The Ultimate Scientific Discovery

Science has not only given us ways to understand nature but also to channel nature toward improving the quality of life, at least for some of us.  Science has been used to organize and control the material goods of life, a situation that led to the wealth and power of those who owned the new technologies of production. The more evolved the scientific technologies, the greater the means of domination and manipulation of the masses.  True, science has served humanity by means of medicine, but people still suffer from obesity, anxiety, loneliness, alienation, and various forms of addiction.  

 All the benefits pale when viewed against the creation of the atomic bomb. Watchdogs of the nuclear menace are saying we’re closest to doomsday today since Truman A-bombed the Japanese.    Countries around the world are shelling out vast sums of money to arm themselves. Having an A bomb is the growing standard for safety in the world of nations. Science has also given us artificial intelligence whose potential for large scale mischief is vast.  Science gave us the Industrial Revolution, which created a consumer culture and its addictions.  Besides providing the tools for mass murder, the use of technology has wreaked havoc on nature and created an apocalyptic climate crisis.   

But I have yet to say something else about what science can do for us. And this is quite the opposite of the horrors cited above.  Science, it turns out, can tell us something about death that is extremely interesting—and highly personal.  It can change our understanding of reality.  It can, and in my view has, destroyed materialism and revised our view of what happens to us after death.

Most folks are unaware of the enormous amount of evidence for life after death. In my book, Experiencing the Next World Now (available online), I take the reader through types of evidence that show how under certain circumstances people experience the next world.  There’s a branch of science called psychical research that materialists impulsively dismiss. Bad boys just won’t do their homework.

In my view, psychical research points to the possibility of a new layer of human evolution. I’ve published several books exploring this higher dimension of our possible consciousness.  I’m interested in ways we can experimentally activate =our latent psychic powers.  There are ways we can rearrange our consciousness such that we edge our way into an entirely new dimension of reality. I keep returning to this theme of how to transcend an insane world where the lowest characters have the greatest power. So, there is good, bad news.  Thanks to science, we can do two things: one, construct weapons to dominate and/or wipe each other out, bad; but science can also make the case for life after death, good—for anyone who loves life.

In the meantime, we go on living, hopefully in tune with our own take on things. I find myself drawn to art, a little painting and drumming. The arts in general strike me as holding the hope for the necessary advance of consciousness.  Science and religion have obviously failed. In fact, they’ve provided the machinery for our species immolation.  Everything depends on what we do with the greatest scientific discovery: that our consciousness transcends our mortal bodies.      

 

Human Singularities: Arigo the Healer

The point at which an extreme or transcendent change becomes possible is known as a “singularity.” There are mathematical, gravity, and technological singularities.  They all mark break-off points, openings to new dimensions of reality.  A black hole is a singularity in a region of space where matter exists in a state of infinite density.  Mathematical singularities involve functions where a change in a variable produce a derivative that is infinite.

 

Perhaps the most popular use of the term is in talk of the coming technological singularity.  This usage stands firmly in the tradition of millenarian or psi-fi fantasy.  The core idea is that there will come a point in human history when computerized machine “intelligence” reaches a point sufficiently advanced that the machines transcend, revolt against, and somehow take over their human makers.  They, not us humans, will carry on the torch of evolution; and they alone will achieve digital immortality. Part of this techno-apocalyptic fantasy entails that computers and computer networks will “wake up,” as science fiction author Vernor Vinge predicts, in short, become conscious.  But they will be “trillions” of times smarter than us, as inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil believes, and so will take over the planet, and have to subjugate or, more efficiently, dispose of us.

 

Needless to say, I don’t assign much credibility to this latter-day singularity fantasy, but something about the idea draws me on.  Keeping it empirical, let’s consider the idea of a human singularity.  This usage won’t be quite as exact as it is in physics or mathematics, but the sense is clear from ordinary English usage. We use singular to describe something rare, one of a kind, new, special, exceptional, extraordinary. 

 

History is replete with specimens of human singularity, individuals who have driven the creative advance of the species. We might, for example, think of “world-historical” figures like Jesus, Socrates, and the Buddha, each a deeply important human singularity that continues to reverberate through history.  Indeed, every domain of historical evolution has its various singularities. For art, think Pablo Picasso; for science, Albert Einstein; for technology, Steve Jobs.

 

But the human singularities I have mind are the type that transcend the common limits of mind and body. Specifically, my interest is in psychophysical singularities, kindled as it was by my research on levitation, as reported in my book The Man Who Could Fly, a study of St. Joseph of Copertino.  Almost every feature of Joseph’s life was wrapped in singularity, most famously in his 35-year-long performance in public as an involuntary ecstatic levitator.

 

 

Psychophysical singularities suggest the emergence of something post- or super-human.  The following cameo will illustrate.

 

Ze Arigo, the Brazilian healer, died in an auto accident in 1971 at the age of 49.  An overwhelming mass of facts suggests that this man may be described as a human singularity. (The book to read is John Fuller’s Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife.  Also, Google Arigo and Henry Puharich, to observe some of the operations and Puharich’s stunning talk on Arigo.)

 

Arigo was a poor working man of peasant origins who began to have headaches for no apparent reason.  Something was trying to get through to him, and he was unconsciously resisting it, hence the headaches.  Eventually, it was learned that it was “Dr. Fritz” calling on Arigo, the spirit of a German Doctor said to have died in 1918.

 

Dr. Fritz took possession of Arigo’s body and spoke with a guttural German accent.  Arigo ultimately came to regard Dr. Fritz as Christ consciousness. Whatever “Fritz” was, it had one task, which was to use Arigo’s body to heal the sick.  And this is exactly what occurred for the remainder of his life.

 

Take the event that led to Arigo’s immediate rise to fame.  A distinguished Senator, Lucio Bittencourt, had stopped in a hotel in Congonhas do Campo where Arigo lived and the two men met, Arigo on behalf of the local miners. Bittencourt was so taken with Arigo that he invited him to take a room in his hotel, so they could carry on their talks. When he retired, Bittencourt was unable to sleep; he had in fact recently been informed that he had lung cancer. 

 

Dozing restlessly, suddenly a man broke into the Senator’s room, turned on the light, brandishing a razor, and announced that an operation needed to be performed. It was Arigo, eyes glazed and speaking with a German accent. The Senator felt no fear but blacked out. When he woke up, he found blood on his pajamas and a healed incision on his back. He rose and staggered toward Arigo’s room, looking for an explanation. Arigo was just as surprised as the Senator. He had no idea that he had just operated on the Senator’s lung cancer. But, entranced, he evidently did. It was in the newspapers the following day, and Arigo was suddenly known all over Brazil. 

 

This was the beginning of a public career of 20 years made famous for his healings.  His office consisted of a few tables and chairs in some shacks with long lines of indigent, as well as distinguished, patients, all waiting their turn. Arigo treated about 300 patients a day, and most of the treatments lasted about three minutes. He treated all kinds of conditions, from cataracts to cancer. He deployed two kinds of treatment—operations and prescriptions.  

 

The prescriptions were preceded by diagnoses achieved almost instantly with a glance.  And with a glance, Arigo gave exact blood pressure readings of his patients.  The prescriptions were written with lightning speed, and in the suitably scientific pharmaceutical lingo. They were completely original and strange, mixtures and quantities of drugs that no physician would even conceive no less dare to prescribe; nevertheless, they worked. 

 

Arigo had no medical knowledge, training, or experience whatsoever. And he had no recollection of writing them. This process of diagnosis and prescription writing was performed and observed thousands of times. For all the weirdness of the prescriptions, they never caused any harm or ill effects. And they brought positive help and cures, often of fatal diseases. Clearly, these are impossible performances, in manner and effect, unless we posit some extra mode or dimension of intelligent reality operative but transcending present science.

 

Surgical operation was the second type of treatment.  Playwright, documentary film producer, and author John Fuller called Arigo “the surgeon of the rusty knife.”  His operations were positively surreal. Nothing could be more wrong, indeed, horrific, as to how he performed surgery on his patients. To begin with, septically: Arigo would take his penknife, or any handy blade lying around, however filthy, and roughly plunge it into the flesh of his patients, rapidly excising diseased tissues. 

 

Patients never felt pain (although they sometimes appeared uncomfortable) and, incredibly, were never infected. Bleeding was minimal and Arigo could stop the bleeding with a command. The wounds healed rapidly, without stitches.

Once the operation was over, the gruff martinet “Dr. Fritz” became the amiable, easy-going Arigo with his pious wife and brood of handsome children. How all the rules of reality can be broken while producing such healing marvels is a mystery—signs of a human singularity.

 

Arigo was singular in his purity of purpose. He never took money or gifts for his healings. He had no choice in the matter; the force compelling him was beyond his control. To profit from his gift would be sacrilege; during his whole career, he worked at menial jobs to support his large family.

 

Arigo gained a vast following, a grateful populace, and a no less grateful class of distinguished acolytes. He restored the sight of the son of the famous singer, Roberto Carlos.  He cured a kidney disorder of the daughter of the President of Brazil, Juscilino Kubitschek, who was himself a surgeon. The condition that Arigo cured in her had stymied doctors in Europe and America. 

 

But aside from friends and admirers, Arigo also acquired enemies, powerful ones, too; the State, the medical profession, and the Catholic Church were all against him. The State would try and jail him twice because he was patently guilty of breaking the law, which forbade “the practice of illegal medicine.” He had no degrees, diplomas, or certificates; he just repeatedly did the impossible.  

 

The medical profession was against Arigo for legal reasons, and for reasons of incredulity, jealousy, and perhaps fear, when in fact earnest curiosity would have been the appropriate response. Fortunately, many physicians did eventually come to observe him on the job.

 

The Church decided that only bona fide Catholics are allowed to perform miracles.  If you’re, say, a Kardec-style Spiritualist (popular in Brazil), or keen on some other spiritual discipline, miracles could get you into serious trouble. The Church attacked Arigo and accused him of witchcraft and profiteering, both lies.

 

Arigo always asked his friends to pray for his enemies, and he served them and strangers for free and with love. Arigo actually behaved like a saint, displaying the Church’s “heroic virtue,” without calling it that. Judged and jailed twice, his better friends prevailed, and he was back playing the part assigned to him by the mysterious Dr. Fritz.  The tide of opinion turned. Plans and appropriations were in place to expand his facilities and bring in a team of scientists to study Arigo, who welcomed the idea.  He, in fact, welcomed scientists observing him, and many did.

 

But at this point fate took a sinister turn. It was early January 1971, and President Kubitschek and Arigo had a meeting.  Arigo explained, as he had to others, that for the past weeks he’d been dreaming of a “black crucifix” and that this was their last meeting. He predicted he would soon die a violent death. On January 11, his car skidded on a rainy road into a truck that killed him.

 

But the story of Dr. Fritz continued and got stranger. He apparently needed to keep on working as healer for the poor and needy, and had taken possession, reportedly, of at least three other men to carry on his posthumous crusade of supernormal healing. Two of those also predicted their own deaths and died violently.  A third appeared, performing Arigo-like marvels, but also awaited his predicted violent end. “Dr. Fritz” (whatever that stands for) apparently operates from outside our reality-system. The persons it seems to use to do its work are then disposed of.

 

What’s behind the singular career of someone like Arigo is a mystery.  The phenomena observed in broad daylight for 20 years cannot be explained, even with remote plausibility, by established science. Its singularity is of the type that suggests a higher order of human function that revolves around astonishing healing powers.

 

Various sorts of human singularity range from historical to recent times and from individuals to group events.  So, in the 20^th century, we have Padre Pio’s 50 years bleeding stigmata, never infected, and exuding unexplained fragrances. At the moment of his death, the last flake fell from his stigmatized left hand, leaving no scar on his body, after being an open wound for 50 years. Leaving no scar was inexplicable, according to dermatologist John Sweeny of Columbia University Hospital, whom I questioned about this.

 

Many other candidates could join the roster of human singularities. Again, in the 20^th century we have banker, journalist, and physical medium of amazing versatility, Franek Kluski (1873-1943) producing sounds, violent psychokinesis, apports, levitation in the form of objects changing their weight, all sorts of photic phenomena, inexplicable odors, materializations of birds and other uncanny forms, apparitions of known deceased people, and so on.

 

The fact is that all sorts of human singularities are part of the historical landscape. They need to be teased out of oblivion and appreciated for their significance.  A more detailed taxonomy of human singularities might help us imagine the possible direction of human evolution. 

 

 

 

On Mass Murder and Life After Death

As for philosophy, I’ve been on the trail of the mind-body problem. What could be more crucial? Our own minds—in effect, ourselves—what we consciously are and experience from moment to moment.  It turns out that our minds are a stubborn scientific mystery.   The materialist is unable to physically explain how consciousness evolved from matter.  It appears that our mental life is irreducibly real. A feeling of love or hatred is totally unlike anything you can imagine going on in a brain. Consider this.   If our minds are radically distinct from our bodies, life after death might be possible; our bodies will die, but our mental life may survive. The two are intimately linked in life, but in death they are divorced.

To prove that the afterlife isn’t just possible but real, I dove into a sea of fascinating reportage from careful researchers of mediumship, apparitions, hauntings, possession, and all sorts of ghost stories. Even I have a little ghost tale from a night in a haunted house I spent that resulted in my being physically attacked by a ghost.  I watched the light form come at me across the room right at my face and body, paralyzing me briefly, and then it was gone. My experience of a ghost was in a house where nine other people interacted with said ghost. Anyway, it’s hard for me to deny that once I was pounced on by a real ghost.

Since 1975, a different category of afterlife evidence has emerged, and spread around the planet, the near-death experience (NDE).   There are interesting features of this new set of afterlife data. It’s a compelling afterlife argument for the person who has the NDE.  Moreover, and this second point we owe to YouTube: you can watch and listen to people who have been though the NDE process, with no story like another but all loosely sharing a set of recurrent variables: the out of body experience, wondrous music, meeting deceased family members, meeting and dialoguing with spiritual beings like angels or, often, the presence of Jesus, a figure of universal outreach, a human deity of transcendent love. The NDE is a kind of initiation into a new dimension of reality, a new afterlife space.  What is also brand new is having a technology for rapidly disseminating experience and information about this extraordinary phenomenon.  

Now to the main point of this post.  I’m interested in the so-called survival question, not just because I and most normal people prefer more life than extinction.  There is a special category of people I hope wake up to the loving world of the classic NDE when they die.  My hope for a loving afterlife is especially directed toward children willfully murdered, tortured, starved to death, bombed, shot in the head on purpose, and otherwise trampled to death by homicidal maniacs. The horrible idea of children thus systematically slaughtered has come to my attention from certain current events.  The films and photographs of their emaciated faces, hacked, burnt bodies, decapitated heads with frozen eyes peeping out of rubble. All this moral horror show I find stamped on my psyche.  I hope the manosphere is not offended by my squeamish harping on the annihilation of children. The spectacular evil of the perpetrators is evident to people everywhere on earth.  My immediate attention is on the uncountable thousands of dead children, whose numbers increase daily. The will to exterminate an entire people and culture is also demonstrated daily; it’s all there, a public performance. And as we know, a good part of the U.S. government, being complicit, applauds. Enough of that.

I want to think about the thousands of dead little guys and girls. I remember the sight of one   boy fleeing from a soldier who was waving his rifle dramatically. I can’t expunge the image of the emaciated face, the child’s beautiful, terrorized eyes. To be trashed and cheated of your life before you have begun to live it—an iconic crime against humanity.  I’m consoled by the research that points to the reality of an afterlife. I can think about the murdered children in new ways. The ineffable brutality of their fate is not the last word.  We can think about justice and humanity becoming the winner in the long run. I can paint the faces in my mind of children laved in a new world of love. Research of the soul explorers has opened our imaginations to a higher sphere of human experience. We’re also living at a time when there seem no limits to how low humankind can descend.  Nevertheless, I believe that we humans possess the power to break free and ascend to the height we need to come together.  

 

 

Love and the Near-Death Experience

 The near-death experience (NDE) is a very strange phenomenon.  Thanks to modern resuscitation technology, it is possible to revive people who have died, from a car crash or on the operating table, etc. They are clinically dead for several minutes and sometimes for much longer periods. Now, if dead, the brain is deprived of blood, which is supposed to obliterate consciousness. A dead brain is supposed to imply no consciousness.

But here is the first surprise. When the dead person is restored to life, he has a strange fact to report. Not only was he conscious, but the conscious experience he has is amazing, super-real and transformative. Shocking!  But how do we know that he was really conscious while he was dead?  Another blow to a reasonable assumption--story after story recounts how at the moment of death, you exit your body, usually rise to the ceiling where you observe your own dead body while others frantically work to bring life back.   You recall all the details of what you saw and astonish everyone by your knowledge of what was happening. Weird.  Could there be other invisible dead people hanging around, observing us?

There are many strange and interesting facets of the NDE, though the experience is filtered in a unique way through each experiencer. There is one special feature that explains something about the NDE. Most of the time, experiencers don’t want to return to their lives in the world. But they must because there is unfinished business that needs attention.  Still,  they would prefer to stay and bask in the ineffable presence of what is described as an atmosphere of pure love and acceptance.

Here now is perhaps the most mysterious feature of the NDE. It begins with awareness of an approaching light, which swells and engulfs you; it permeates you and reveals itself as love. This feels like the apex of the possible. Experiencers describe the presence of a transcendent embrace of the heart.  It is a form of love beyond the judgmental and the punitive.  Ecstatic and unconditional love; to feel it showered on you is like a gift from heaven.  It lingers in the mind, like an intoxicating atmosphere.  ‘Home’ is the metaphor that seems to fit the essence of the near-death journey.  It’s a remarkable idea: to die is finally to make it home and discover ineffable love!  All this is wildly at odds with our sense of rational reality.

There is another notable aspect of the NDEs. The popularity of Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, said to appear and interact with so many who find themselves in the near-death state. What to make of this? The Jesus that appears so often in the NDE radiates the spirit of divine love and peace.  Moreover, Jesus appears in the NDEs of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all sorts of unreligious characters, always with the same infinitely tactful approach.  In many reports, individuals are converted to the figure of Jesus as their central conduit to the experience of a kind of love that seems uniquely pure and enchanting. It is a love that we experienced in the past that now seems fully realized.  The Jesus figure in the NDE talks with the souls he engages with, telepathically and intimately. The effect is to sense an invitation to surrender without reservations to the generosity of divine love. Apparently, dying and being stripped of everything, even your body, can open one up to the influx of the love God.

It’s also good to know that the Jesus of near-death experience has a sense of humor.  An American woman had a near-death experience where she saw a man whom she instantly recognized was Jesus by the love she saw in his eyes.  He was, however, dressed in a suit. They met and she asked, “Jesus, why are you dressed in a suit?” He smiled and replied, “You wouldn’t have noticed me.”

 

Miracles and God: A Short Statement

 There are three great scientific mysteries. Why is there something rather than nothing? Nobody knows. We do know that our universe started, apparently out of nothing, 13.7 billion years ago. The second mystery is the origin of life. Biology has advanced wonderfully, but the origin of life remains unknown.  The third mystery is consciousness. Science cannot explain how life or consciousness evolved from dead matter. Consciousness lights up the universe for us—and for all living things.  The most obvious fact—that we are conscious—and yet physicalist science cannot explain it.  The three gaps in our knowledge suggest we are missing something big—something transcendently creative. Something we end up calling God?

Our materialist friends are optimistic and hope to get a handle on these pesky problems—good luck!   Meanwhile. the gaping holes in the materialist worldview are open doors to another worldview—to a spiritual universe and the God-idea. These open doors invite us to explore the universe of spiritual consciousness.  But since the industrial revolution and the rise of mechanistic science and technology, the collective consciousness has been hypnotized and manipulated by the dominant media.  It’s hard to break the spell of the mainstream archetypes; hard to snatch a breath of inspiration from a culture intent on keeping us in the materialist box.

 As it happens, there may be a way out. From time to time, people have extraordinary experiences.  For example, I’m interested in experiences described as miraculous. These aren’t easily explained.  As a philosopher, I took it as my duty to focus on experiences that science cannot explain. Moreover, I’ve had experiences that parapsychologists call paranormal—precognition, telepathy, healing, apports, and so on. My favorite, I was once physically attacked by a ghost in a haunted house. My research has taught me that miracles are a universal feature of human experience.  They point to an extraphysical, transcendent reality, variously named God, the divine, the great spirit, etc.  Such experiences are found in major religions, indigenous cultures, spiritualist movements, and with individual mystics, poets, shamans, prophets, and ordinary people.

 All the transcendent powers—levitation, inedia, materialization, bilocation, precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, empathy, the near-death experience, etc.—they are doorways into an alternate dimension of experience. The prevailing intuition as people enter the deeper ranges of consciousness is the presence of the divine, the superhuman. Proof of this depends on the light of direct experience. The enlightenment happens in different ways at different times and cultures.  God and the spirits are amazingly spontaneous and unpredictable.   The good news is that science is joining the exploration.  Many today see signs of the next stage of human evolution, a new sense of openness and shared higher consciousness. A new empathy for all forms of life on Earth.  St. Augustine said, if you seek God, go within.  The miracle of our own consciousness is the best argument for the existence of God. 

 

Stepping Beyond Yourself

It’s hard not to think of the many ways you can be taken in and taken out nowadays. It’s a weird world where anything can happen.   No wonder so many feel the need to connect with the more soulful part of themselves.  There’s more to us than we might normally suppose. We’re riveted to what’s obvious, the immediate surface of life. We need to unrivet ourselves, create an open mental space, if we’re curious about our unrecognized potentials.  

Down the ages, humans have discovered ways to tap into these potentials.   What follows is a short list of some examples. Not the details, just the main idea.

Fasting, for example, a world-old practice where you choose not to be tyrannized by your appetites. There is no question that fasting can alter your consciousness, even as it benefits your body.

Periods of solitude, which heighten self-observation and self-awareness.  In our busy lives, we often lose track of our real goals and interests. We’re distracted and divided by all manner of interruptions. Solitude means freedom from all the gadgets and the people.

Sublimation of sexual energy is a challenging route to higher consciousness.  The more Saint Joseph of Copertino had to fight to resist his sexual fantasies the more spectacular his levitations!  There are, however, less combative ways to sublimate our unruly sexual energies.

These examples, strategies for stepping beyond mundane consciousness, all abstain from paying attention to the world. They disallow consciousness from being scattered in all directions. 

As for inducing glimpses of greater realities, there is one procedure that can propel you instantly into another universe—the near-death experience. And it can happen in a flash.  Another universe, just around the psychic corner, so to speak!

We’re talking about the universe of consciousness and ways to enter more deeply into it.  We said something about physical maneuvers. Let’s look at some mental maneuvers.  In

 meditation, we focus the stream of our awareness on one thing, thus withdrawing our consciousness from everything, except what we’re meditating on. It’s good to know there are numerous ways to meditate.  Each of us is free to choose a way, or several, suited to our personality. 

One way to meditate (focus the stream of awareness) is in partnership with others.  For example, in prayer groups, in healing circles, in ritual song and dance.  And in seances where you try to connect with spirits of the dead.  The Dionysian rites of ancient Greece and the dance epidemics of Europe were popular. At Eleusis was a nine-day ritual of fasting and dancing, which came to a climax with drinking the kukeon, a psychedelic brew. This was followed by a vision of Persephone, Goddess of the Underworld. This rite lasted for thousands of years in ancient Greece, serving to moderate the fear of death.

The challenge today is to devise group dynamic situations that work for a wide range of functions, ranging from healings to creative interaction with spirits.  For example, the Native Indian vision quest. Here you stay by yourself on some isolated corner of nature, and stay there, without food or drink, attuning yourself to the Great Spirit, until you encounter your healing vision, the sign, symbol, icon that seals your entry into the spirit world.

Sleep and Dreams are a way. Most of us spend about a third of our lives sleeping and dreaming, dead to the waking world, but reborn in another world, the dream world. We leave our bodies and enter other realms of experience.   We leave our physical bodies, become dream bodies, and enter dream space where the impossible comes to life.  Dreaming qualifies as otherworldly. It seems like a metaphysical halfway house to the more far out realms of consciousness.  The first step beyond us is inside us.   You don’t have to travel far to perform a metaphysical somersault.   

Spiritual movements are possible and do happen. – Breaking out of our mundane consciousness is a perennial need. Throughout history movements have arisen that create new forms consciousness. Some movements try to fuse spiritual quest with factual truth such as Mesmerism, Spiritualism, the 20^th century New Age, the current worldwide UAP movement, and so on,

The latter I suspect will grow in interest.  Finally, I offer a little pneumonic for those open to the idea of psychophysical experimentation. And here it is—get SET, Spontaneity, Ecstasy, Trust. Spontaneity, openness and fluidity of spirit; ecstasy, beside yourself with joy; trust, self-reliance with love. These three variables are virtues conducive to opening the gates of consciousness. In every case, the step beyond has its own quirky story.

I intend to pursue this line of exploration into the hyperpossible. Why not? For as the poet Auden wrote: We who are about to die demand a miracle.

 

 

Psychic Warfare or Evolution?

 It should be of interest that the three most powerful nations on earth, empires if you will, Russia, China, and America, all have a history of interest in psychic research. Clearly, the extended mental and physical powers associated with psychic power might well have military implications. In this post, I want to say something about China, based on China’s Super Psychics, by Paul Dong & Thomas E. Raffill (1997).

The phenomena described in this book are astonishing. The book begins with a foreword by Dr. Karen Kramer explaining how her complete recovery from cancer was due to her practice of chi gong, a Chinese spiritual practice, said to deploy a universal energy that seems to operate like psychokinesis (PK), in plain language, mind over matter.

In chapter 1, Paul Dong takes us back to Beijing in 1987 to the scene of an experiment with Zhang Baosheng, a famous Chinese superpsychic. There were about thirty witnesses. Baosheng was handed a sealed bottle, never opened, with forty-four medical pills inside; he concentrates intensely on the bottle, after which the seal was broken.  All forty-four pills were gone, and in their place, a small piece of candy was found! The candy is cited as a feature of the psychic’s “prankish personality.” It turns out that many superpsychics in China do the pill-vanishing thing (dematerialization as well as apports, matter passing through matter). 

Zhang is said to have a bad temper.  If you photograph him and he doesn’t like you, he can use his PK to disable your camera and ruin the photograph.  This reminds me of accounts of UAP entities that stop cars, elude fighter jets, toss aside bullets, turn off lights or any technical system at will. The most dramatic fact that the U.S. government doesn’t want us to know is that on various occasions alien entities have temporarily disabled American nuclear weapons’ facilities and operations. This must be extremely concerning to those in charge of our military defense systems.

But back to Baosheng. On one occasion he was visiting with high-ranking government officials for a demonstration of some EHF (exceptional human capacity.)  The moody medium refused to do it, so the head official ordered to have him locked up in a special room. Done. But when the official went home, he opened the door and found Baosheng waiting for him. Surprise! He could apport pills out of a sealed bottle; apparently, he could also apport himself out of a locked room! After this impossible performance, he found himself working for China’s Defense Ministry.  As for these accounts of apport and teleportation, there is Western data from saints to poltergeists that confirm the weird reality of matter passing through matter.   What seems new here is the degree of control the Chinese evidence seems to suggest that humans may possess over these PK powers.

True to the title of this post, given the evidence for things like psychokinesis, especially macro-PK, the idea of psychic warfare takes us well beyond sci-fi entertainment. The English physicist William Crookes was a paradigm-busting psychical researcher who claimed the discovery of “a new force” in nature—new to the physical science of the day.  The new force is manifest when we observe willed intentionality produce some physical effect, apart from any physical cause. What if we learn to mobilize by direct mental operations the “new force” to harm or deflect the mind and body of a designated enemy in war. Every time we learn to enhance our physical power in new ways, we up the ante of our destructive potential. As far as our moral evolution, so obviously stunted, PK by itself will not palliate the mounting peril. What is lacking is development of our mental powers, our telepathic and empathic powers.  We need to tune into the psychic reality of our opponents and they to ours before anything resembling rapprochement is possible. A well-rounded evolution of the psyche is the best hope for the survival of our species.

The EHF here reviewed could be used for nefarious purposes.  We learned, for example, that Baosheng could psychically remove medicine pills from a sealed container and project them elsewhere. The testy PK master threatened to project one of the pills into one of the experimenter’s stomachs. A well- trained psychic spy could cause all manner of disruptive hijinks for enemy targets. But then, reading the minds of your foes, especially if you can do so precognitively, would also be a military advantage. Information that can be conveyed without any machinery could do much mischief.   Crucial targets are closely monitored and shielded by protective bodies, but psychic attack could elude physical barriers. 

Although the Communist authorities have become alert to the dangers of psychically manipulated politics, the wider public is drawn to the healing virtues of Qigong. The attraction is widespread with three practices—breath, movement, concentration. It appears that many learn they can do things we normally assume are impossible.  The idea that millions of young Chinese people train in Qigong is worth noting, especially since American kids basic reading skills are in decline.  

Children in America are raised via what I prefer to call a passive screen culture. Contrast this with the native American vision quest.  There what you did was release yourself to some obscure portion of the wilderness, with minimal clothing and no food or drink.  And there you remain in a fasting solitude, intentional and meditative until you experience a dream or vision that speaks to you in ways that convince and deep move you. To see how this works, I would recommend that you read Lame Dear, Seeker of Visions, by John Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes. It is a life of a Sioux Medicine Man.  He tells his native story, free from the ethos of his genocidal invaders.

Zhang Baosheng caused objects, including his own body, to apport from locked rooms. I can’t help fantasizing about Zhang devising an apport-inducing method for all the brutally, unjustly imprisoned people on the planet. This, of course, would be only the beginning of a worldwide psychospiritual revolution.  We must be honest and confront the strangeness of this reported claim of Chinese super-psychics.  Surely, a hefty weapon in the possible coming psychic wars.  I hope that instead of wars, all the nations come together in a quest for promoting the creative evolution of our destructively inclined species.  

China and her children of supernormal phenomena provide data that enable us to imagine ways of accelerating human evolution.    Many of these powers can be unnerving but the emphasis of chi gong is on health and well-being. Chapter Six is about an extraordinary chi healer, Nan Xin, notable as a “fragrance master,” emitting impressive fragrances whenever engaged in his healing activities. The book is full of reports of paranormal healing.

But the Communist State has pulled in the reins on the popular psychic practices.  A danger is sensed of a type of spiritual energy, which resides in us all and may with some become an instrument of miraculous creativity and even perhaps revolutionary power. In an interesting contrast, the United States intelligentsia is chary about confronting the reality of psychic phenomena or miracles, as I know from my book on levitation, which Oxford University Press refused to publish unless I abstained from confirming the reality of levitation. The reason in this case was more an anti-religious bias.  But not all publishers suffer from this intellectual small-mindedness. See my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Available via Anomalist Books or Amazon.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                     

 

 

 

 

In Praise of a Conscious Ant

I was at my computer when I noticed an ant perched on the edge of my machine, to the left of my pinky. I wondered how the little creature found its way to my keyboard.  The ant decided to go for a walk, and I observed it move in a straight line, changing directions as if it were trying to reconnoiter the whole scene. 

I placed my right index finger two inches away from the ant, blocking its path. The ant stopped and changed directions, moving at the same pace.  I repeated the obstruction and the ant kept adapting and looking for a way out. Impressed by his performance, I retired my index finger and bid the little guy farewell.

Well, I thought, that ant and I have a big thing in common.  We’re both conscious beings. The ant had to be conscious to see and react to my index finger. Given that consciousness, which pervades the whole of living nature, is one of the great scientific mysteries, I feel respect for all life forms and prefer not to kill any animate creatures for no good reason. As far as I was concerned, that ant was a walking wonder

As for insects in general, they’re very interesting.  As a life form, they are wildly successful and adaptable to environmental change; 1.2 million diverse species of these arthropods occupy our planet, whereas we mammals make up about 4,000 species. Moreover, bugs thrive anywhere and everywhere, deep in the soil of the Earth and as high in the sky as an airplane.

Even more striking is their sensory apparatus. Insects have large eyes.  They see in color and can judge distance; and they can see around themselves, night and day, and, unlike us, can sense ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized light.  And consider this fascinating bit: “Smell and taste often blur together and are detected in combined form by chemo receptors all over the bug’s body.” (See below, R. Imes.) What a sensory experience! The whole surface of the body imbued with taste and fragrance—how exotic and surrealistic!

Aside from the amazing nature of insectile life is the fact of it being critical to human survival, being the basis of the of the food supply chain, through pollination, keeping the soil healthy, and bless the scavengers, by decomposing waste and recycling nutrients. The overall effect is to keep a balance in nature, a balance, as we know, disrupted by human technology and insatiable consumerism.

 The climate crisis ought to be a reminder of the need for humility.  We need to become more aware of the natural world that we depend on for our existence. There’s a whole layer of our collective existence easy to ignore, described in a wonderful book, Incredible Bugs, by Rick Imes, a book that will startle you into awareness of the miraculous ingenuity of life.  Insects were the first living creatures to fly, and to their credit, insects turn out to be a big part of bird food. Like the Jain philosophy, abstention from killing other conscious beings (even bugs) is a way of marking the universal bond of all life forms in the bosom of infinite consciousness. I know I’m asking a lot, to respect all forms of life on Earth.  It may be a request for the impossible, but the total adventure of life is at stake.  

 

 

The Most Astonishing Fact

 What could that be? Answer--the president of the most powerful nation on Earth believes that the world climate crisis is a hoax.  Why so astonishing? The answer has two parts.  First, the enormity of the stakes entailed, namely, planetary destruction and ecocide. Second, the transcendent stupidity of the President, along with his evil indifference to the fate of our environment.

There is an ad, a voice periodically heard on public television that reminds us that a million species of living creatures, due to climate and habitat change, are slated for extinction. That’s no hoax. It’s been noted repeatedly that the President has a style in which he accuses others of the crimes he is accused of.  He learned this piece of malign brilliance from one of the weirdest creeps of the McCarthy era, the ‘lawyer’ Roy Cohn. So, it’s the president that is trying to hoax the entire world and all the scientists. We need to underscore the gigantic danger of such a man possessing the power he has. A documented pathological liar, Trump has the power to trigger an atomic war, most likely, terminal for world civilization.  This too is part of the astonishing fact we’re all forced to live with. 

While I was researching my book, The Millennium Myth, I kept taking notes on all the predictions of the end of the world made by the visionaries and prophets of history. They were all wrong.  Little did I realize I would see the day when Noam Chomsky and others would be warning us about the growing onset of climate and nuclear end time. According to the millennium myth, there is always an end time rogue, an Antichrist or Satan.
So, given the real confrontation with looming apocalypse, we need a diabolic rogue to insert into our unfolding story.    I leave it to the reader to pick a candidate for the job.

 

Three Types of Relationship

Life on Earth is heating up. One effect is to accelerate changes like the melting of glaciers, the destruction of habitats, and the predicted extinction of a million living species, not excluding humans.  The picture of the coming climate: Armageddon painted by scientists is not consoling.

 

As a species we’re facing an enormous challenge that is unavoidable, and each day the future seems to look grimmer and more disorienting. Chaos and disintegration approach on scales unprecedented.  In light of this not too jolly premise, I find myself wondering about the fragility of relationships. 

 

It struck me that there are three kinds of relationship we all have.  We are in relationship with ourselves; with other human beings; and with the natural world we’re part of. All three are problematic, given the terminal dangers introduced by human activity.

 

As for relationship to ourselves, many of us manage reasonably well. But many not so well, and problems with ourselves can range from morbid self-loathing to criminal megalomania.

 

As to how we relate to others, conflict and wars of all kinds are creating mountains  of corpses and mangled bodies, flattened houses, blasted churches, sanctuaries, hospitals and schools reduced to rubble, with millions of ruined lives in their wake. 

 

As for how we relate to the living natural world we’re a part of—the answer is miserably.  Suicidal, self-destructive, cosmically stupid, to be more exact.  Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humans have managed to create a monster called climate change. We’ve polluted, overheated, and wrecked ecosystems all over the planet.  And this is not a one-off event; it’s a process that needs to stop or else it will roast, drown and starve us to death.

 

Instead of an industrial revolution, we need a revolution in the way we see, understand and experience the world.  The creative center for the entire enterprise revolves around the way we relate to ourselves.   After all, the way we relate to other people must be a function of the way we’re tuned to ourselves.  If we’re not moderately happy, relating to other people and the natural world are bound to suffer.

 

The key to the three relationships then is how we relate to ourselves. ‘Know yourself,’ was inscribed on the pediment of the temple of Apollo. A signpost to ancient Greek wisdom.  Our relationship to ourselves is the primary challenge we need to consider. The relationship to oneself contains the potential for something transformative, even futuristic.  

 

We are thrown into a world of bewildering relationships. There is our beautiful planet and the sprawling universe. There are other humans, saints and savages we have to contend with. And finally, there is our mother the natural world with all her powers and mysteries. A mother poisoned, polluted, and exploited.  

 

We've learned to plunder the material Earth as if it were raw material made for us to use and consume. Nature is treated as a soulless resource to be exploited in whatever way serves human desires, including  profit. Technology, in this way, spells the death of the sacred. All things are now for sale.

 

So here we are, facing a frightening future. Are we up to the changes we must make to insure our survival as a species? Are there latent powers we possess but don’t know how to mobilize? A large question mark hangs over our most important relationship, which is to ourselves. The greatest challenge but also the most interesting—a relationship impossible to avoid.  

 

 

The Secret Message of Sleep

Sleep, falling asleep, seems to me a strange phenomenon.   We are awake all day, consciously engaged with the world, and then something happens.  The consciousness that I am, my experience of reality, becomes fuzzy and lethargic. Tired, it withdraws from the external world and falls asleep. At first, nothing, no more consciousness; just like death, (at least according to the materialist credo).  So, in the world of sleep, we experience the nonbeing that presumably is death.  

But that’s not the secret of sleep.  Rather, the secret is that out of the nothingness of dreamless sleep emerges the conscious world of dreams—the vestibule of the afterlife?  

We are layered creatures and range across different forms of conscious reality.  Begin with common waking consciousness. But by day’s end we get tired and need to sleep. So we enter  another interesting layer of consciousness, hypnagogia, literally, falling asleep.  This can be missed, but if you don’t fall asleep easily, you may slip into the hypnagogic state. You’re still awake but also coasting in dream space. (Surrealists love this layer of our mental life.)  In the next layer, past hypnagogia, you enter the full dream world. I have a question.  Are sleep and dream a metaphor of life after death? 

We do spend almost a third of our life cycling back and forth in our sleep and dream life.  What’s the point of our dream life anyway? From one angle, dream space looks like the connecting link between our waking space and our possible afterlife space. Is our nightly dream life signaling us from the great beyond?  Prepping us for the big transition?

As for an afterlife, there is a huge, sprawling literature, unfortunately ignored by most academics and journalists.  Evidence for an after world is vast and varied (see my book, Experiencing the Next World Now);  nowadays the leading contender for survival proof is the near-death experience.  People who have near-death experiences appear in case after case on YouTube; they tell their own stories, all quite unique while certain themes reveal a definite structure to the experience. Evidence aside, just falling asleep and dreaming seem to be telling us something about death and the afterlife—and that may be the secret message of our sleep and dream life.

 

 

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.