Sunday, February 19, 2017

Ocular Proof of the Impossible

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Belief in a mind greater than our own, an external mind that can relate to us in a helpful way, is a recurrent belief in human history.  To honor this archetypal psychic entity, let’s just call it Big Mind.

Now, depending on time, place, and culture, people imagine Big Mind in different ways: as spirits and deities of magic, of shamanism, of polytheistic religions; as constructions of monotheism like God, Brahman, Wakan Tanka; as all kinds of angels or demons; as carefully defined philosophical agents or beings like the Hegelian Geist or Bergsonian elan vital; as entheogenic formations of consciousness; as hallucinations of various kinds that qualify as psychotic; and so on.  In light of this historical proliferation of forms, I think we’re justified in forming the hypothesis of Big Mind: vague and general, I mean no more than something I could also call extended, subliminal, or transcendent Mind.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Levitation and Life After Death


                                  
                                               

         
  “You understand how to fly using wings, but you have not yet seen how to fly without them,” wrote Chuangtzu, the great Taoist.  I have been thinking about levitation and life after death. A strange combination, for sure. My research convinced me that levitation is a fact of nature, having focused on the dramatic, well-documented case of St. Joseph of Copertino. A mass of eyewitness testimony of very high caliber leaves it a no-brainer for me. 

The question I’d like to raise here: assume the reality of levitation -- or of any supernormal mind-body effect. Would it detract from or enhance the prospect of an afterlife?     

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