Music and Human Transformation

It can be interesting to think back of our teachers, people that had an impact on our lives. I recently found myself thinking about an unusual teacher I met soon after finishing my graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University.  Unusual, because the man I’m thinking of liked to boast to me that he never read a book!

It begins with a curious dream I had of a slightly rotund and merry man who said he was a music teacher, and was prepared to be my instructor, casually adding with a smile that there would be no instruments.  I woke up puzzled. I in fact had a jazz musician friend who gave me a few lessons for the flute I was learning. I had a special interest in music, thanks to an incident in the last days of the life of Socrates.  Facing execution, Socrates is said to have dreamt several times of a goddess who had a message for him. “Socrates,” she said, “make music.”  Socrates replied by saying that philosophy was the greatest music, but this did not fly with the goddess. She returned to his dreams and repeated her message urging him to make music. 

Meanwhile, puzzled by my dream, a few days later I received a telephone call from a friend of mine, a psychotherapist, who told me about a new music teacher she discovered. Fresh from an ashram in the Himalayas, and on a world teaching tour.  Swami Nada Brahmananda was a rare practitioner of Indian sound yoga, and I should take lessons from him, my friend Alida said.            

So I checked out the place on the lower West Side and arranged for my first lesson with the musical swami.  I still recall how I felt when he first called out my name to come into his little space. It was as if we were old friends; he invited me to sit on the floor next to him. “Mind-control is life.  Rhythm is music,” were the first words he spoke.  It wasn’t long before I realized I was in the presence of a different kind of fellow human.  Educated and evolved, but not in the Western mold. “I never read a book,” he said.  He had no interest in paper, he said triumphantly.  Everything he knew, he knew by heart, and with heart, I would add. In fact, he had memorized about five hundred ragas.  The ragas were songs, stories, and lessons from various Hindu styles and traditions, touching on every aspect of life.  These he sang, played, and taught.  His musical lens on reality was magical and transcendent

To begin with, consider his name, Nada. In one scholarly translation, it refers to the fusion of breath and the fire of intellect.  This could be a description of John Coltrane and his transcendent jazz. Nada was singular in several ways. He had amazing health and lived to be ninety-eight. I met him when he was in his eighties; his skin was like a child’s.  Energy without limit seemed available to him.  He normally slept two hours a night.  Stranger yet, he never had dreams; scientists who studied him while sleeping saw no physical signs of REM sleep. By far, I am struck by the way Nada meditated. Nada Kumbaka was the monk-musician’s daily sadhana (spiritual practice), his special form of meditation. This consisted of him taking one breath and drumming on the tabla while he focused on an icon of the god Shiva. On the one breath, never blinking, he played for thirty-five minutes, an ability he demonstrated in an airtight chamber while under study by the India Medical Institute of New Delhi. His various abilities have been verified by Indian and American scientists (e.g. the Menninger Foundation.)

One more point I want to make about my former teacher.  He often reminded me that we humans are at the tail end of the Kaliyuga, the Age of Conflicts.  It was Nada’s conviction that music, which touches and can transform the soul, is the best antidote to the horrors of the Kaliyuga.  Ordinary, practical consciousness, tied to the normal ego, will not save us from the violent and heartless world we have created. A new paradigm of consciousness is needed.  Would like to hear from readers on this point.

 

A Remarkable Interviewl on Alien Visitation

Ross Coulthart has been reporting on the U.S. cover up of what is now known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).  Notably, they constantly invade American airspace with impunity.  Attempts to engage with these entities in the air invariably fail. In fact, they are known repeatedly to disengage any mechanisms that we deploy to stop, trap, or take them out. There’s no doubt about the reality of an unknown, and more advanced, intelligence operating in our midst.  But what do we really know about UAP other than their existence? What, who, from where, and why?

I was struck by Coulthart’s remarkable interview with Jake Barber, a U.S. airman in a UAP crash retrieval program. (Available on YouTube)  As far as government secrecy, Barber is a whistleblower who feels compelled to make public information of dramatic interest to Americans.   Barber was assigned the task of transporting a crashed, egg-shaped, unidentified ‘vehicle’ to a research facility where scientists try to reverse engineer the mysteries of the strange ‘craft’.

Several things especially struck me, beyond what I already knew. Barber describes the bare egg-shaped object, inconceivable how it flew, while noting some transient ill bodily effects he suffered. The second point that stood out in the interview was unexpected. Jake Barber recounted the strange emotional effect that came over him when he encountered the alien object he was tasked to transport.  An articulate man, he struggled to express it as the melting of himself into a feminine energy. He stressed the idea of his consciousness as playing a role in the UAP story and citing several parapsychological notions.  Ross then asked if Jake was ready to shock listeners by acknowledging a psychical dimension to his story. He wants to shock his audience, Jake replied, smiling. Apparently, we need to be shocked into a new consciousness.  Rational argument and evidence work with a minority; most of us need to be shocked out of our habitual selves and assumptions.

Barber’s surprising sense of the transcendent feminine reminded me of the 1917 Virgin Mary appearance to three children. There seems to be a connection between Marian visions and UAP.  The so-called miracle of the sun, was, I believe, a wonderful UAP-induced illusion of the sun behaving strangely. That’s the only way I can make sense of the miracle of Fatima.  Certainly, the real sun did not swoop down on the Cova da Iria and terrify 71 thousand people into thinking it was the end of the world.  (See Jacques Vallee and John Keel on the ufological link to the famous Fatima phenomena.)   In any case, it is surprising that this highly trained government official should undergo a mystical feminine presence in connection with moving a crashed UFO object.

Now to the perhaps most interesting assertion about the secret governmental UAP research. In the interview, Barber began to talk about psionics, people with psychic abilities that work with the reverse engineering crew. What I heard this time was incredible.  What I heard from Barber is that the government has a crew of psychically gifted individuals working together trying to evoke contact with the unknown intelligences.  And if I heard right, they have succeeded.  Details of the latter assertion, that humans are learning to psychically communicate with intelligent nonhumans, were lacking.

                  This is not the first time I’ve heard about groups of people that try to initiate contact with the mysterious visitors.  Barber made a curious remark, aware of its oddness, that children may in fact be the best psychic operators for the research. Of course, people trying mentally to communicate with higher beings is commonplace in religion, another topic to explore.  For now, thanks to Ross and Jake and other courageous people like them, we can be sure that the government has been and still is lying to us about UAP.  We are being visited by intelligent beings from outside our world of space and time. There are full scale operations under way trying to extract secrets of alien technologies from crashed ‘vehicles’ likely to have enormous consequences for life on earth.      

Tale of a Small Miracle

 In my last few blogs, I told stories about what seem like supernormal rescues.  That occasionally an unknown agency is said to intervene in human affairs and pull off something impossible to help someone is an intriguing idea.   Coincidentally, while writing up these posts, I had an incident that looked like a supernormal rescue.  My story is not as dramatic or poetic as the previous posts, but it counts as physically unexplained, as far as I can see.  If you have a possible explanation, please share.  

On the evening of January 8^th, 2025, it was remarkably cold and the ground almost everywhere you walked on was solid ice from a snowstorm. After dinner with a good friend, I mounted the ice-covered stone stairway up to the door of my house.  I realized then that I forgot to turn the outside light on.  I was stuck in total darkness and had to grope to find the doorknob. I noticed the key wasn’t working.  Finally, after finagling, I inserted the key, but it was jammed.  I could not open the door to my house. I then walked to the front door; the key was equally inept at opening my front door. 

Why, I wondered, go rogue on me on this precise  night when the temperature was 19 degrees Fahrenheit? I looked around and saw no lights on in my neighbor houses.  How could they help anyway?  What I needed was a locksmith.  Maybe I could make an emergency call, I thought, and reached for my phone.  Then I realized I left my phone home too.

I tried again to get into my house, but the key failed to do its job, first time in many years of unfailing use.  What was I supposed to do? The best I came up with was to spend the night in my car. I looked at the door that had me locked out in the cold.  The top half of it consisted of four small windows. I decided to break the lower left-hand window, assuming I could then reach inside and open the door, and let myself in.  I then proceeded to hit that window with my elbow, four very hard, focused blows—but, to my amazement, nothing broke. But the blows shattered the inside of the glass, the surface remaining perfectly smooth. Totally frustrated, I decide, once more, to try to open the door.  I insert the key and lo! it slides right in, and the door opens!

Inside my house, I feel grateful but somewhat amazed.  It was strange the way the key did not quite fit, jammed and failed to open the door.  I had tried about ten times at least to make the key work, but always failed. The one time it worked, there was no problem at all; the key slipped perfectly in, as it always did.  Why then did it work exactly once when I desperately needed it to work?

Let’s entertain an antique myth and suppose we have a guardian angel, or, as we might say, a subliminal self, a being with a life and logic other than everyday life and logic.  Suppose we sometimes intersect with a world where the impossible sometimes miraculously becomes real.  I told the story of my key to the locksmith who came to my house the next day, adjusted the lock and provided me with two new keys.  No matter what he did, he could not get the original key that failed to work.   All I could do was conclude that maybe I do have a guardian angel. And there’s something else.  After the locksmith finished—I didn’t recognize him--I asked how much I owed him. He smiled and softly said something I took to mean he was already paid. I assumed I would later receive a bill in the mail.  I never did.    

Saved By a Voice in Battle

Tales of miraculous rescue come in all shapes and forms. They turn up in religion, mythology, and ordinary life. They stir our imagination, our gratitude  and  perception of reality.  Such encounters can be personal but sometimes the supernormal assistance affects major events and large numbers of people.  Joan of Arc is perhaps one of the most spectacular examples of the latter. Both Joan’s and the story I’m about to recount involve hearing voices.

A student of mine in a class on the philosophy of mind, a police officer, was a veteran of the Vietnam War. In 1968 he was with the U.S. Army ‘s 101^st Airborne Division, a combat soldier in a reconnaissance platoon.  John C. was sent to Bien Hoa, located near the Mekong Delta.  The base he was stationed at was a low combat zone but not immune to the occasional rocket attack. The assignment felt like a holiday to most of the men, at least until February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day.

It was 2:30 in the morning when the air raid siren woke John up.  The base was under rocket attack and all personnel had to take shelter in the bunkers adjacent to the barracks.  By the time that John got out of the barracks the bunker he was supposed to use was already packed to capacity. He glanced around quickly and decided to get down behind a reinforced partition just outside the entrance to the bunker. He made the move and peered back into the bunker. Three light bulbs glowed dimly over the crouched soldiers.  A nervous pall settled over the men as the sound of rockets landing nearby began to fill the bunker.

 Barely a few moments had passed sitting on the reinforced partition when John heard a voice cry out, “John, get back here!” Looking toward the rear of the bunker, he was unable to see his friends, the smoky yellowish light blinding him.  He called back, “Who’s that?”  “John! Come back here!” the voice replied. The voice was clear and authoritative.

“I’m alright!” shouted John, annoyed because he couldn’t see who was calling him. Then the voice cried out again, and more urgently. This time he impulsively went back into the barrack as far as the first support beam. “Okay?” he shouts, but no one says anything, except once more the voice commands him to move to the next beam.  “Okay?” he shouts again. This time the voice was silent, so John squeezed into a seat. Wondering why he was unable to recognize the voice, he glanced back at the reinforced partition. “He’s in my spot,” John thought, and turned to ask the guy beside him for a cigarette.  As their eyes met they heard the sound of a rocket. They could tell by its clear whine that this one was going to land nearby. The next sound was a high-pitched whistle—the last sound before a direct hit.

John told me that he remembered a tremendous ball of flame explode directly where he had been sitting a few minutes earlier! Then a powerful force struck him and he blacked out. He opened his eyes to find himself covered with sand and iron planking. He was treated for a bump on his head and a cut on the knee.  All the men sitting in front of him were dead, sixteen in all. John walked around in a daze asking who kept calling him. Nobody, and nobody heard anybody calling him.  More uncanny, the intelligence behind the voice apparently knew exactly where John had to sit to escape the fatal effects of the rocket. 

John explained to me that his mother prayed for him with great insistence. He wondered if his mom’s prayers had anything to do with the voice that saved his life.  I’ll end with the last note I received from John, in which he wrote: “I often think about the tall, thin, blonde sergeant who sat where I first sat, and who was obliterated by the rocket. I feel as if my life is on loan and really belongs to someone else.  I would like to repay this gift but don’t know how.” At one point he admitted to me that his mom embarrassed him by how often she prayed for him. She often told him not to worry about anything, in short, that she had him covered. Home from Vietnam, he was no longer embarrassed by his mom’s prayers for him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Miraculous Plant?

This is a little for Christmas,  but some years ago, I was living with a girlfriend in New Jersey on River Road, facing across the river toward New York’s West Side. It was Christmas Eve, a clear night but also one of the coldest nights in a very long time.  Also, the heating system of the apartment was not performing very well. Early in the night the hissing and chortling of the pipes would die down. 

On this hyper-wintry night, the cold and the wind were closing in on us, and I thought to myself how lucky I was to have beautiful Francesca, my flute-playing lover, to stay warm with under the covers of our bed.  Wonderful, I thought, to have this living sanctuary of warmth with me at arms-length. We listened to music, had already exchanged gifts, and had dinner.

We were starting to feel the cold more, so instead of adding sweaters, why not retire to the bedroom where cuddly warmth awaited us?  My suggestion met with approval and an inviting smile. 

But then something happened—I forgot to mention: Francesca, just short of being a perfect gal, had a fiery temper. So, there we were, on the threshold of yuletide bliss, but then I said something wrong. I wish I could remember what I said. Whatever it was, it triggered my lady’s temper. The result was that I found myself backing out of the bedroom, followed by the door being slammed shut.

What was I to do? I resigned myself to sleeping on the floor. I did have to break back into my bedroom to collect what I needed to avoid freezing to death.  Suddenly, it was a lonely Christmas Eve.  Francesca made herself invisible and motionless under covers and pillows. I grabbed one more sweater and split from the bedroom. It took a moment to arrange a space on the floor to sleep, a place where I could manage my night at the North Pole. Eventually, I fell asleep.

Morning came, I woke up, and the sun was out.  But something quickly grabbed my attention. I became aware that the room, the air, was suddenly fragrant. What on earth! Suddenly, the bedroom door opened and Francesca, not fully dressed, is gazing at me. “That smell,” she said, and looked around.  I looked around too, and we both noticed something about the plant on the windowsill.  It had bloomed overnight with large white flowers!  It was the flowers that were giving off the fragrance.

 

Francesca and I said nothing but breathed in the magnificent fragrance; we looked at each other and embraced.  We didn’t say a word about our quarrel the night before. It was Christmas morning and we both felt as if the flowering in what turned out to be the coldest night of the year was a message to us about keeping a warm heart in a cold world.

For some time after, I stopped by various florists, and nobody ever heard of a plant like mine ever flowering in bitter cold.  Finally, I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens with a photograph of the flowered plant and my story.  I remember the botanist there smiling with amazement and saying, “The plant is called dracaena fragrans. Flowering in such bitter cold was a miracle.”

Fran and I eventually went our own ways. But we can tell a story of how a mysterious plant brought us beautifully together once upon a cold time.  It was, after all, Christmas, a time about miracles.  When we woke up to the fragrance of those miraculous flowers, the anger and pique between us completely vanished. The spirit of Christmas lay behind this miracle, I thought.  Plants are living and have a certain consciousness; so perhaps the plant was stressed out by our quarreling and flowered to change the atmosphere with a new fragrance.   I’m just dreaming out loud, but if you’re curious  about the latest science of plant consciousness, you might try Dr. Monica Gagliano in Thus Spoke the Plant, an account of the author’s personal encounters with individual plants and her theories of plant consciousness.

 

 

 

Jesus and the Near-Death Experience

 Having read much of the written scientific literature, I’ve been watching people recount their near-death experiences (NDEs) on YouTube.  Often, I’ve been struck by the authenticity of what I heard, everyday folks struggling to describe a life-changing experience.  Some of the NDE stories are professionally produced with another voice smoothly narrating and a visual display meant to evoke heaven and a godly sunrise.  These NDE productions impress me much less than the unmediated personal accounts.

One of the highlights of the NDE is an encounter with a great light emanating pure unconditional love.  Among the other elements (the out-of-body state, the life-review, the meeting of deceased friends and relatives, etc.), some folks encounter a figure they instantly perceive as Jesus, the light of pure love in a personal form.  On Christmas day that I’m writing this, the NDE epiphanies of Jesus especially come to mind.

But there is something puzzling.  You would think that a near-death crisis might stir up the religious figures you were raised to believe in.  But that isn’t what I have noticed in over a year of watching these online ND stories.  What I found is that Jesus plays a critical role in the NDEs of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and avowed atheists—not just Christians.  One of the winning traits of the near-death Jesus: he comes as the perfect friend of love, not as a judge or punishing deity.  Indeed, he, as well as God when he speaks out, has a sense of humor, even of irony.  In one NDEer, Jesus appears in a suit.  The woman asks him how come in a suit?  He replies, “You wouldn’t have recognized me.” The Jews who report this experience, are keen on a jokey Jesus, and lament that Jesus was mocked and obliterated by their rabbis.  They immediately claim him as their guy and seem to forget two thousand years of Christian history. One notable Jew for Jesus is Dr. James Tour, an accomplished American biologist that rejects reductive materialism, rightly, in my view. He does, however, sound a bit extreme when, as I heard him say in his interview, that the entire Bible, both testaments, every single word, are absolutely true. Really?

My puzzlement was magnified by two recent accounts, one from a Buddhist and the other from a Muslim.  In both cases where a woman and a man had an NDE, they encountered Jesus and were instantly converted. But in these two cases, the Buddhist and the Muslim were driven to review everything lacking and deficient in their previous Buddhist and Muslim faiths.  Instead of feeling love and compassion for people of their born belief systems, they say that unless they become Christians, all the horrors of eternal hell await them. This is morally repulsive.  Gone in a flash is that beautiful idea of unconditional love.   T

The NDE is an objective and hugely significant experience by virtue of its extraordinary effects and aftereffects.  The phenomenon has a flexible structure and is recurrent, thanks to advances in modern medical technology.

There are at least two distinct explanations of this phenomenon. The first is that these are extraordinary illusions that our species has evolved as part of the dying response.  The illusions are designed to stimulate the will to live, a trick our suggestible mind needs to carry on the adventure of life, even if it doesn’t change our meaningless fate. 

The second theory is more appealing and allows us to imagine that physical dying enables us to enter a new world after we shed our bodies.  The NDE seems like the vestibule of a mental universe.  Like the physical universe, science had to grow before it understood its unimaginable vastness.  The same unimaginable vastness faces us in the mental universe. The NDE seems an authentic venture into a distinct, alternate dimension of space and reality. We are all partially acquainted with this extraphysical dimension of experience when at night we enter dream space.

People who have NDEs usually conclude they are immortal and have no desire to reinhabit their mortal bodies.  If we are immortal, then we an assume that Jesus is still alive and conscious, and open to the near-death dimension of existence.  And thus it appears to all the people who have reported encounters with Jesus.

It would also be true that all the great souls of the past have survived and may be accessible in ways that might shock us into a new awareness.  Mary, the mother of Jesus would have survived, and as we know, visions of Mary are widely reported in modern times.  

I’ve written this post as a kind of Christmas card to readers. I am drawn to the picture of Jesus that emerges from the near-death experience.  I am not drawn to the accounts of converts that hate and despise the non-Christian teachers they were raised to believe in. In the history of human experience, all sorts of great spiritual teachers have emerged, and there is room for all of them.  The fanatics that want to send all non-Christian teachers and believers packing to hell are an abomination. The popularity of the figure of Jesus appearing so frequently in the near-death experience is interesting and puzzling.   I’m curious to hear what you all might think about this facet of the near-death experience.

 

  

Can I Be Frank?

One periodically hears an ad on NP Radio about the 25 thousand therapists waiting in the wings and prepared to help the souls of afflicted listeners.  The implications of the ad were  disheartening, the image of an army poised to descend upon and save us from our problems!  I don’t mean to make light of the sea of troubles that life often is.

But I know someone who does. This fellow dares to make light of our troubles—the light of wit, of compassion, and of insight. Dr. Frank Pasciuti has been a licensed clinical psychologist and certified hypnotherapist for forty-five years.  He is the author of Chrysalis Crisis: How Life’s Ordeals Can Lead to Personal and Spiritual Transformation.  

Frank Pasciuti’s new book, Can I Be Frank? Poetic Insights that Empower and Inspire, embodies a novel venture into psychotherapy.  Using his own name in a title, punning on the adjective frank, turning his name into a challenge—can I be honest and thus fully myself?  That’s a universal question.  Am I in a world where it’s okay to be myself?  That’s a startling way to begin a book.

What is unique about this book is a poetics of therapy, so that by mingling prose with rhymes, half-rhymes, rhythms, and images, Dr. Pasciuti returns to a more shamanic mode of coping with our natural human difficulties.  Besides a short introduction, the book contains about sixty poems, in a rich spectrum of themes and moods, and alongside apt and witty illustrations. This is a book to be held, heard, and seen. The issues touched on run the gamut from the metaphysics of mind and body (Trivini, p.35) to matrimony, (You’re Not Who I Once Married, p.13.) You’ll learn something essential about how your mind works in Concentration, Meditation, Contemplation, p.61, and get a more humorous lift of spirit in It’s Hard to Hug a Porcupine, p.21.

The table of contents offers the reader a feast of options. The issues that plague us are infinite in variety and originality.  The format of narratives is in tune with the more or less chaotic flow of life.  It respects the reader’s freedom to begin wherever he or she wishes.  For example, I was captivated by the poem called Rattled to Insight, p. 62.  The poem was about a terrifying dream the author had that woke him up. 

                  I found myself outside walking through a path with lots of snakes.

                     They filled the ground, were all

                     Around.  I wanted to get through.

              I tried to step between them, but the spaces were so few.

Some of the ghastly rattle snakes started to move and threaten the dreamer and so he awakens and assumes a questioning stance toward the dream.  Awake now and thinking about his nightmare, there is a flash of insight:

                  I further came to recognize when my fears get denied

                  They rise up from the darker places where they tend to hide.   

So, the dream helped him see what he was not quite able to confront. This then was a poem about the interesting dialogues we may be having with the subconscious part of mental life.  Can I Be Frank? is full of hints and illustrations of how to use the poetics of our creative imagination to gain insight and heal ourselves.       I heartily recommend this book (available on Amazon) that will entertain and instruct you on the great art of being a human being.

 

 

              

 

 

 

 

 

Mind and Obesity

The prestigious Journal, Lancet, reports a study that predicts that in less than two decades, 260 million Americans will suffer from obesity, a condition associated with a host of diseases and disorders.  It’s easy to understand that with advertising and food technologies, the temptation to indulge the comfort that food and drink give, makes it easy to tumble into obesity.

But surely, once awake to the mortal dangers that lie hidden in that hamburger and sugary drink, the solution to the problem should be clear: be picky and eat and drink less!  But people find that hard, so out comes Big Pharma to provide drugs in the battle against obesity.     But the drug approach has obviously failed, given the giant obesity crisis the Lancet has warned us about. 

I’m skeptical about the supposed genetics of the problem. The real culprit are bad habits and lack of self-awareness. Our systems of education neglect to address the freedom of will as a central fact of a flourishing human existence.  We are educated to be fans and consumers, not life explorers with independent minds.  

 Once asked to speak about diet, I came up with this advice.  Decide on the weight you ideally prefer.  Then follow this instruction. Whenever you eat and drink, say, the normal three times a day, each time eat and drink hardy but consume only one half of what you would normally consume.  

There is nothing painful, no self-deprivation—just a healthy reduction of your intake. Continue halving your diet until you reach the weight you chose to be. Then go back to eating and drinking but be mindful and sustain your ideal weight.

There’s a problem with this plan.  Swamped as we are in a materialist ethos, there is no clear sense of the freedom of our will. Nobody reminds you that you’re a free agent and master of your life.  We need to sharpen the consciousness of our freedom—and practice using it.  

The answer to the obesity crisis is our own minds—the power we possess to say yes or no—the power to open our mouth or shut it. Use and prove your free will is real. It's a key choice—live your life or slip into slavery.

 

Einstein's Advice: Change the Way We Think or Die

 

All over the world people and countries are spending like there’s no tomorrow on updating their arsenals of selective and mass murder and mayhem—based on the need to defend oneself—or to annihilate one’s foes.  Meanwhile, the arms sales folks are rolling in ecstasy.

 

But Albert Einstein wrote: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking, if mankind is to survive.”

 

A substantially new manner of thinking—we should underscore Einstein’s prophetic words. They suggest that any approach that relies on old formulas for solving the world predicament probably need to be scrapped. A substantially new manner of thinking? Einstein has remarked on the importance of imagination in solving the great problems.  We have to step outside the box of our usual assumptions.

 

In Edward Thompson’s Letter to America, we read: “Nothing less than a world-wide spiritual revulsion against the Satanic Kingdom would give us any chance of bringing the military riders down.” Now we are talking about a spiritual revolution. Einstein and Thompson agree on the greatness of the challenge. It’s no small thing to outgrow one’s worldview and launch a revolution of consciousness. Something very jarring needs to happen.  Perhaps like climate catastrophe or somebody fingering a possible nuclear strike.

 

In a short play by Luigi Pirandello, The Man with A Flower in His Mouth, a man emerges from a doctor’s office with a fatal diagnosis. Possessed by this knowledge of his impending death, the world lights up for him, the smallest things swell with significance; he lingers over every detail; the doomed man’s awareness changes radically, and he undergoes a brilliant conversion of consciousness, an insight into the eternal.

 

The question is whether ours is a world with a flower in its mouth. Like the man in Pirandello’s play, will we wake up in time to see life in a new enlightened way?  Reader, what do you think?

 

 

 

 

How to Avoid Scaring Yourself to Death

 

In a class discussion about the philosophy of mind, a student who was a nurse once told me a sad story about her husband.  When he was a teenager on a lark he went to a fortune-teller.  She looked at his palm and announced that he was going to have a happy married life.  After a slight pause, she then added that he was going to die when he was thirty-five years old.   On his thirty-fifth birthday, the nurse’s husband keeled over dead.  An autopsy uncovered no physical cause of his death; he was perfectly healthy.  The only explanation is that his belief that he was going to die on that day killed him.

 

This apparently is a widely reported phenomenon. There is a book by J.C. Barker, MD, Scared to Death: An Examination of Fear, Its Causes and Effects. The main shocking point of this book is that people of all ages and cultures, people, moreover, in perfect health, die because they believe their time has come, as predicted by someone or implied by some oracle or sign.  How the ‘mere’ belief that one is going to die may cause a perfectly healthy person to die cries out for explanation.

 

First, it should be noted that according to Barker, at the time of publication of his book in Britain (1968), public interest and use of fortune-tellers, mediums and psychics was popular and widespread.  People try all sorts of alternative methods of scoping out the future.

 

Dr. Barker was inspired to research self-induced death when he witnessed a patient, a homeless laborer, brought to the hospital in a state of terror, crying out that he was going to die. Barker was unable to calm him down. “Then to our horror and amazement he suddenly stopped crying, fell back into the bed and quickly expired” (3).  A post-mortem exam proved he was in perfect health. 

 

Barker provides a harrowing chapter on autosuggestion and voodoo.  “If a native believes himself to be “hoodooed”, “hexed”, “bewitched”, or “conjured”, he pines away and dies unless someone can be found who he considers has greater voodoo powers . . .” (18) Similar cases of hexing are cited in Australia, Africa, America and so forth, demonstrating the devastating power of sheer belief.  The witch doctor in effect by virtue of curse or hex destroys the consciousness and will to live of the targeted victim.  Cases are given of victims tottering on the edge of death who are persuaded by a counter-spell and are instantly restored to health. 

 

Barker shows how politics combined with destructive magic can have murderous consequences, and “shows the extraordinary extent to which hatred and scheming machinations can build up between natives and so prepare the victim for voodoo-type death . . ..” (23).  The malignant psychic influence through abusive language that Hitler unleashed on European Jews illustrates the dark side of the psyche in action.  It explains the incredible rise to power of a psychopathic liar like Donald Trump as well as the bizarrely perverted conspiracy theories. The intent is to degrade the person by the magic of destructive language.   

 

We should underscore another factor, the phenomenon of the “evil eye”—the malignant side of the Freudian superego. There is an ancient archetype—superstition, we could say—that we may be exposed to the Evil Eye, disposed to do us harm.  This evil potential is proven by using charms, amulets, and talismans—all meant to protect us from the dark forces around us. Neuroscientist Paul Maclean writes of the “paranoid streak” in us, a byproduct of our reptilian brain. So, we can’t help being suspicious and we’re easily manipulated by unscrupulous influencers.

 

The destructive power of belief can be converted into healthy, creative power. The nocebo can kill is, but the placebo can cure us.  There are stories of miraculous healings, more than stories of healthy people dying because of what of some fortune-teller might have said. 

 

The antidote to self-destructive feelings is to educate yourself on how your mind works.  Dr.  Barker found that imbibing the values of a reason-and-truth honoring civilization is the best way to guard against succumbing to the black magic of our worst emotions.  Love and truth are the antidotes to the disease of self-destruction.  We are curious to hear stories that demonstrate the power of the mind to help or harm our health.

 

 

Living By Song Magic

        

                                        

 

 

 

Indigenous people, generally poorer and powerless, have played no part in the creation of the current climate crisis.  And yet they are liable to suffer most from it. In two centuries, our modern technological society has created this crisis. Native traditions have lasted thousands of years without wreaking havoc on the planet.  They might then be able to help us with the climate monster we have created.   

 

One fact is key. Modern science is quantitative, mathematical, technological, and soulless.  If you look at a tree, a river, a mountain as no more than material structures, why not uproot and reduce them to saleable items.  In contrast, the indigenous mind honors nature for its sacred value and creative benefits--the exact opposite of the capitalistic vision of nature, treated as raw material for profiteering corporations to exploit.  

 

I’m struck by traditions that use music as a way to live in harmony with nature. In the early 1930s, Ruth Murray Underhill, at the behest of the Humanities Council of Columbia University, spent time with the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona, an unusually dry and inhospitable region of the Southwest.  What she discovered about their ceremonial life is described in her book, Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians (1938).

 

These peaceful descendants of the Aztecs used a type of song magic to facilitate the various tasks of everyday life.  This region of the desert on the border of Mexico was, and no doubt still is, overwhelmingly dry and hot. To extract a living from such a barren desert domain called for some kind of “magic”—something akin to psychokinesis (mind over matter).

 

Papago ceremonies have different names, The Drinking Ritual, Singing Up the Corn, The Peaceful Go to War, Eagle Power, Ocean Power, and so forth. Each of these ceremonial tasks has songs, stories, and narratives passed on in oral traditions.  The magical language had to be memorized, as we say, known by heart. And with heart, I would add.  The song magic is meant to produce real effects, physical as well as mental.  But can our minds do such things?  The Papago Indians thought so.

 

Let’s see how it works with an example, The Drinking Ritual, which is about rain magic.  The only source of water for the Papago was the sky in the rainy seasons.        

In this ritual, a liquor is extracted from the pulp of a giant cactus, and drunk.  The fruits of this liquor ripen at the end of the dry season. Drinking this liquor, which  has mind-altering effects, was thought to mirror and facilitate the rainfall.

It was the duty of everyone to drink to the point of saturation; in short, get seriously drunk, and become like the rain-soaked earth.  Apart from this ceremony, boozing for private pleasure was verboten.  Moreover, all of the ceremonies presupposed widespread participation of the group.  This makes sense in light of what we know about paranormal group dynamics.

 

But now where is the magic in all this?  Underhill provides an exact explanation. “In accordance with the rules of Papago magic,” she writes, “which always imitates the desired event, this act will bring the rain to moisten the earth” (p.20). The drinking and altered state, however, is only the first part of the ceremony meant to bring on the rain. Next is the singing.  A hundred people, old men who know the songs, women and everybody else either dance or sing of rain and clouds, red spiders, frogs, and toads known for their affinity with rain. 

 

In effect, there is a group effort to imagine as vividly as possible the state of affairs they are trying to bring about.  The same method is used for other ceremonies, making the corn grow, preparing for war, or dealing with a troublesome person. And of course, for healing purposes. You have to sing or in some way create compelling images of what you’re aiming for. Rain, a healing, courage in war, whatever.

 

This must appear strange to a culture addicted to materialism. Acquiring song magic implies different kinds of skill and mental attitude. Underhill writes as follows: ““What of a society which puts no premium whatever on aggressiveness and where the practical man is valued only if he is a poet?”

 

The Papago were never at war with whites or other tribes.  In part this was due to the forbidding landscape of this region of the Southwest.  There was nothing there worth fighting for and survival itself was not easily achieved.  You had to learn to sing for power just to survive. And the singing went on for hours. You also had to use your imagination to perform magical operations.

 

Readers will wonder about the ‘magic’ part of this story.  It turns out that the way the Papago magic is supposed to work is consistent with the way psychokinesis (PK) works.  To repeat: the Papago tries through song and gesture to imagine and evoke the desired effect as vividly as possible. Now, the physicist and parapsychologist, Helmut Schmidt, argues that PK is a goal-oriented process.   Schmidt found that subjects in PK experiments succeeded when they focused entirely on the target they were aiming to affect.   Facing a panel of lights the subject wants, say, to turn on the outermost light on the left side of the panel.  He has no idea of the complicated process of how the lights on the panel are turned on and off.  All he has to do focus on the desired outcome to be effective—all attention is on the target, the aim.

 

Schmidt’s subjects were remarkable in producing results.  Lab based evidence for psychokinesis proves that native people may also be effective with their more life-based experiments with PK.

 

The Papago form of PK was based on survival needs, not just to obtain a score in a parapsychological experiment.  The latter, in its sphere of science, is hugely important. It’s part of a research movement that points to our paranormal mental and physical abilities.

 

Papago Indian song magic offers one way to reimagine our relationship to the natural world. What sort of people were these brown-skinned Indians noted for their peaceful nature. “Beneath their modern externals,” writes Ruth Underhill, “a life based on other ideals than ours and aimed toward other goals.” She tells us there are three points notable about these people. 

 

They never raise their voices.  Living in a hardscrabble desert community, you don’t waste your energy, and the barely audible manner of speech suggests low emotional expenditure.  Theirs was a world where you were not free to deploy all kinds energy to do what you want—travel, communicate, consume at will.  Near silence was a way to store one’s inner energy. The white traders said they needed to lip-read the Indians.

 

Secondly, Underhill writes of the Papago: “Their movements are deliberate; our own swift jerkiness can hardly comprehend the rhythm slowed down by the desert heat to the slow swing of a wave under a ship’s bow in a dead calm.”  Clearly, an energy deprived environment will impose a different lifestyle in many subtle ways, more deliberate and more careful and caring.

 

The last item she notes about the Papago folk; they were always purring with laughter. “We who pass days, even weeks, at hard work, with no more than a polite smile now and then, can scarcely accustom ourselves to the gentle laughter which always accompanies Papago talk.”  She ends by noting that she especially missed the murmuring mirth of the Papago when she got back to New York.  

 

Two final observations.  First, the Papago story, as revealed from Underhill’s study of the late 1930s, proves that ingenuity, imagination, and social solidarity can create a culturally rich life, even in an environment minimally endowed with the raw materials needed in ordinary life. 

 

The second point I want to make is to affirm the extraordinary work of Ruth Underhill. Now is the time to renew and revise the relationship between modern science and indigenous beliefs and practices. The song magic practiced by the Papago seems vitally credible in light of what is known about apports, apparitions, poltergeists, shamanic and saintly miracles, and controlled parapsychological experimentation.

 

It is important to state what is possible, in light of modern parapsychological research. Groups of people can indeed create forces that do things such as we learn from the Papago ceremonials.  These are socially integrated activities directed toward benefitting all members of the community.  We have barely begun to learn how to draw on the latent forces within us. There’s a whole new science of creativity waiting to be born—a science that may be of use in the coming battle with the climate monster we have created.

 

 

UFOs--Why So Shy?

In an idle moment while doodling, something about the Biblical creation story occurred to me.  It’s hard for me to imagine that the all-wise Creator should have created just one planet with one type of living human.  What would be the point of creating such a totally immense universe as stagecraft for one little planet led by a self-absorbed, cantankerous species, supposedly endowed with rational and moral abilities?

 

It’s far more probable to suppose that the unspeakable vastness of the universe is a sign of equally vast forms of life and consciousness spread out around the cosmos.  And in ways we can barely imagine now, although all the authentic reports about alien visitation suggest a considerable variety of types of conscious entities interacting with us.

 

One story running about is that aliens are living among us. There is a program in action about us somehow biologically merging with the aliens, supposedly, to the benefit of each species. This story is at least conceivable and might resonate with some souls in distress.

 

But there is enough evidence to support the belief that there are intelligent beings in our midst.  Clearly, they possess superhuman powers and come from who knows where? 

 

The question is, what are they doing here?  And why so devious, sneaky, and too often brutal?  They may of course be quite frightened.  Humans can be trigger-happy brutes whose first reaction to something unknown, is to lunge for the AR-15 and aim to kill.

 

There is evidence that explains in part why they are here:  They are interested in our weapons systems, nuclear, for sure.  They are also concerned about the catastrophic effects of overheating the planet, a consequence of our technology and addiction to consumerism.

 

They have terrified the military by temporarily turning off, disengaging our weapons systems, thus temporarily killing our billion-dollar defense systems.   Letting us taste a moment of exposure, of vulnerability.  It surely must gnaw away at U.S. belief in its God-blessed empire to know there is an unknown agency daily violates with impunity our airspace and cannot be shot down by ace jet fighter planes.  The technology that haunts our airspace is a complete mystery.  Moreover, where they come from and exactly why they’re here is unknown, other, it would seem, than being worried about nuclear annihilation and climate catastrophe wrecking the planet.

 

The question is: if these highly evolved aliens are here and monitoring us as we continue to wreck the planet and kill each other in endless wars, why not make a public appearance and announce their presence?  Why just hang around and carry on as cosmic peeping toms?  Any ideas, reader?

Our Unfinished Evolution

 Has the driving force of evolution on Earth gone crazy?  Could it have meant to produce a species, in which the members are constantly killing each other, and in all sorts of ways, some spontaneous, and some more ferociously organized? According to one present count, there are fifty-six killing conflicts between humans raging on the planet today.  Moreover, this same killer species has exploited, polluted, and destroyed countless other living species and their habitats, such that the man-driven over-heating of the planet is causing a global climate catastrophe that threatens to bring down world-civilization.

 

In my view, we can at best speak of the unfinished evolution of the human species. Phrasing it that way, we can entertain the possibility of completing, or at least dramatically advancing toward our full evolutionary potential. Okay, but how in heaven’s name will that be possible?  I can imagine you saying, “The idea is preposterous!  You’re asking for a miracle!” 

 

I would say that it is possible to wake up to a new way of being, of living, of seeing and feeling each other and the world around us. Surely, we can learn how to relate to the natural world in a life-enhancing way instead of exploiting and wrecking it, as is normal for most of people in advanced economic cultures.  We can learn from indigenous peoples important things our materialist philosophers automatically negate.  We can get serious about reducing our carbon encroachment on the planet.  With luck we might at least move, however haltingly, toward signs of minimizing the damage.  A miracle we absolutely require: the species has to wise up about the waste and futility of war as a solution to anything.  

 

War everywhere is the bloody proof of the unfinished evolution of our species.  

 

I believe we need strong medicine to save us from our current half-evolved selves. The human situation, as it appears to be unfolding, does seem to need a miracle.

What do we mean when we use the word miracle?  One hears of the miracles of science and of religion. I like to think of the miracle of peace. The core sense of the word miracle suggests being astonished, amazed by something extraordinary, unexpected. Also, something that established science cannot explain. If you’re curious and don’t mind doing a little homework, there are records of all sorts of miracles available, puzzling wonders that make us smile and force us to expand our creative imagination.    (You can check out my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief.

 

I have an affinity for miracles. A miraculous healing is bound to make folks smile. Besides flashes of metaphysical mirth, miracles intrigue us because they enlarge our idea of the possible.  In particular, a large portion of miracle lore transcends physical explanation. So, miracles apparently point to a hidden dimension of creative force, a place where the impossible becomes actual.

 

Miracles are also stories of struggle, danger, aspiration, breakthrough; stories of adventure and transformation.  But where do these events we call miracles come from?  We may have beliefs about the origin of miracles, but nobody knows for sure.  After all, nobody knows why there is a universe, how life originated, or why we’re conscious beings. 

 

There is one thing we know about miracles; they seem to revolve around certain people, contexts, existential scenes.  So, consider the miraculous effects produced by the Brazilian healer, Arigo, the famous “surgeon with a rusty knife.” Whatever enabled him to perform these impossible feats of surgery, it was through him that the miracles were daily performed and manifested.  Stories vary but the extraordinary event always occurs around a human being or group of humans. 

 

Now the leap of my active imagination, leading to the next suggestion.  I believe as human beings we are all in possession of extraordinary potentials. Jesus himself made a famous point about what his disciples could do.  He said, you guys can surpass me in the miracle-making department. Nobody knows where or how the next astonishing breakthrough will take place. We do know something about how people in different cultures have learned to access the latent higher powers of our species.

 

There is an ancient Greek adage, gnothi seauton, know yourself, inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi.  Nowadays many people are concerned with their identity, and much of the problem lies in widespread feelings of rejection, humiliation, and social stigma. The aberrations of human conduct arise from focusing on differences between groups of people: economic, religious, political, linguistic, racial, and gender related.  

 

What we in fact need is to be educated concerning the true depth and scope of our identity, which is wider and deeper than we normally suppose.   Apart from cultural differences, it seems right to say—and more crucially to feel—that we are grounded in a common spiritual identity. Here is where we step in and devise ways of activating our imagination and creative energies.  The challenge: how to facilitate creative eruptions from our subliminal self—the self below our everyday surface awareness.

 

We are rooted, grounded in a deeper dimension of ourselves. So how, we’d like to know, do we interact, connect with, contact in some meaningful way this deeper self we have reason to believe exists?  There are many ways, to be sure.   One way is to personify the force within us.  Call out the name, if need be, create a name for the force. Great Spirit! Lord! Guardian Angel! Grandma in Heaven!  Draw on tradition or be a poet and invent.  Whatever way you can, provide a focus for your creative imagination.  Invent whatever it takes to induce an opening to your creative subconscious.  Persist in trying, aiming, until you get results. In other words, we have to learn how to converse with the deeper side of ourselves.