Launching the Adventure of Transcendence

In a conversation with somebody about the transformative effects of spiritual life, I was surprised by a question he put to me—namely, what does one do?  In other words, how does one embark on the path of transcendence and transformation?  That of course is a big question, and my immediate thought was—like falling in love, there are many ways such dramatic changes of consciousness might start off. It seemed like a question worth pondering.

                  My first thought was simple enough.  It struck me that there are at least two distinct ways one might commence a journey in quest of enlightenment. Something might happen that shocks you into an acutely felt need to alter your lifestyle and revise the meaning of your existence.  For example, to take a well-known example, suppose you undergo a near-death experience. Almost always this results in a major transformation of one’s consciousness, values, and lifestyle.  Other types of disruptive events, illness, loss of a job, emotional break-ups or disappointments—events that radically subvert your sense of security.  Experiencing one’s life as broken may inspire one to look for a new premise for living and for a more satisfying worldview.  One feels as a result driven to look for new ways to explore and live one’s life.

                  The second way that aims for transcendence may simply result from an intuition that there must be more to life than what one has, however reasonably satisfactory. A kind of metaphysical boredom might afflict one, a restless dissatisfaction with the flatness of everyday life. One might learn about a person who got involved in some exotic spiritual practice and its beneficial effects. That might be a way to start one’s practice.

                  To the person who asked about what to do—how to get into some practice that would launch his voyage of transcendence—I would say this. Read into the literature of spirituality and try different things. Be guided by your choice and intuition--and observe the results.  Experiment. Strike up a conversation with your guardian angel—try to connect with the spiritual forces within yourself.  Again, observe the results of your efforts.  The history of the creative spirit won’t disappoint you.  Some measure of openness and confidence is essential.  Keep a journal of your experiments.
                 

Strangers from Outer and Inner Space

 

 Talk about fundamental reality may seem distant and abstract—in philosophy, it’s called ontology.  Butsuch questions have practical implications for how we understand ourselves, our values and beliefs. One of the key questions. What is fundamental to a human being, mind or body? The correct answer is important. 

Another big question is being asked today: Are we alone? Or are we being visited by intelligent, extraterrestrial beings?  In April, 2026, President Trump put his stamp on the Disclosure Act meant to release all UFO-related unredacted information to the inquisitive American public. 

So, two questions—what is basic, the mental or the physical, and: do we have company from outer space, nonhuman intelligent beings?

            The U.S. government has for eighty years striven to conceal the truth about UFOs, now called UAP, unidentified anomalous phenomena. Whistleblowers have revealed that American and other scientists have attempted to reverse engineer crashed space vehicles, in hopes of discovering the operating forces and mechanisms of the craft. Given that the pilots and their vehicles are most likely thousands or even millions of years older than us and therefore more evolved, I’m not optimistic about the reverse engineering.  I understand keeping it all a secret.  Since UFOs are global phenomena, we can be sure other countries are trying to learn what they can about UFO technology. Our government wants to keep the UFO secret in hopes of achieving techno-superiority over our rivals and enemies.

 But we have other things to learn from our alien visitors.  Hopefully, we might learn something about peace, harmony, love, justice, and so on.  To explore a more amicable perspective on alien encounters, read the books by the late American psychiatrist, John Mack, who had a genius for listening to people who had alien abduction experiences.

            How does the alien-human interaction connect with religion?  If ETs have been interacting with planet Earth and its inhabitants, the myths of religion may contain signs of ET influence and visitation, for example, Old Testament prophets, Catholic saints and Marian visions. The humanoid beings display powers over material reality that are shocking. The current alien superman doesn’t look like Clark Kent, but more like a thin dwarf with huge head and bulging eyes. There is also an uncanny connection to reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

I’m forced to ask a weird question. Is there an out of world technology engineering visionary experiences of the Virgin Mary? Have the various Fatima prodigies been products of an unknown UFO technology?  

Let’s look at the other big question dealing with ontology. When we think about it, we are a curious compound of mind and body, one visible, the other invisible.  A question comes up, which of these is fundamental, the ultimate cause?  Body or mind? And what is the relationship between the two contenders?

Some people (materialists) say that the brain (matter) is fundamental, our mental life a byproduct of our brain.  But nobody has ever been able to explain how the brain produces the  thing we know to be our consciousness; more likely, what the brain does is not create, but transmit, our mental life, like a radio transmits music, news, voices, words. The radio creates nothing; the voices, the music, the bad news are coming from elsewhere. So, our consciousness seems grounded in what’s been called cosmic consciousness.  (If you want to know what that feels like, read Leaves of Grass by the poet Walt Whitman.)

Our consciousness is fundamental, irreducible, and reveals our world to us continuously. The question is, what are the limits of our conscious world? Well, from an everyday embodied perspective, my conscious world is shaped by my bodily sensations, along with thoughts, feelings, desires, memories, imaginings, etc. My conscious world includes, to be accurate, my dreams, and more rarely, visions and various altered states. 

But something is missing.  And that brings us to the second item in the expansion of our ontological perspective. The world of consciousness we experience is the complement of our embodied life. The next step in ontological expansion is for consciousness to disentangle itself from physical existence. So, what happens to our consciousness when we die? Normally, we don’t know.  But now thanks to science, we may have a way to crack this perennial mystery.  

 Modern technology of resuscitation seems unwittingly to have set into motion a revolution in after-death research. We already have survival evidence from mediumship, apparitions, deathbed phenomena, hauntings, and so forth.  But thanks to the ability to bring people back to life who have died, we now have a reliable portal for gaining knowledge about the next world.  There is a swelling body of data based on the near-death experiences of people everywhere on the planet.  With no heart or lungs working, the brain functionally dead, people report having the most extraordinary experiences of their lives.

The person whose heart and respiration ceases suddenly finds himself out of his body, hovering above and observing his dead body as a team of nurses frantically try to resuscitate him. He observes his body without feelings of concern or partiality, and soon turns away and enters the various near-death events, meeting a guide or a god, meeting loved ones who had passed, witnessing his life in review, marked by empathy and self-knowledge. From the vast reportage of experiencers, it is clear that when a person dies, and the physics (heart) of life breaks down, the mental reality of life emerges into self-awareness.  The afterlife world is a non-stop out-of-body experience. That’s what the near-death phenomenon is telling us.

So, in sum, the twofold expansion in our picture of reality. First, we are interacting with nonhuman intelligences, highly evolved beings from somewhere in the universe; second, our mental life is rooted in a deep mental universe. When our body dies, we apparently enter a purely mental universe.   We are forcibly drawn out of 3-d space into the space of out-of-body existence. This we call the ‘next’ world.  

 My view is that there is a 3-D physical universe, dating from 3.7 billion years ago. But invisible and intersecting with the 3-D universe, is a psychospiritual universe. So, we are attuned to a physical and a mental universe.  Dying entails full transition into the mental universe. The picture of this mental universe is becoming clearer as the global input of near-death and related data increases.

I suspect that interest in ways of entering the mental universe without being literally near death will grow. Yogis, shamans, mystics, and saints have devised methods designed to induce entry into the spiritual universe.  What the data points to is no small thing, our world a scene of cosmic visitations and our world as a platform for entry into an afterlife existence.  Our view of reality is in the midst of a dramatic, twofold expansion.  

             

 

  

 

The Magic of Music

 

 

  

Although I can play the flute and bongo drum with pleasure and amateur enthusiasm, I am not a musician.  Even so, I’m drawn to what I might call the metaphysics of music. In fact, I have had music-related experiences that spoke to my deepest ideas.  I want briefly to describe some examples, and then I want cite a book published in 2026 that is an intriguing exploration of the metaphysics of music.

            But first, experiences I’ve had of music that altered my consciousness and my sense of reality.  Music can touch the heart and the soul in ways hard to match by other means. Listening to the music of Hildegard of Bingen once and once to the music of Claude Debussy, I slipped into a state of ecstasy, ineffable detachment, my ego dissolved in bliss. The sense of another reality is present but elusively.

            A second item of my experience I’d like to mention, featured in Mike Fiorito’s highly original study of the magic and metaphysical meanings of music, which he connects to the highly current issue of the U.S. government finally beginning to reveal the truth about UFOs/UAP.   Music and UFOs?  It’s a curious pairing. As it turns out, I had such an experience. April 23, 1971, in Greenwich Village, NY, I’m listening, with my girlfriend, Jane, to John Coltrane, a piece called The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I step to the window to look out (we’re on the top floor.)  Out of nowhere a cluster of lights appear in the sky and start dancing, clearly echoing the music in its fantastic movements. Also, I see in the sky a man smiling at me and gesturing.  Jane comes to the window and sees the dancing lights.  (The man I saw vanished.) Later, we learned that a third person, Louie, also into John Coltrane, was on the roof and witnessed the dancing lights.  So, we have music (Coltrane) and space visitors grooving with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What’s going on?

             Fiorita’s book begins with a discussion of the celestial jazz master, Sun Ra. Sun Ra and his band in the 1960s performed in the basement of an apartment house. Sun Ra, like Coltrane, was very much into music as a spiritual practice, as a way to opening and awakening the deep regions of consciousness. This is very much the pervasive motif of Fiorito’s book.  It’s not my purpose to review all the rich material discussed in this book. There is a lot to encompass.  Of great value, I would suggest, the book provides a work-out program for the imagination, the key to the magical dimension of what C. G. Jung called “active” imagination.

Fiorito also writes in several places about “deep listening.”  The whole planet might become more civilized if we all learned how to listen deeply to each other. Listening to music could be a way of learning how to listen to the more subtle harmonies and discords of the environment. We need to tune into the entire living environment or leave it to the magic of money wizards. We know what that leads to, without fail.

            There is a way to connect music to the center of our living being; that is, through the living heart. Rhythm, the soul of music, is essential to the living heart. Our life on earth depends on the music of our beating hearts. And when we sing or even hum, we are literally playing on our life-giving respiration.  Fiorito evokes the idea of Oneness, a concept empirically grounded in types of mystical experience.  The realization of archetypal oneness would be the kind of evolutionary advance the sane among us would welcome.  In the climax, it will music that blows our minds into the ether of the impossible. In the meantime, however, you can do it, make music.  And I recommend M. Fiorito’s book, The Inner space of Outer space, guide to the multiverse of creative evolution.

Apprentice House Press, also available from Amazon  

           

             

 

Paranormal Group Dynamics

Teamwork is often the key to success in life: in sports, in business, in marriage, in politics-- and in war. What interests me is the concept of paranormal teamwork, group attempts to do things seemingly impossible—extraphysical, to be exact. The kind of thing that a materialist would never admit could be real. I get it. It sounds strange to say that ordinary people can be trained to perform miracles.   

                  Nevertheless, the English psychologist, Kenneth Batcheldor, trained a group of five people, not known for any esoteric skills, to succeed in a controlled experiment. They caused a table to rise into the air, that is, to levitate—and without any physical contact! A small group of humans get together and manage to suspend the most basic physical force in nature--gravity.  That seems to be saying something about a shocking piece of human potential.

Much of the research that led to these experiments involved seances where the aim was to contact deceased spirits.  We seem to have stumbled on a group dynamic with a variety of potential uses, one that enables us to defy gravity but that also enables us to interact with presumably deceased persons. Moreover, the group dynamic we’re discussing can be used to explore still other forms of paranormality.  For example, as aid in one’s personal evolution, in situations that call for healing, in the world of artistic challenges. And so on. Each member of the group is also learning how to sustain the rapport that is the key to the dynamic.

 So, for example, under the heading, personal evolution, you might describe an issue that’s problematic, and the group does its thing, Jung would say, by using our active imagination: identifying with the problem and looking for ways out. The group-dynamic is childlike in its openness and responsiveness. The aim is to interact with the deeper layers of our mental life.  The challenge is to learn how to do this. Batcheldor favored a group process where nobody is singled out as special.  Individuals in the group did not want to stand out as a source of strange powers. The important thing was to explore phenomena that stimulate your imagination and see what it’s trying to tell you.

                  Despite the continued reluctance of scientists to accept the reality of the paranormal, interest is growing and spreading, especially when the latest neuroscientist, philosopher, clergyman, or hospice nurse has a mind-blowing near-death experience. Modern resuscitation technology, used to bring people back from death, is leading to a revolutionary model of the afterlife.

 I believe that the reality of the NDE is going to lead to the discovery and development of safe procedures for inducing experimental crossovers into the afterworld. That would mark a radically new step in the evolution of the human species. For centuries there always were claims of traffic between our world and another. The connections were always hard to pin down. For the rationalist, it was easy to dismiss the idea of an invisible world. But there were gifted people that reported encounters with spiritual worlds and beings. The names of Blake and Swedenborg, Joan of Arc and Teresa of Avila, come to mind as famous examples.

                  The near-death experience provides a growing mass of evidence strongly suggesting the reality of postmortem survival.  The ontological expansion is twofold. In addition to an extraphysical afterworld, we now know we are, and have been, visited by a host of nonhuman intelligences, UAP, UFOs, beings from other worlds and beings that also seem to operate near free from the constraints of physical reality.  I wonder: are the ETs interacting with us our future selves?  Are they here to coax us into a new phase of evolution? Are they here to activate the expansion of paranoia into metanoia, of murderous mendacity into more intense life and empathy?  

                  In another post, I plan to describe an outline of how a group might proceed to get into the experiment of forming a creative group dynamic

                   

 

A Glance at Our Evolutionary Future

In 1974, A.E. Orage published a short book, Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman.    The author begins by saying that from “the constant contemplation of the blue sky of our minds we may, I believe, one day behold new suns and moons and stars. For though at first there is nothing, yet the nothing is of the nature of that formless and void universe with which creation began.”

His book is about the evolution of consciousness. Our concern, too. He speaks to the great transition and our possible superhumanity.  The new epoch of our evolution will differ in kind. It won’t be more of the same.  Instead of more control of the external world, it will be more control of our internal world, in other words, ourselves. We’ll be more attuned to the hidden dimensions of our being.

 Imagine something analogous to awakening from sleep.  The big task is to let go of the ego; we need to wake up from the sleep of the ego. To repeat, we can anticipate something altogether new, like a talent for experiencing ecstasy, being able to slip out of our routine mind-body perspective. And there are various ways of doing this: for example, meditation, music, the arts, prayer, fasting, love, solitude, psychedelics, and so on. A bloodless revolution, we surrender to ecstasy. To be precise, we escape from ourselves. We become detached from the tyranny of our mechanized lives.

                  Imagine how the new ecstatic potential of our consciousness would alter our lifestyle.  I can think of two marked effects. Life without the fear of death would be one. This might have a calming effect on all the edgy folk among us.  As more consciously evolved, we’ll have a greater ability to project ourselves into the wonderfully wild extraphysical universe. An intriguing picture of a new degree of human freedom. Why this speculation on our greater freedom? Why all the metaphysical angst?

Part of me, to be frank, recoils from science and religion; they’ve had their chance to save the world. Right now they’re yanking it to the edge of destruction. Science creates all sorts of fiendish weapons so we can annihilate each other and toxify the natural world. And  too often religion provides the righteous rants and reasons to carry out the gruesome specifics.

So another part of me is attracted to the arts.  Our souls and our sensory lives are the raw material we need to work on and with. Every conscious moment is an invitation to the poet inside us.  And we’re not humble about what we’re aiming for. We plan to become the free-spirited sculptors of our lives, and yes, also the playwrights.  Imagine that!

The Question of UFOs

 

Since 2017 information and some videos have been released that suggest the reality

of UFOs or UAP, unidentified aerial phenomena.  The partial information of what’s going

on we owe to some whistleblowers at personal risk. What has been released for the public

is very little, despite some hints from President Trump that a fuller disclosure was

forthcoming. But there are no signs of this happening. In fact, the government is holding

back on a matter of enormous significance.

                  For example, as jet pilot David Fravor discovered during a sortie with an alien

craft, the latter completely transcends the most advanced American military technology.

As it turns out, there are crashed alien vehicles that American scientists are trying to

reverse engineer.  Any organized group of humans that succeeds in reproducing the

alien technology from the crashed retrievals would enjoy a military advantage over any

merely human organized power.  The importance of disclosing the complete truth about

the various types of beings that have been visiting us transcends military issues.  Too often

in accounts I’ve read about alien encounters—the first human reaction is to run or

shoot.  We need to make efforts to engage in civilized discourse with the alien intelligence

whose presence is worldwide.  An attempt to engage with them constructively might well

turn out to be a step toward our evolutionary advance.  We need to get our government to

open to the idea that more is involved in the alien confrontation than military matters. The

sheer fact of the presence of a highly evolved, nonhuman intelligence on Earth

                  For the political dimension of this undoubtedly strange issue, I recommend that you

look into the New Paradigm Institute (NPI) of Danny Sheehan, the distinguished civil rights

lawyer who won Supreme Court cases involving the Iran Contra civil lawsuit, the Three

Mile Island litigation, the Pentagon Papers, what happened at Wounded Knee, the

Watergate Burglary, the Sanctuary case, and so on. Now he’s fighting for disclosure of

information about UAP held in secret from the public and even from Congress for 80 years

by the Military Industrial Complex.  Check out the New Paradigm Institute to see a  

fascinating film and learn about the cosmic adventure the human species is on the

threshold of entering.  But for this to happen the government must stop lying and

misleading the American public.  It’s completely absurd that the most astonishing news

of world history is being withheld from us for reasons anything but good or necessary.

President Trump has called for this disclosure. What are you all waiting for?

  

 

 

Resuscitation Technology and the Afterlife

 

Modern medicine has developed skills and technologies used to resuscitate people from clinical death. In most cases a clinically dead person stays dead, unless somebody intervenes and resuscitates the victim by pumping blood back in the dead brain; one then becomes conscious and returns to life. The range of time that the period of death lasts is from a few minutes to cases reportedly lasting hours. 

But now we come to the shocker. People who are revived from being dead report having the most extraordinary experience of their lives. The materialist would expect nothing!  Instead, the trip is to a world, immense, wonderful, beautiful, and occasionally horrific.  We’ve known about this other world from 1975 when Raymond Moody published.  Life After Life. By now we have a growing population of people who die for a period but are restored to life. These folks uniformly report quite amazing afterworld experiences.

A highly metaphysical and emotionally charged issue is suddenly thrust into the limelight of glaring medical fact. We are told by the revived person exactly how at the time  of death his consciousness appeared but outside his body, totally at peace and devoid of interest in the sight of his own corpse.  People all over the planet are having near-death experiences, which to some degree, vary, due to culture.  For example, unlike America, the Japanese rarely experience the life-review. Even so, overall, the experience is structurally similar, being flung as it were into an unexpected universe, not extinction. So, we now have a technology that can serve as  a portal to a new dimension of experience, the very afterlife or next world we’ve all heard about. Of course, getting there by ND is not the same as going on a summer vacation.  We need our scientists and artists to experiment and help us devise ways of crossing the psychic boundary without killing ourselves.    

All this may sound outrageous and super-silly to our materialist friends. There are efforts to argue that the near-death experience is just a matter of hallucination.  End of story. Why then do no living people showing up in these hallucinations?  Why then the repeated accounts of the ND experiencer describing the minute details of doctors trying to revive their dead brains, the devices they manipulate, their verbal exchanges. Only lucid consciousness, not hallucination, could account for the accurate observations. Also, the NDE has recurrent structures, themes, motifs, drama that is not at all hallucinatory but intensely focused and meaningful.

And there’s this. The NDE transforms people in extraordinary and lasting ways. Far from hallucination, we have direct evidence that persons physically dead continue to be conscious, happy, and moreover, transformed, in values, in heart, in understanding.  The NDE is a global phenomenon. It is possible to see experiencers as a branch of a new type of human being. This new type is distinguished by having direct, experiential entry into the next world that has haunted the soul and imagination of humankind since the dawn of our history.  It appears that we have evolved a technology that restores the traumatized brains of dead people. When revived, they describe their disembodied, transformative,  experiences.

Medical technology has, inadvertently, opened the door to a new phase of evolutionary psychology. Science is using technologies that bear on phenomena of psychospiritual transcendence.  Near-death stories take us out of our body; and reveal a host of other extraordinary phenomena. Fortunately, there are less violent procedures for opening the inner gates and exploring the next world. Science, by evolving the technology of resuscitation, has created a new genre of human narrative, stories of voyages into a world perceived as more real than our familiar world and “real” in a way as ineffable as it is transcendent. The new genre consists of stories about after death experience.  This is a breakthrough that opens many doors, experimental and theoretical. 

 

 

Paranormal Group Dynamics

We humans seem to have figured out how to perform miracles. Now that would be an evolutionary leap. Let’s look at the amazing work of English psychologist, Kenneth Batcheldor. About Batcheldor, Colin Brookes-Smith writes, “It is no exaggeration to say that this renewed interest in macro-PK by one person alone may well have far reaching consequences not only on the whole of parapsychology but also on belief in survival after death.” Colin Brookes-Smith, 1981, Theta, p.3.

We associate paranormal phenomena with unusual people like saints, yogis, mediums, and the like.  Batcheldor worked with ordinary people on the assumption that one can learn to produce PK effects.  For a striking example. a group of four participants that he guided succeeded in causing a wooden table to levitate—without any physical contact. Just by intending it to happen, but in the right way. The fact that we may learn to produce psychokinetic effects—in short, reshape physical reality solely by means of our minds—opens us to an enlarged world of possible experience.   

The group context for making PK is important to underscore, whereby a normally quiescent ability may be induced to spring to life. After working with various groups, he found it could be embarrassing, even terrifying, to realize you had such power over physical reality. Supposing we all do harbor such power within us, we might back off with a certain trepidation. It could throw your whole life in disarray to start performing miracles in public.  

For those who can handle the fear and want to learn how to tap into the hidden powers of their inner life, our guide has a few suggestions.  The first big idea is that psychokinesis is a human skill we can learn.  It is after all an extension of our normal intentional life, presiding over all the actions we perform, unconscious or conscious.

A group of four sitting around a wooden table place their hands on the table, palms down, exerting no force; the PK task is to move, lift, and ideally, cause the table to rise and detach itself from the human hands. This is not an experiment about mechanical or electrical forces; the forces here are mental or we might say spiritual or possibly quantum mechanical.

The first thing to note about the psychology of the PK process, the sensation and mindset of effort need to be eliminated. Instead, a clear and relaxed awareness of the goal—say, to move or raise the table.  PK is a goal-oriented process. Expect success. Never dwell on the difficulties of achieving the goal. The research shows that firm confidence leads to desired results. In this process, we are encouraged to be spontaneous. Spontaneity is one earmark of flights of paranormality. Also notable, there is an effect of darkness that seems to be conducive to psi-productivity, so the light can be adjusted to individuals, but the tone and quality of the group dynamic must be unified, trusting each other and the process.

The paranormal group dynamic is a delicate operation.  Two negative points are crucial to PK success: no critical analysis and no disruptive changes.  Batcheldor writes: “. . .  critical thinking interferes with any form of delicate conditioning, and I consider the training of psychokinesis a form of conditioning.” Critical thinking has its place but is lethal to creative or expansive streams of consciousness.  PK, it would seem, insists on full attention agency. Distraction is fatal.  Batcheldor writes, “All changes are inclined to inhibit progress.” So, the group met in the same rooms, house, appointed times, décor, and with the same personnel. Any novelty that might break the flow of attention was avoided.

         The instructions are clear as to what hinders and what helps. Try too hard and not feel confident will hinder; being open and spontaneous will help. To succeed in the PK experiment, subjects must stay in harmony with each other and with themselves. They, the group, may become adept at knowing how to come together and focus where they need to focus.

         We have yet to speak to the larger scope of Batcheldor’s model of PK production. Once we realize we can learn to deploy our PK potentials, we begin to think less about merely moving tables. A well-evolved PK-creating capacity could be brought to bear on a wide field of possibilities.  We’ve already noted the healing powers from mild placebos to the more dramatic healings at Lourdes and by saints like Padre Pio. We need in this project to keep reminding ourselves of the key role of empathy, which is grossly lacking in the leaders of the rogue nations, the cesspools of mendacity and hypocrisy.

As we learn to improvise groups expert in PK and ESP production, we will discover new ways to help people and each other. The challenge will be about learning to use our paranormal mental potentials in creative ways.  I plan to explore this theme in greater detail.  Readers might be up to getting into this process. Questions and comments are welcome.  We are talking about new forms of creativity open to us all—the only requirement is that we are conscious human beings.

          

 

Are We Facing a Final Choice?

A while back an editor-writer-friend of mine, Carolyn Myss, suggested a title for a book I was about to publish. Call it The Final Choice, she said. I went along with the title, feeling a bit squeamish about using such a dramatic title.  My book was about the kinds of evidence pointing toward the next possible step of human evolution.  I pictured the idea getting under way in the vague distant future.

                  Fast forward a few decades to New Year’s Day, 2026, and the notion of final choice seems a little less incredible.   What do I mean?  As it seems to me, there is a twofold process going on right now that unless stopped, spells catastrophe for all forms of life on Earth—and that includes us humans. The two processes are the heating up of the planet and the heating up of nuclear-armed bellicosity. Countries everywhere are scrambling to purchase and learn how to use the best technology to terrorize and annihilate their enemies.   Meanwhile, the glaciers are melting full speed ahead dooming the great coastal cities, a prelude to further   disasters. Upheavals of bodies of water, wind, and earth will increase everywhere.  The climate crisis and the murderous social bellicosity will combine to turn life on earth into a hellhole.  All the signs point to a grim denouement to our story. We have the president of the most powerful nation declaring the climate crisis a “hoax.” With one word, all science is thrown out the window.   

                  The title is a bit flamboyant, but it does speak to the urgent need for change, the need to rethink the way we live.  That depends on the way we shape our perceptions of ourselves, of others, and of the world around us.   As it turns out, we don’t have to travel far to come face to face with things of great and often intriguing interest. I’m talking about our own minds, our own consciousness.  Remember that science has no idea how our consciousness came into being.  My take is that the conscious part of ourselves emerges through, not from, our body.

                  It’s an interesting way to look at ourselves.  If the conscious sense of ourselves is streaming from outside our bodies we must be connected and potentially attuned to a   transpersonal world of consciousness. So-called altered states of consciousness often provide portals into these extraordinary experiences. At the same time I often hear on the news stories about the pandemic of loneliness that is troubling Americans— ironical, given the availability of different technical ways of connecting with each other nowadays.  However final a choice may seem, there is always room to change your mind.  The most hardened in their ways often break down at the least expected moment.

                  In any case, hints of change are visible on the horizon.  Either we will make creative changes and spark a renaissance of life on earth or succumb to the death instinct and bring down world civilization.  The counterforce to that unhappy climax is to do what you can to ignite the divine kernel in the depths of your being.  Locate it, track it down, befriend it, dance with it, sing with it, make miracles with it.  Happy New Year!

See the recent edition of The Final Choice: Death or Transcendence  2017  White Crow Books or Amazon

 

Is Reading a Psychic Phenomenon?

 In one sense, anything we do with our minds is a psychic phenomenon. True, psychic phenomena stand out as in some way unusual and powerful. The reason I’m posing the question is the news that in America fewer people are reading books.  Moreover, young people are not learning how to read.  I can understand why this is happening, in part, the ease and fun of getting online with a computer screen.

                  But I do think reading affords us the greater psychic challenge. Suppose you chose to read a novel, say by Mark Twain or Virginia Woolf or Dostoyevsky.  You must feel and imagine what you’re reading.  The words are there, but you as reader must bring them to life.   Reading forces you to actively use your mental faculties such as your imagination.  It also favors the use of your critical mind. The screen experience appeals to the lazy part of the soul. Now and then you poke a button or shoot around hitting on lots of buttons. This is not to deny the easy access to useful information or some of the fascinating forays into the world of YouTube.

                  But the screen experience, in its many contexts, is strong on manipulation. Ads of one sort or another are omnipresent in the digital universe. Wanted is your money, your time and your consciousness. And under the new AI establishment, real and pseudo-real can be hard to distinguish.  So, in this increasingly intrusive and manipulative environment, I’ll stick with my own mind to engage with  the wars and wonders, the rants and raptures of the written universe.

                  Reading can be a training of the will, a sharpening of the critical sense, and an exercise of the creative imagination. To hold your attention on the content (of whatever) is a skill that needs to be cultivated. You can’t do it if you have machines buzzing in your face all the time, interrupting you and trying to capture your consciousness. The ability to direct and hold your attention on something of interest and value can make the difference in the quality of everyday life.  I catch myself passing without thought among things worthy of notice, scenes of mirth and pathos, of a child’s spontaneity, of a homeless soul cramped in the doorway of a closed store.  We ‘read’ not only written words. We can read the meaning of somebody’s stooped head or the mood of some protestors against the latest fascist stunt or the mendacity of some greasy politician.  Reading invites us to draw on our intuitive potentials as well as our respect for matters of fact.  

                  And let’s not forget the obvious: that by reading we can mentally engage with some of the great minds or even, if we are curious, with some of the worst characters of history, like Adolf Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf. But thank goodness, we can an also read and converse with the ideas of Zoroaster, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, and countless other extraordinary human spirits remote from us in time and space. So, to answer the question: Is reading a psychic phenomenon?  Yes, I would say, if it is done with a free, open, and active imagination. The internet is a wonderful information tool but not at the price of losing the soul that can read the hidden depths of reality.  

                 

 

Cat and Mouse Consciousness

There is a worldwide movement of scholars, scientists, and everyday folks in quest of enlightenment—an awakening and exploration of the mysteries of consciousness. I count myself a humble votary of this metaphysical adventure. First, I had to survive graduate philosophy at Columbia University where the very idea of consciousness was suspect, according to the reigning materialists. Materialist science rejected the reality of anything mental or conscious.  But this assault falls on its face. Without consciousness there could be no judgement of what is real or illusory.

                  Consciousness, as we know it, has at least three different forms: our waking sensory world, the dream world produced in sleep, and the mystical world of visionary experience. There are no physical explanations of the origin of consciousness.  Consciousness is fundamental, the irreducible datum, the core of our existence. The mystery of its origins is only the beginning of the challenge. There are three properties of consciousness worth noting: memory, creativity, immortality. The worldwide movement is about exploring the higher dimensions of our evolving consciousness. I believe that consciousness research may well be the key to the survival and flourishing of life on Earth.

                  I want to relate some stories that touch on animal consciousness. We humans are not the only form of conscious life on Earth. Consciousness comes in all sorts of shapes and forms, all levels of depth and complexity. One day I was typing away on my computer when looking down on the space below the keys, I noticed a dot-sized object slowly moving. It was on its way somewhere in a straight line. It was alive, but no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. I then placed my left index finger in front of the tiny bug, and it walked around my finger.  Again, I tried to bully the little guy and blocked his passage; but again, ignoring my intrusion, bravely he marched around my finger, showing me his proud but tiny intentionality. So I stopped annoying him.  This tiny point of life was animated by a willful consciousness.  It had to be aware of an obstacle and proved it by directing itself away from the obstacle.  I was struck by the idea of a conscious life energy operating at such a micro scale.

                  From a plucky dot of life I want to recount the tale of Clio, a cat who became a good friend of mine.  One sunny afternoon not too long ago, I opened the side door of my house and was surprised to see a smallish, grey, brown, and white-streaked cat, sitting motionless on the stoop about ten feet away from me. It sat there and stared at me. I shrugged and closed the door.  What happened was this. Thet cat showed up the next two days, and each time sat in the same place and just looked at me without moving. It was a cute cat, and I wondered why it sat so stock still when I opened the door. I never guessed it might politely be waiting for an invitation.

                  The following day when I stepped out there it was again. This time I walked up to the cat and introduced myself and pat the furry head.  We looked into each other’s eyes. Hi ! I  murmured, and for some reason I thought of the cat being the reincarnation of an unhappy woman. I stepped back toward the door into my house and this time the cat came along with me.  “Oh,” I said, “would you care to come in for a moment?”  And the cat strode right in, in unison with the steps I took. Once inside, the feline went on a tour of inspection in every room, brushing up against certain spots as if to mark them.   After the survey, the cat came straight to me who was sitting down.  I pet and picked up the  cat and we became instant friends.

                  I noticed there was a locket around its neck with a name and address. Two houses over was the home of the cat. I soon learned that the cat’s name was Clio and was let out all day but was fed if it came back to its presumptive home. If Clio were my cat, I wouldn’t let her roam free right next to a hilly road where cars regularly shoot by. I stood up and Clio followed me around for a while until I went to the door and opened it and thought “Out!”  And out went the cat. I had a distinct sensation of mental rapport with Clio.  The following day she came by for a visit, and it became a habit lasting for several weeks. Almost every day she came by. It was a ritual of contact.  She would do her thing around the house, and we would have a period of playing together, and of nestling and petting. Then I would retire to my desk or whatever I was doing. I should mention that Clio was not visiting me for food or drink. Her sole reason was social and for entertainment.  There was something she did at least once at every meeting.  I’ll call it Clio’s Whirligig.  She would do this for the sheer fun of it, a demonstration of her agility, her quasi-levitation. She would leap in the air, and sping around, trying to catch her tail; it was hilarious to behold, and she looked pleased with her performance. This was the climax of her visit.  She knew when it was time to leave and would go stand by the door and I would let her out.

                  I felt a little uncomfortable when Clio started to show up at odd hours and was hanging out for longer stretches.  She was a neighbor’s cat but seemed to want to stay with me. One night it was raining and windy, close to midnight, and I thought I heard something outside. I opened the door and there was Clio, curled up and cowering by my door.  I bent down and picked the cat up and walked to the back of the house, “Back to your house, Clio,” I said and laid her down on the wet ground and gave her a gentle shove back toward her home.  I made up my mind that I would break the habit of letting the cat in my house. We had a friendly relationship. I had no doubt that Clio was a conscious being and that we had feelings for each other. But she wasn’t my cat, so I decided not to let her in anymore.

I missed her company, and she quit trying to visit me. A month or so passed and then one day I was looking out my window and I saw Clio, standing in the street, about three feet from the sidewalk. I had a bad feeling.  The following day I got the news from my neighbor that Clio was run over by a car. Exactly what I feared might happen. I allow myself to speculate.  There are reports from the near-death universe that our pets show up in the next world. If animals have souls, why not? Why not, if immortality is a property of consciousness? If there is another world, there should be room for Clio to find her way.

If our pets carry on, why not all the living creatures of nature that have some degree and manner of consciousness and soul?  For example, why not a mouse?  The last time I had a mouse in my house I caught him live in a trap and let him go at the far end of my backyard. Recently, another mouse moved in with me, but this little guy must have a high IQ. One night I was lying in bed and about to turn off the light and sleep when I felt a tiny tug on my bedsheet. I sprang up and turned on the light and there was a mouse scrambling away from me, bulletlike shooting out of my bedroom. On three other occasions I had to halt the mouse from occupying my bedroom. This mouse stayed away from the trap I used in the past, so I had to resort to more fatal devices, steel springs and poison pellets. I’ve named him Mickey Mouse and now have set up three different traps but so far Mickey has avoided them all. I knew the very night that Mickey moved in with me. He ate a portion of an avocado I left out to ripen. Now I leave my avocadoes to ripen in the fridge.  The other night I Ieft three bananas under a basket on top of the fridge. In the morning I found the basket overturned and a good part of one of my bananas devoured.

I couldn’t help admiring Mickey’s intelligence and will power, but he was an intruder and a thief. So I decided to remove every scrap of food from sight. Instead, I dumped the scraps in sturdy garbage bags. But each time I did that Mickey would bite through the bags and snatch anything inside that was edible. Each time he did this he created a mess I had to clean up. Mickey was outwitting me, so I hid the garbage bags. But then he devised a new strategy. I noticed a bar of soap, one sponge, and two small towels were missing. Hard to believe, but he stole them all.  I had a hard time finding them. I found the sponge and the bar of soap hidden away behind my paintings in my studio and the two towels squeezed into a crack behind the stove in my kitchen. All this proved that Mickey was conscious and capable of keeping a moderately evolved human being at bay. What did stealing my bar of soap, sponge, and towels signify to Mickey? Nothing there to eat.  Maybe it was just meant to annoy me—a sign of protest, a mousey vendetta? Mickey’s thought might conceivably be: “Hey Human! You’re trying to kill me. What’s my crime? Hunger.  Starvation of the innocent is against international law.  Or does the law ignore the rights of animals?”

  I know there are more exalted realms of conscious existence worthy of exploration and pointing toward the great Next Step in Evolution.  I wanted to underscore how the lowest forms of life are in their way imbued with consciousness. There is a school of thought that sees not just living life forms, trees and animals, but the whole of physical nature as conscious.  The mountains, the rivers and seas, forests and deserts, all with their forms of consciousness.  But to feel it, to breathe and taste it, to listen to its songs and symphonies, to fly, dive, dream it—that is the question.  How to connect?

An Experience that Blew My Worldview

 

What happens when you have an experience that, well, is not supposed to happen? You are likely to confront some ironclad assumption.  Can’t be! But you experienced it.

Let me share a bit of my mind-blowing experience.   This experience takes me back to a university class I taught some years ago.  It was philosophy, and we were discussing the mind-body problem. We can all distinguish our minds and our bodies—two very different things. The problem: how do they relate to each other?

Philosophers like to tussle over that question.  During the discussion a student raised a question about the near-death experience and wanted to know if it was possible for a person to leave his body.  That would be a dramatic step into the unknown. It challenges the popular assumption of many scientists who swear by reductive materialism. However, scientists and philosophers cannot explain how consciousness came into being. It’s a stubborn mystery, but a topic for another day.

Walking out of the classroom, a student I’ll call LS caught up with me and tapped me on the shoulder. “That was an interesting talk,” she said, “and there’s something I’d like to tell you, but it’s between you and me.”  “I can keep a secret,” I replied, curious about what she had to say. “You never know how people will react—especially if you have something weird you want to share,” she added.

“I understand,” I said, “and weird is just an old German word that means become. Are you about to become something weird?” “Not right now,” she smiled with a faintly seductive air.  “I just wanted to comment on the last question about the out-of-body experience.  Is it a real experience? For sure, and I know from my own experience.”  She paused and I waited for her to go on. I could see she wasn’t inclined to get into details. So, impulsively (and sardonically) I said, “Hey! Next time you find yourself out of your body, come and visit we.” LS said nothing but gave me her enigmatic smile.  We exchanged a few more words and went our ways.

It must have happened no more than a week later.  I had forgotten the exchange with my student.   One morning I woke up, had breakfast and glanced into the living room.  I was taken aback.  Something was slightly off.  I stepped into the living room and quickly noticed that my music stand was out of place and sitting in the middle of the room.  I normally kept it flush up against the bookcase. I stood there, baffled. There was nobody in the apartment but me.  I had no doubt where the stand was when I retired last night.  What caused my music stand to move to the center of the living room?  Frozen on the spot with wonder, at that very moment, the phone rang.  I picked up, it was my student LS, and she says, “How do you like the new furniture arrangement?” 

LS explained what happened the night before. Getting into bed and drifting off she found herself hovering above her bed—out of her body. She remembered my challenge about visiting me. Suddenly, she (her disembodied consciousness) found me in my kitchen, reading and writing.  She tried to catch my attention but failed.  It was terribly frustrating.  How can she prove she came to visit me by her out-of-body express? She looked around and noticed the music stand.  She approached it and managed to move it to the center of the room. There it was, right in front of me, moved by her invisible, intangible, and inaudible self.  It was a shocking fact that I could not deny. My student left her body, traveled about 25 miles, entered through the walls of my house and physically rearranged a piece of my furniture.  It was absolutely clear that this happened, a fact that is bound to strike most people as impossible.

I know there is a great deal of data that point to the reality of psychic phenomena.  But in the end, what counts the most is personal experience. There are many compelling out-of-body (OBE) stories in the NDE literature.  The literature is growing so that one could plausibly argue that to say that Mr. X died is equivalent to saying that Mr. X had a terminal OBE. 

The implications of the OBE are highly suggestive.  If my conscious self can leave my body, it could be a statement about the afterlife. My real self is my consciousness that leaves my body at death.  Plato said that philosophy was the practice of death, of rising ecstatically out of the confines of your body into a mental universe.

There is another item from my student’s experience. Not only does she liberate herself from her body—a metaphysical blast—she moves through space in a self-directed fashion—she also can act upon the physical world, as demonstrated by LS’s movement of my music stand. This experience allows me to entertain the possible reality of invisible agents and hidden forces among us. Incorporate OBE and PK into our worldview and reality can get very interesting. My experience certainly enlarged my worldview.

If you enjoy having your mind jogged by the unexpected and the impossible, see my book: Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Anomalist Books, or Amazon.

   

 

 

 

 

Brain Malfunction and Miracles

 

The most obvious thing in the world is my consciousness.  It is also a scientific  mystery. Thanks to my consciousness, I know that I have a body and a brain. And thanks to my brain I am conscious of my relationship to my brain.  But what sort of relationship is that? If you are a devoted materialist, you would say that your brain somehow produces your mind and consciousness.  The problem is that nobody has a clue as to how brain chemistry could produce out of itself a mental universe: feelings, joy, sorrow, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, regret, perceptions, intentions, memories, fantasies, reasonings, inferences, etc.  Instead of production, I would suggest transmission.  The brain transmits consciousness, like a radio transmits the music and talk that you listen to.

Thanks to our brains, we are conscious of our life and our existence on earth. But there is something paradoxical about the brain-consciousness connection.  There’s quite a bit of data showing that physical trauma to the brain can awaken various mental powers that rise to genius and miracle status. Why should traumatizing the brain open one to higher forms of consciousness?  I’ll mention a few examples.

The first that comes to mind may surprise you. In a near-death experience (NDE) the brain is severely traumatized—to the point of clinical death. When the heart stops the brain is deprived of blood which blanks out consciousness.  The brain is no longer functional. But—and here is our miracle—folks often have the most amazing experiences of their lives. The brain normally enables our experience of waking life; but when it ceases to function, it enables us to experience phenomena of the afterlife. That’s the extreme example of what may happen when the brain malfunctions.

There are other indications of brain malfunction that appear to unleash latent powers within us.  In the savant syndrome medical professionals deal with cases of autistic children with severe disabilities but who also display remarkable abilities, original to the point of genius. The syndrome includes several categories of phenomena: calculation prodigies and calendar reckonings, music and the plastic arts, painting, sculpture, and fantastic feats of memory. These savants had IQs less than 50, couldn’t feed or dress themselves.  And yet they had talents that were astonishing and that they themselves scarcely understood. Their malfunctioning brains somehow put them in touch with dimensions of creativity from another zone of being.  In Islands of Genius, Dr. Treffert describes adults struck by lightning or had their heads violently bashed that suddenly acquired extraordinary talents that changed their lives.  It’s hard to learn of these outcomes without marveling at the irony of nature. There are cases of people suffering from the dreaded brain diseases of aging who suddenly wake up to the living artist or musician inside them, desperate to come out.  We should take the time to muse on the unknown gifts we may be harboring within. We might learn how to tease them into active life.

 And so, being cut off, arrested, impaired, may serve to open one to creative, transformative forces.  Disruptive events may open channels of creativity that are normally inaccessible to us, sunk in the rhythms of normal life. We may have to be damaged or thrown violently off course to land on the cusp of transcendence. The game is played in such a way that we never know for sure where we are in the field of play. We need always to keep our third eye open to the half-hidden, the possible miracle.