scientifically rigorous way of testing something.

At the very least though, their subjects genuinely believed they’d had these impossible experiences—which raises the unsettling question of how someone blind from birth could be capable of describing anything visual.

9.) Quantum Physics May Allow It

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bc44f_3QfwE

Biocentrism is a borderline-crazy, totally counterintuitive theory about the universe that tiptoes around the far-flung edges of acceptable mainstream science.
That being said, there’s also the faintest possibility that it’s true.
And if that’s the case, then it also makes an afterlife not just a possibility, but a certainty.

Pioneered by Professor Robert Lanza, the theory relies on the famous double-slit experiment, which suggests (among other things) that all possibilities in the universe happen simultaneously.

It’s only when an “observer” chooses to look that all these possibilities collapse into a single one—the one that happened in our universe.
According to Lanza, we can take this premise and blow it up to encompass everything.

If we do this, then time, space, matter, and everything else should only exist because of our perception of them.
If that’s true, then it means things like “death” stop being solid facts and become merely a part of this perception.

In effect, although we may appear to die in this universe, Lanza’s theory states our life should then become “a perennial flower that returns to bloom in the multiverse.”

His theory is almost certainly nuts.
But if it does turn out to be true, then it would mean the multiverse doesn’t just allow us to return after death, it physically demands that we do so.

10.) Children May Remember Their Past Lives

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h6M-nXjh_9I

Doctor Ian Stevenson may have one of the strangest claims to fame: He’s possibly the first person in history to have provided proof of reincarnation.

If that sounds crazy, wait till you read the rest.
Over the course of four decades, Stevenson meticulously researched and documented cases of children apparently being able to recall their previous lives.

And we don’t mean he indulged in some kid’s make-believe fantasy of having been an emperor.
We mean he recorded over 3,000 cases of children under the age of 5 who had very specific knowledge of the lives, loves, and deaths of people they couldn’t possibly have known about.

In one documented instance, a Sri Lankan toddler overheard the name of a town she’d never been to.
Immediately afterwards, she told her mother she’d been accidentally drowned there by her mentally-handicapped brother, before describing the town in great detail.

She also supplied details of the family she’d belonged to, including what they looked like, what their house was like, and what her name had been.
Twenty-seven out of 30 of her wild claims later checked out.

Neither the girl, nor her family, nor anyone she knew had any prior connection to this town or the dead child.
But the weirdness doesn’t stop there.

Stevenson documented children who had phobias linked to previous deaths, children with birth defects that mirrored their manner of dying, and even three children who flew into a screaming rage when they recognized their “murderers.”

In nearly every case, he could link the child’s claims to an unconnected real person; and each time he investigated a case, he left behind research so thorough it would put most mainstream academics to shame.

Now, before we declare this final proof of life after death and throw away all our critical faculties, we should point out that Stevenson’s work isn’t totally watertight.
As this essay shows, several of his studies may have been contaminated by using unreliable translators and his research as a whole relies on putting a whole lot of trust in a succession of random strangers.

In other words, his work is probably thorough enough to convince the agnostic, yet nowhere near airtight enough to win over the skeptic.
But if there’s one thing we can take from the case of Dr. Stevenson and others on this list, it’s that we probably shouldn’t fear dying.

Who knows?
It might even be the best darn thing that will ever happen to us.

 

[Skarekrow]

What I find especially interesting is the idea that these experiences are “hyper-real” to these people, or even more real than our day to day lives.

Near Death Experience Documentary - commonalities of the experience


[video=youtube;nTuMYaEB35U]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=nTuMYaEB35U[/video]

This video explores the commonalities of the Near Death Experience and its possible implications and meanings for us while we reside on this planet.​

 

[Skarekrow]

My own personal opinion on what happens after we die is that all those stories of NDEs share similar structure and they usually end with becoming one with an all soul-encompasing ball of light of unconditional love...have truth to them.
And I believe this is why humans have religion…because some place inside of their soul knows that there is indeed an afterlife.
We believe in things like this IMO not because we are ego-driven and the concept of us blinking out of existence is too much for us to overcome as an individual…but because somehow we innately know there is something. I think the fear comes from the unknowable parts of that.
It’s sort-of like Plato's Cave Allegory…we fear the shadows because we cannot see what is casting them…we fear our death because we innately know that our soul continues on, but the unknowing of just how and what happens creates the fear.

 

[Tin Man]

[/SIZE]
Believing in Fiction

The Rise of Hyper-Real Religion by Ian ‘Cat’ Vincent

Interesting. Reminds me quite a bit of the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman where newer gods such as the internet and television battled against older ones such as Odin and Anansi. I highly recommend it, Gaiman raised a lot of relevant points on how the evolution of ideology reflects the evolution of society.

I think it's also interesting how historical figures become more mythological in nature. Tesla, Lincoln, Marx; their works and lives are now less important than what people see them as an idol for. Even the idea of Hitler is changing, with some places likening him to a sort of Hello Kitty figure.

 

[Tin Man]

I thought that said rawrforbeauty. For a minute, I thought [MENTION=2240]rawr[/MENTION] had created a new religion. And before I had been able to establish mine as well.

 

[Eventhorizon]

Precognition and Porn

New evidence for PSI?

Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images



It’s rare for academic parapsychological research to garner coverage in the mainstream press, but a paper by Professor Daryl J Bem of Cornell University has managed to cause something of a stir outside the usual circles. Perhaps that’s because its author, unlike his mostly cautious and often actively sceptical academic peers, claims to have produced results suggesting that humans are capable of such feats as precognition and premonition.

Prof. Bem of Cornell University, New York State, carried out a series of nine different experiments involving over 1,000 volunteer students, and has published the results in a paper entitled “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”, which will appear in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Bem, a self-described maverick, started out as a physicist but switched fields in the 1960s, becoming a social psychologist. He has held senior posts at Cornell, Stanford and Harvard, and has published widely on self-perception, personality theory and sexual orientation. He also has a long-standing interest in psi, and this paper is the culmination of eight years of research.

Bem defines psi as “anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms”, and chose to study “precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process”. His methodology was simple, testing for “anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses” by “time reversing” well-established psychological effects “so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur”.

One experiment involved the students being shown a long list of words and being asked to remember as many as possible. They were then asked to type a selection of words randomly selected by computer from the original list. In an apparently striking example of causality seemingly working in reverse, the students proved significantly better at recalling words they would later type.

In another experiment, devised to test precognition, Bem provided his volunteers with the following instructions: “This is an experiment that tests for ESP. It takes about 20 minutes and is run completely by computer. First you will answer a couple of brief questions. Then, on each trial of the experiment, pictures of two curtains will appear on the screen side by side. One of them has a picture behind it; the other has a blank wall behind it. Your task is to click on the curtain that you feel has the picture behind it. The curtain will then open, permitting you to see if you selected the correct curtain. There will be 36 trials in all. Several of the pictures contain explicit erotic images (e.g., couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts). If you object to seeing such images, you should not participate in this experiment.”

Which curtain covered an image was selected randomly by computer, which should have given subjects a 50 per cent chance of correctly locating the image. The results were interesting, to say the least, with subjects achieving an overall hit-rate of 53.1 per cent for the pornographic pictures; while this may not sound all that impressive, statistically speaking it is significantly above chance. Their hit-rate on the neutral, non-erotic pictures was 49.8 per cent. Similar above-chance results were found in eight of the nine experiments, and across all nine an average ‘affect size’ of 0.22 was obtained.

Bem’s hope is that his results will be taken seriously in academia. Certainly, his tests both build upon well-known experimental paradigms and take care to minimise the contact between experimenter and subject — even the data collection is an automated process. The paper passed the peer-review process, with Charles Judd, who oversaw it for the JPSP, commenting that the some of the journal’s “most trusted reviewers” were involved. Even psi-sceptic Joachim Kreuger of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, was uncharacteristically impressed. “My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can’t be true,” he wrote. “Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn’t see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order.” He also found Bem’s method of using time-reversed versions of established psychological phenomena “a stroke of genius”, providing psychologists with tests that could be easily evaluated, and perhaps more importantly, replicated elsewhere.

Such replicability was one of Bem’s main aims in constructing the experiments, and ‘replication packs’ are available online for others to use. We have no doubt that sceptical (para)psychologists everywhere will soon be running their own tests in the hope of demonstrating that Bem’s results — like those of most psi experiments, historically — prove non-replicable or methodologically flawed. Prof. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from the University of Hertfordshire known for debunking psi claims, blogged that he’d already found a serious potential problem in the way the data was collected.

Daryl J Bem: “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect”, available online as a pdf at: www.dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf; www.hplusmagazine.com, 4 Nov; New Scientist, 11 Nov; Wired, 15 Nov; D.Telegraph, 18 Nov 2010.

Yes. I see the need to use porn in this experiment rather than say a picture of a dog, rabbit, street sign or even kitchen appliances....

 

[Skarekrow]

Yes. I see the need to use porn in this experiment rather than say a picture of a dog, rabbit, street sign or even kitchen appliances....

It’s probably because of the greater reaction in the person that is more easily measured, than say the shocking picture of a stop sign.
I know this test has also been conducted with violent images.

 

[Eventhorizon]

It’s probably because of the greater reaction in the person that is more easily measured, than say the shocking picture of a stop sign.
I know this test has also been conducted with violent images.

Right. Here I thought it was just a clever way for the researcher to get away with having porn on his work computer. "I need that porn for my research. "

 

[Skarekrow]

Interesting. Reminds me quite a bit of the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman where newer gods such as the internet and television battled against older ones such as Odin and Anansi. I highly recommend it, Gaiman raised a lot of relevant points on how the evolution of ideology reflects the evolution of society.

I think it's also interesting how historical figures become more mythological in nature. Tesla, Lincoln, Marx; their works and lives are now less important than what people see them as an idol for. Even the idea of Hitler is changing, with some places likening him to a sort of Hello Kitty figure.

Aren’t those great books?! Neil Gaiman is one of my all time favorites…going all the way back to Sandman…which they are supposedly trying to turn into a movie, which is a daring feat in itself. I would much prefer to see the movie version of “Good Omens” or “The Graveyard Book” (those folks that did Coraline should grab that one).
If you like Gaiman then I have a suggestion for you…I got the series for Christmas this last time around. It’s “The Age of Misrule” series by Mark Chadbourn.
http://www.markchadbourn.co.uk/age-of-misrule/
Anyhow, I really enjoyed the books and would have liked to see the story continue although it had a good ending.

I thought that said rawrforbeauty. For a minute, I thought @rawr had created a new religion. And before I had been able to establish mine as well.

I know… [MENTION=2240]rawr[/MENTION] is sneaky.
Look out.

 

[Skarekrow]

Right. Here I thought it was just a clever way for the researcher to get away with having porn on his work computer. "I need that porn for my research. "

That would be a fantastic excuse wouldn’t it…hahaha…”It’s for my “research” honey!"

 

[Skarekrow]

A Reality Beyond Death?

Excerpted from 'Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife'

-----------------
We often think of our identity in terms of our physical body, but is it just something that we — as only a consciousness — simply use as a vehicle?

This is an interesting idea, and has been with us throughout human history, largely built into the religious beliefs of cultures around the world.

But we should be careful of falling into the trap of thinking about an afterlife existence based simply on the religious or cultural models we have been brought up with.
Most people who were exposed to some sort of religion in their upbringing are imprinted with the fairly simplistic idea that surviving death means a transparent, ethereal version of you floats ‘up’ to a heaven of fluffy clouds, and lives there for eternity in happiness.

Who knows, perhaps elements of this are correct — some of near-death experiences and other visions of an afterlife actually do correlate in some respects with these ideas.
But perhaps also these experiences are filtered through an overlay of our own expectations and cultural beliefs, and the ‘true’ experience could be fundamentally different.

It’s fun to consider some of these possibilities.

The way our view of an external realm ‘beyond reality’ can change is illustrated well by the science fiction blockbuster The Matrix, with Neo taking the red pill and ‘waking up’ into the ‘real’ world, despite having thought until that point that the computer-generated Matrix was the real world.

Before the age of computers the idea that we might be inside some sort of virtual reality, with the ‘real us’ residing in another realm, was barely known.
Certainly, versions of this idea existed before the computer age, notably in discussions of the strange world of dreams.

For example, the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once remarked on the difficulty of distinguishing where ‘reality’ lies with the following words:

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man”.

​

The influential 17th century philosopher René Descartes also wondered how we could actually know what reality is, given that our senses can be so unreliable, and yet it is only through these senses (and then subsequent interpretation by the brain) that we comprehend the world ‘out there’.

Descartes deduced that all we can be sure of about ‘reality’ is just one thing — that if we think, then we must in some way exist, at the very least as just a mind.

He summarized this view with his well-known maxim ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’).
Beyond that, for all we know, we could just be a ‘brain in a vat’ — a piece of meat hooked up to sensors that trick our mind into thinking it is undergoing experiences in a virtual world.

The Matrix took all these older ideas and made them new again by making them the centerpiece of a movie about a false reality.

The fact that all of our sensorial experience of ‘reality’ must necessarily be filtered subjectively through the brain — and thus isn’t ‘reality’ at all (for example, we apprehend the world very differently to an infrared-sensing rattlesnake) — was enunciated in Hindu culture via the termmaya (illusion): the idea that we can never identify or comprehend the actual truth or reality of the world, only (at best) a fragment of it.

But in the 21st century, the ‘simulation argument’ — the suggestion that all of what we think of as ‘reality’ is actually a simulation, and that until now we have been unaware of the fact — has gone mainstream.

Not only through the popularity of The Matrix, but through first-hand experience: many computer gamers now spend several hours a day immersed in the virtual worlds of first-person shooters.

As an example of how things are progressing in the world of virtual reality immersion, see this recent demonstration:
Given the speed of technological development, it no longer seems impossible that one day a computer might be able to be hooked up directly to our brain, and be able to ‘trick’ us into thinking we are in another world.

In fact Nick Bostrom, Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, has said that he feels there is about “a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation”.[SUP]1
[/SUP]
Meanwhile, physicist Frank Tipler believes that, through extrapolation of the laws of physics, it is inevitable that the sentient beings of the far distant future will be virtually omnipotent, given the likely scale of information processing at that time.

This ‘Omega Point’, as Tipler terms it, will be a time in which such beings will be able to ‘see’ the future, as well as all of history up until that point, which will allow them to ‘resurrect’, within a virtual universe, every being that has lived.[SUP]2
[/SUP]
Certainly a different type of ‘heaven’ than we normally contemplate…

The small selection of ideas outlined above range all the way from ‘plausible’ to ‘what the hell were they smoking?’.
My point in mentioning them, however, is to show that our everyday assumptions about the world — as per the current orthodox scientific and religious views — may be only part of the picture, or perhaps even largely wrong.

At any point in history until now, our assumptions about both ourselves, and the cosmos, have often been incorrect.

For example, for thousands of years up until the 16th century, most people believed our Sun, the planets and the heavenly sphere rotated around the Earth — and though it now seems silly, it was actually common-sense based on their observations and the knowledge they had available to them at that time; from the human frame of reference, we do indeed appear to remain still, while the heavenly bodies rotate around us across the sky.

We should therefore be careful in assuming that any of our current views are correct — from a belief in a God that will resurrect us once dead, through to thinking that we’re simply meat puppets of little to no significance in the greater cosmos.

What cannot be denied, however, is the power of science in leading us to better ideas.
Science should not be discarded just because we don’t like what it is telling us.

In the last few centuries we have discovered an enormous amount through the use of rational thinking and the scientific method (although as the eminent American physicist John Archibald Wheeler once remarked, “As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance”).

But we should also be careful of the dangerous assumption that what we know now is the limit of knowledge, or at least that we have most things correct and only need to finesse the details from here.
Such assumptions have resulted in some genuine scientists becoming outcasts simply due to the ‘fringe’ topics that they research, even though they believe in the efficacy of science and that it is the correct tool for the job.

Dr. Sam Parnia is unequivocal in his opinion on the role science can play in exploring the question of what happens to consciousness at the time of death. “I see no reason why a priest should tell us about death,” he states, “when we have all this technology available”.[SUP]3
[/SUP]
However, we should also be careful not to get so carried away with our desire for undeniable evidence that we diminish people’s personal opinion or worldview.

We all make our best guess at how the world works from the evidence we have at hand — truly, none of us know the ultimate truth.
And if there is a ‘next world’, it may well be that our science applies to it as much as it might apply to the ‘true world’ beyond a virtual reality.

All we can do is use science to its limits in order to present ourselves with the best models of reality that we can construct — although perhaps we should be a little more open to integrating that science with the testimony of those that claim to have caught a glimpse of a world beyond the veil of death.

But you shouldn’t need me to tell you this.
Some two and a half thousand years ago, the great Greek philosopher Plato illustrated the issue perfectly with his Allegory of the Cave, a fictional dialogue between his mentor Socrates and his brother Glaucon.

The former asks the latter to consider the scenario of a group of prisoners held within a cave since childhood, chained so that they cannot move even their heads; they face away from the cave’s entrance and can see only a wall before them.

Behind them at a distance a fire blazes, and between them and the fire is a raised walkway over which passes a parade of various figures.

As such, the prisoners can see only their own shadows and the shadows of those that pass over the walkway behind them; any sounds they hear echo off the wall, and thus appear to come from the shadow of the figure making the sound. “To them”, says Socrates, “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images”.

Then Socrates ask Glaucon to consider the scenario where one of the prisoners was released: “At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive someone saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision”.

Though the objects he now sees are the ‘real objects’, and not a shadow illusion, Socrates notes that the prisoner might well instead think that what he sees before him is an hallucination, given that they are beyond anything he has previously witnessed.

Led up and out of the cave into the open world beyond, Socrates then notes that though the emancipated prisoner would be initially blinded by the light, he would eventually grow accustomed to the ‘upper world’, and at some point would witness his own true body and realize he is more than a shadow.

He would likely also, says Socrates, now understand that the ‘wisdom’ of the cave prisoners was clearly flawed and pitiable, and have great disdain for any among them who seemed to be the best at observing and making predictions about the shadows, given their illusory quality.

And if a prisoner were to return to the cave, Socrates notes, his vision would no longer be suited to the land of shadows — so much so that the prisoners still there might mock him:

“Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death”.

​

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.


Compare Plato’s allegory with the near-death experience — NDErs are taken out of ‘the cave’, shown things that make no sense to their usual perceptions (consider the many reports of 360° vision for example), and upon their return are unable to communicate what they’ve seen to others in the shadow language of the cave world (the ineffable nature of the experience).

All they can say is they know what they saw was ‘real’…more real than the shadows at least.
In the cave, however, they are regarded as “bewildered”, and laughed at.

I’m sure many near-death experiencers would relate well to this allegory.

In short, the message we should take from Plato’s allegorical tale is simple: while we should employ science and critical thinking to get as close as we can to understanding what ‘reality’ is, we should also always keep in mind that we may still, even in the 21st century, have the barest comprehension of the truth.

For as J.B.S. Haldane once remarked, “my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose”.

For extended discussion of this topic, and the scientific evidence suggesting that consciousness might survive death, grab the ebook or paperback editions of Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife, available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

-----------------

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html

[2] Tipler, Frank J. The physics of immortality: modern cosmology, God and the resurrection of the dead. Random House Digital, Inc., 1994.

[3] Appleyard, Bryan. “The Living Dead”, in The Times Online (December 14, 2008).

 

[Skarekrow]

​

Over 50 Geoglyphs Discovered In Kazakhstan

photo credit: Image copyright DigitalGlobe, courtesy Google Earth, via Live Science

Using Google Earth, researchers have discovered an archeological gem in northern Kazakhstan–more than 50 previously unknown geoglyphs of different geometric shapes and sizes sprawled across the landscape.
Geoglyphs are large designs created on the surface of the ground, usually made by arranging stones or sculpting the earth.

The newly discovered shapes include squares, rings, crosses and swastikas, ranging from 90 to 400 meters in size (300 to 1300 feet).
While the latter may now be associated with the Nazis, it is actually an ancient symbol that has been used for over 3,000 years by many cultures around the world, including in China, Europe and India.

Before the Nazis adopted the swastika, it was widely used as a symbol of prosperity, good fortune and power.

[Images: copyright DigitalGlobe, via Google Earth]

Archeologists from Kostanay University, Kazakhstan, and Vilnius University, Lithuania, have been using a variety of techniques to examine the geoglyphs over the past year, including ground-penetrating radar, aerial photography and dating. According to the team, you would struggle to spot the shapes from the ground, but they are clearly visible from above.

The majority of the shapes were forged by creating mounds in the earth, but the swastika was fashioned from wood.
Upon excavating the site, the team also discovered remnants of ancient structures and fireplaces, which could suggest that it was a place for ritual activities.

While the team is currently unsure why the geoglyphs were created or what drove people to use geometric shapes, they postulate that they could have served as a mark of land ownership.

“As of today, we can only say one thing–the geoglyphs were built by ancient people.
By whom and for what purpose, remains a mystery,” Kostanay archeologists Irina Shevnina and Andrew Logvin told Live Science.

Geoglyphs are widely distributed across the globe, but perhaps the most famous example is Peru’s Nazca Lines.
Some 700 shapes have been discovered so far in the Nazca desert, southwestern Peru, which fall into two categories: natural objects, such as snakes and birds, and geometric figures.

These geoglyphs also vary considerably in size with the largest measuring almost 300 meters (935 feet).
Recently, previously unseen figures were revealed in the area, which were probably exposed by a sandstorm.

Image credit: Irina Callegher, "Famous hummingbird, Nazca lines," via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

These enigmatic designs can also be found in England, such as the Uffington White Horse which was created by carving into the chalky hillside, and other countries such as the US, Chile and Russia.

Satellite imagery has been extremely useful in spotting these structures which may have otherwise evaded our eyes, so who knows what other exciting designs could be exposed in the future.

Image credit: Dave Price, "Uffington White Horse," via Flickr. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

 

[Eventhorizon]

[video]http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/09/26/new-mexico-police-catch-ghost-on-camera/?intcmp=features[/video]

 

[Skarekrow]

[video]http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/09/26/new-mexico-police-catch-ghost-on-camera/?intcmp=features[/video]

Hmmm…I don’t know about that one…it seems like it could be a headlight reflection or something.
It would be nice to have higher quality video.
Thanks for posting it!

 

[Skarekrow]

This is the way I feel having been witness to more forceful "anomalous events”.

Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core

I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism

Sep 16, 2014 |By Michael Shermer

Credit: Izhar Cohen


Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain.
What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural.
My answer is: yes, now I have.

The event took place on June 25, 2014.
On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany.

She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16.
In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged and several precious heirlooms lost, including her grandfather's binoculars.

His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness.
I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder.

I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface.
Silence.

We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.
Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings.

Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely.
She wished her grandfather were there to give her away.

She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom.
We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music.

We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio.
Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said.
She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted.

We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory.

My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio.
Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.

What does this mean?
Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning.

In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.
Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena.

Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval.

I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well.
I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account.
And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

This article was originally published with the title "Infrequencies."

 

[Eventhorizon]

This is the way I feel having been witness to more forceful "anomalous events”.

Anomalous Events That Can Shake One’s Skepticism to the Core

I just witnessed an event so mysterious that it shook my skepticism

Sep 16, 2014 |By Michael Shermer

Credit: Izhar Cohen


Often I am asked if I have ever encountered something that I could not explain.
What my interlocutors have in mind are not bewildering enigmas such as consciousness or U.S. foreign policy but anomalous and mystifying events that suggest the existence of the paranormal or supernatural.
My answer is: yes, now I have.

The event took place on June 25, 2014.
On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany.

She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16.
In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged and several precious heirlooms lost, including her grandfather's binoculars.

His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness.
I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder.

I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface.
Silence.

We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.
Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings.

Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely.
She wished her grandfather were there to give her away.

She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom.
We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music.

We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio.
Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said.
She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted.

We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory.

My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio.
Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.

What does this mean?
Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning.

In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.
Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena.

Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval.

I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well.
I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account.
And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

This article was originally published with the title "Infrequencies."

How did the radio work? Battery. .wind up etc? Could be plug in if it was Iin the desk working..

 

[Skarekrow]

Remote Tampering

​

An excerpt from "Perceptual Augmentation Techniques, Part One--Executive Summary" by Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, SRI Project 3183, Final Report, Covering the Period January 1974 through February 1975. RECENTLY DECLASSIFIED BY THE CIA.

"The goal of this program was to determine the extent to which certain individuals obtain accurate information about their environment under conditions thought to be secure against such access and without the use of known human perceptual modalities...

"As a result of exploratory research on human perception carried out in SRI's Electronics and Bioengineering Laboratory, we observed the emergence of a perceptual channel whereby certain individuals access and describe, by means of mental imagery, randomly-chosen remote sites located several miles or more away.

In this final report, we document the study at SRI of this human information-accessing capability which we call 'remote viewing'..."

"Perturbation of Remote Equipment"

"Additional experimentation was initiated to investigate the possibility that the remote sensing channel may possess bilateral aspects; for example, it might be possible to couple energy from an individual to a remote location as well as in reverse.

To test this hypothesis, experiments were carried out with a sensitive magnetometer in an adjoining laboratory as the remote target.
Use of an ORD-developed magnetometer was arranged by ORD personnel.

In a series of thirteen 10-trial runs with 50 seconds per trial, perturbations of the magnetometer by a subject gifted in remote viewing were obtained under strict randomization protocol, yielding a positive result significant at the p=0.004 level.

Because of the potential significance and implications of such findings, we intend to collect considerable additional data before arriving at a a hard conclusion.

Nonetheless, as a tentative conclusion there is evidence that a piece of sensitive equipment can be perturbed by a subject during remote viewing, thus implying that the information channel under investigation may sustain energy transfer in either direction."