Hope or Disaster: Vote Please

Election day is coming, and this one is like no other in world history. It’s an election for the president of the United States, the greatest and richest Empire on Earth, along with its eighty military bases spanning the globe.

 

This election is historically unique. The leader of this world power must confront at least two extraordinary challenges, as Noam Chomsky has repeatedly underscored:  realize it or not, we are coasting toward climate catastrophe and toward nuclear war, either of which promises to bring down world civilization.

 

We can only hope that our next president has heart, wisdom, and a sharp practical intellect.  We hope that person will be on the side of life for all and against the fanatics that worship wealth, race, and power.

 

So who are the candidates? Donald Trump, the former president, and Kamala Harris, the current Vice-President. This is clearly a serious choice, and will affect a world in the throes of the Kali Yuga, the age of conflicts.

 

Heart, wisdom and a sharp practical intellect.  So, how to vote?  Shall we vote for Donald Trump? Is he likely to meet the challenges that threaten our very existence?  Donald thinks the climate menace is a hoax.  He has no head for scientific and factual truth.  Trump on the climate crisis is a zero.  It’s  not on the man’s radar. So, a vote for Trump is a vote for climate catastrophe.

 

On the Heart, Wisdom, Practical Intellect scale I fail to detect any evidence of these virtues in Trump.  No one reasonably sane could ever regard him as distinguished in the realm of heart, empathy or compassion.  Donald’s M.O. is the exploitation of fear and hatred, flavored with paranoia and racism.  The appeal is not to the heart but to the bowels of resentment.  We deperately need leaders with wisdom. Trump gets minus zero on this virtue. 

 

Half the psychiatrists on the planet agree that Don is a malignant narcissicist, and let’s not forget the growing signs of dementia. The man is a  paradigm of unwisdom, notoriously obsessed with fantasies of his greatness.  There is one feature of Trump that totally disqualifies him as president: he’s a pathological liar. I wouldn’t trust him as a delivery boy in a delicatessen. As for the practical intellect we demand of our president, it’s wildly obvious that Trump is obsessed with two major things.  Revenge against his political opponents is numbr one.   

 

The other is to reorganize the government, and streamline it so that maximum power is focused in the executive branch. Once established, as Trump has told us, there will be no further need for elections.  Trump’s goal is to be a dictator; he’s on good terms with various leading dictators around the world.  So a vote for Trump is a vote for dictatorship.

 

It appears we are left with Kamala Harris and the air already seems fresher.

In terms of our scale of the three virtues we naturally hope for in a president, all I can say is that in light of what I know about Kamala, my spirit is slightly buoyed up.  However, when asked if she would part from Biden in any area of concern, she seemed to say no.

 

This would distress many people in the U.S. who are nauseated by Biden’s financial,  and military support of the Zionist genocide currently ravaging Palestine and its people.  I understand why Kamala might not yet be willing to talk about ending America’s murderous complicity with the Zionist Fascists.  But I have hope that she will change when and if she beomes president. 

 

My hope is based on something ral  I have heard Kamala speak out against the horrors inflicted on Palestinians more than once. I cannot recall Biden ever saying anything remotely compassionate or caring for the horriic plight of the Palestinian people. All he does is provide two-thousand pound bombs and billions of dollars to the Israeli murder machine.  

 

As for our last criterion, practical intellect, in a debate, we saw Kamala demolish Trump, scaring him away from any further debate with her, proving his cowardice and obvious inellectual deficiencies.      

 

The Conclusion

A vote for Harris is a vote for hope.

A vote for Trump is a vote for a the biggest BS artist in world history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A New Science of Spirituality?

 

The physical sciences have been highly successful, for example, in advancing medicine, consumerism, and militarism. The psychological sciences, from behaviorism to psychoanalysis, have also enjoyed some measure of success.  And yet, one wonders how effective all this has been, given our 21^st century world struggling against manmade climate disaster, injustice and exploitation rampant among the rich and powerful,  and murderous wars and warmongering everywhere.

 

Something is gravely missing.  In my view, we need a new science—this time, a science of spirituality.  There are, of course, reams of theological works and all sorts of philosophies of religion. But a science of practical and effective spirituality is what battered humanity really needs. Again, where has all the clever talk taken us, with international crime at a post-Nazi peak, and corporate greed driving Mother Earth to over-heated violence and suicidal disorder.  To deal with the problems that beset us, we need to change the way we relate to other human beings—spiritually and economically.  And we need to work on the way we relate to the natural world of which we are a part.  

 

What brings us into a more harmonious relationship with other people and the living world around us? That is the question.  A new science of spirituality would guide us toward the necessary changes.   We need revised values, a new style of existence.

 

There could be no spiritual science if materialism were true and nothing existed but physical reality. But materialism is false. It is falsified by the existence of irreducible consciousness and uncontrollable free will; and by mountains of paranormal and ufological data.   What’s more, I have only to be conscious of my consciousness to see it is something radically unphysical!  Can you weigh it, measure it, locate it in space and time, as you can with material things?   

 

The main obstacle to a spiritual science, materialism, is false. The door to a spiritual world is open.  But how do we enter?  This takes us to the second point.  Thanks to the way medical technology has evolved, people can be resuscitated from near or temporary death and we can learn from them what they experienced.

 

Rather than fade into nothing, they break free from their dying bodies, and find themselves in a strange but amazing  world.  It’s a place with all the properties we might link to a spiritual world.   

 

I have watched, listened, and read about near death encounters at great length, and am continually intrigued and surprised.  In part, because of the variety and unique way each story unfolds. But there are recurrent features of the experience. It has a structure.   For example, this whopper, being suddenly out of one’s body and watching medics or family  hovering over your dead body!  They are trying to revive you.  You’re curious and somewhat bored.  Next, you move into velvety darkness or are greeted by a voice or angelic guide and start to move and fly away from your body.

 

You are drawn to a point or orb of light that may swell and embrace you with sensations of ineffable  love. There are marvelous colors, sublime music, heavenly landscapes. Most powerful is the life-review in which you relive your life experiences with other people, but this time around you see and feel the effects you had on others, malign and/or benign. This part of the experience is profoundly transformative. And last but not least, after they are resuscitated, the creative force of the experience carries over into how they live back on Earth..   One’s life is lighter and brighter. One emerges with new psycho-spiritual powers and a more transpersonal perspective.  

 

So we have the near-death experience as a model of what happens to our consciousness when it is torn from the plane of ordinary life.  Freed from the deadening effects of materialism and shown how ordinary people, regardless of what they believe, can be totally transformed, we have the basis for a new spiritual science.  Evidence in abundance exists that we have the raw materials we need to develop a new science of spirituality.

 

Great powers lie in us all, buried in the depths of our inner selves.  If modern science so chooses, it can be exploring ways to awaken these latent powers of self-transformation.  Spiritual exploration is as old as the hills. Shamans, yogis, and mystics of all times have invented and evolved methods of awakening the higher forms of mental life. Seems like the time for science to hook up with traditional spiritual practices in the supreme project of the human race—to realize the godlike potential in us all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Visions of Virgin Mary?

 

The other day the New York Times ran a story about visions of the Virgin Mary. Pope Francis made a comment about the ongoing reports of Marian visions in Medjugorje.  The Pope stated that the visions were consistent with Catholic teachings, but held back from full acceptance of them as miraculous. 

 

It is a fact worthy of note that since medieval times and increasingly up until the present, visions of Mary have been reported from all parts of the world.  Most of the time it is children who claim to be witnesses of the Marian apparitions, as, for example, in two of the most famous cases: one young girl, Bernadette Soubirous in France, mid-nineteenth century and three children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. The latter two have become popular centers of pilgrimage, mainly because of reports of extraordinary healings, spiritual and physical. The details of the latter I reserve for future comment.

 

The question I want to pose here is simple:  Why Mary?   Well, she’s the mother of God, a crucial component of the divine creator scenario.  More to my point, why should the feminine figure of Mary be the most popular recurrent  public manifestation, instead of Jesus, Saint Paul, or other authoritative male figures?

 

Several possible reasons occur to me.   It is worth noting that the three Abrahamic religions share three significant traits.  First, they worship one God who is a male, conceived as the divine father.  Second, the  male deity serves as an excuse to dominate other men and all women, often ruthlessly and fanatically.  Third, these are religions that have historical and current records of incentivizing and justifying wars of murderous brutality.  I will not discuss the details of this here.

 

The point here is to suggest an answer to my question.  Why Mary? Whether some great benign spirit or the wisdom of the collective unconscious, it ought not to surprise us that a figure of the feminine divine should be manifesting in countries around the world. Perhaps we have been witnessing a symbolic revolt against the reign of male-driven religiosity. Surely, women as mothers have an intimate sense of the creation of new life, in contrast to the man-based specialty of destroying life, whether hunting for food,  or sport, or slaughtering perceived enemies in wars or land thefts.  

 

Marian visions, in my view, are signs of the return of the Goddess.  A more feminine divinity and overall cultural orientation promises to be a more humane spiritualizing force.  Zionists would cease exterminating Palestinian women, children, and civilians; women and girls in Afghanistan would be treated as human beings and released from slavery; and the Catholic Church would grant women the same rights as men in the church organization.  These would be first steps in the right direction.  

 

(In my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief, the topic of Marian visions is explored, with an emphasis on the amazing events at Fatima in 1917.)

 

 

Answer to My Previous Question

My last post was a question—Guardian angel or subconscious mind?  The question is interesting. It confronts a true story that baffles the scientific imagination. Celestino saved from annihilation by a voice from nowhere.  So where did that voice come from?  My view of the phenomenon is not based on any religious assumptions.

 

I think parapsychology can open the way to an explanation. Without listing a bunch of scholarly references, we may assume that precognition is possible in nature; and in fact there’s much literature backing up the reality of this almost unnerving capacity to subvert one of our most common intuitions of reality: the before and after of time.  This happens to be something I know about from direct experience.  One day in 1981, to impress Jodie Foster, John Hinckley shot and attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. He failed, and Reagan promptly recovered.  All this I already had learned from three dreams, written down, and shared with my students.

 

Celestino was saved by a voice whose origin might have been the worried soldier himself, perhaps more likely by his unusually prayerful mother, or maybe by some kind of group effect.  Only Celestino heard the saving voice, as one might hear a voice in a precognitive dream.  The persistence of the voice reflected the serious danger at stake.

 

The general point about human psychic powers: they add up to an awesome composite of what some might call our divine capacity.   At their root is consciousness—the irreducible mystery we’re all acquainted with.  Moreover, we know from ample research about the latent potential of consciousness to perform psychokinetic and cognitive wonders. 

 

When you scan the range of supernormal marvels that both history and modern times afford, the idea of allies and messengers that dance around time and space, and perform miracles, begins to seem plausible. But much resistance persists among those unable to wean themselves from reductive materialism.  Such seem to suffer from a kind of imaginal paralysis.

 

Call it your guardian angel or the genius of your psychokinetic imagination; God or your creative unconscious: whatever works, whatever resonates. Both reflect part of the truth. I mean the kind of truth that breaks out of a deadening shell and opens into a new way to see the world.  

 

 

Guardian Angel Or Subconscious Ally?

How nice if there were  some mystic resource we could rely on for help—a hidden eye looking out for us—a guardian angel!   Belief in the possibility of supernatural aid is widespread in religion and mythology. But more important, there are allegedly true stories of help that come to people in strange ways. There is enough there, as they say, to make you think.  And if you think, you might end up asking peculiar questions. 

 

For example: Do we perhaps inhabit a world with openings to higher and perhaps more interesting dimensions of reality? Or is reality more ruthlessly restricted than we would prefer? What is your preference, one might ask, an open universe of unlimited possibilities or a closed universe that constantly threatens you with extinction?

 

As a matter of fact, striking stories do exist in which somebody is saved from an event or situation, and in ways that defy common sense as well as scientific law.  Such stories are important. They can open your imagination and expand your sense of what is possible.  Also, and this is big: they can sharpen your sense of agency.   It’s hard to know what’s missing in the way we see the world.  A lot of unknown stuff, tottering between magic and madness, is playing out around us.   I like to be alert to events that crack open parts of myself that were closed and locked down. I think of it as a matter of psychic hygiene.

 

No less a personality than Socrates famously had a daemon (spirit-guide) who kept an eye on the philosopher, and was given to warning and steering him away from danger, often in the events and mishaps of daily life.  Also famously, teen-ager Joan of Arc was guided and prompted by spiritual agents, in her case , to become the leader of the French army in war against the English. The English were so impressed by her talents that they burned her alive.

 

From the sublime, let me descend to the mundane with two current stories that  illustrate the idea of supernormal help.  The first is nothing cosmic, but it does show how I obtained real assistance in a psychically peculiar way.  Here is what happened.  One morning I woke up and immediately did something I had never done before in my entire life.  I just did it, like an automaton.  Without an instant of forethought I immediately pull all the sheets off the bed, and the pillow covers, snatch up a loose pair of socks and rush toward the basement door, intending to put everything into the washing-machine.  Before I proceed, let me comment on the description of what I did. Never have I and never would I begin my day, any day, with a mad rush to do my laundry!

 

Well, when I stepped down the stairs, the first thing I saw  was that the  sink was full of water and the water was overflowing onto the basement floor.  I ran to the sink and found it was clogged. I unclogged the muck with my hand and the water drained out.  My entire basement would have flooded if I wasn’t impelled mindlessly down the stairs to do laundry where I was able to see the problem and prevent a costly mess

 

Granted, this was no world-shaking miracle, but it was strange. Just before waking I may have dreamt of the flooding in my basement (clairvoyance).  When barely awake I automatically do what I needed to do.  No guardian angel there, but rather it looks like my subconscious just lent me hand—if so, thanks! For some reason I’m occasionally treated to an experience that undermines my commonsensical picture of reality. 

 

But now for one of the more striking accounts unexplained help. I once had a student, a police officer and Vietnam Veteran, who shared an amazing story.  Celestino—the name fits the fellow—began by telling me that his Mom embarrassed him when he was a boy by announcing that she was always praying for him, but especially in 1968 when the U.S. army sent him to Vietnam with the 101^st Airborne Division.

 

The incident he described to me occurred at a Bien Hoa base, 15 miles north of Saigon.  The base, flanked by native villages, was subject to rocket attacks. It was just before Valentine’s Day when the siren in the barracks rang at 2: 30 in the morning, signaling imminent attack.  The bunker Celestino was supposed to use was already packed, so he got down to a reinforced partition by the entrance to the bunker.  He could hear rockets landing nearby.  Barely a moment passed when he heard someone call his name out and say “Get back here!”    “Who’s that?” he called back.  The voice called out to him four times, loud and authoritative. He finally got up and moved back half way into the bunker.  “Is this okay?” he cried out and looked around.  No reply.

 

Celestino glanced back at the spot where he just was.  A tall, thin sergeant with eyeglasses was now sitting on the reinforced partition, a person he had only met the previous day. Celestino heard a high-pitched whistle—which meant a direct hit.
He told me that he was staring at the spot now occupied by the sergeant when right there he saw a tremendous ball of flame explode, literally annihilating the sergeant (not a speck of him was found); and killing everyone else, sixteen, just short of himself who survived.  Celestino was knocked unconscious by the blast, but when he woke up his fellow survivors wanted to know who he was talking to.  Nobody was calling him, they said.

 

What strikes me about this case of precognition is the exactitude of details.  The warning agency ‘knew’ the first spot, where the rocket would land; and it knew  where soldiers would die, and very insistently got Celestino to move to a safe zone.  Finally, this exact and focused intelligence was not concerned with the rest of the soldiers who were killed.  Why not a little more democracy with the saving grace?  Maybe none of the other victims had anybody praying for them.  

Clearly, the voice that saved Celestino’s life was a voice from his interior universe.  Was it a guardian angel or the benign machinations of his subliminal mind? What do you all think about this incident in Bien Hoa? Mom’s prayers, maybe? For a more detailed story of the miraculous powers of human consciousness, see my Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. (Anomalist Books, Amazon)P

 

 

 

The Triple Mystery of Our Existence

 

The other day I was struck by all the layers of mystery lurking in the fact of human existence. In the evolution of our existence, I count three major steps, three epochs of emergence: physical, biological, and mental.   Well, the first mystery to be solved is how the physical universe came into being.  Nobody knows.   Granted that there is a physical universe, the next leap forward is that the dead physical universe comes to life. Creatures of physics and chemistry emerge on the surface of Earth that know how to replicate themselves and have the capacity for self-directed movement.  A living thing becomes an independent source of its own actions.  Life is the second great mystery. Next we come to the third mystery: consciousness. Each of us is a center of awareness: sensory, rational, reflective, impassioned, inspired, et cetera.  So these are the three steps we had to go through in the course of our cosmic evolution: material existence, life, and consciousness. 

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Let’s look a bit more closely.  So there’s a question, Why should there be something rather than nothing?  Science has found that our universe is about 13.7 billion years old.  Many astronomers and scientists, Einstein, for example, had assumed ours to be a steady-state universe.   If so, our universe should be eternal, but it’s not. It looks like the universe had a beginning.  And there is further bad news for the steady-state believers.  Scientists have discovered that the universe is expanding and evolving from the original explosion into being 13.7 billion years ago.  Question, what caused the explosion?  Nobody knows.

 

Next we come to the origin of life on Earth.  Biological science has revealed the wonders of living matter; but it has failed to explain the origin of life.  Try explaining the origins of even a single-cell animal like a paramecium. We are forced to agree that life itself is a mystery.  The next example is going to lead to the same failure of explanation. We are not only alive; we are conscious beings, endowed with mind and soul. This too is a mystery that even devoted materialists are forced admit. Consciousness, it is said, is the hard problem. Hard indeed!  Think about your feelings, your memories, your last beautiful or scary dream,  your loves of family and romance, your fantasies and loneliness, listening to music,  planning for the future.  All these are part of your interior life.  How on earth can you translate the above and reduce it all to brain tissues and electro-chemical processes? 

 

So, we exist; and we are alive; but we are also conscious beings; rooted in life, this evolutionary leap opens us to a multiverse of possibilities, cognitive, social, aesthetic, and activist.  It certainly is worth noting that the three levels of existence, physical, biological, and conscious are all inexplicable by scientific materialism.  ce.  Behind the three stages of our evolution, I would suggest is a single unknown agency and cause.  My main point, I thought it worth reminding us that our very existence is buoyed up on a triple-leveled layer cake of mysteries.

Miracles in an Age of Disbelief

According to mainstream science, “miracle” talk is a rhetorical device, a term expressing wonder and astonishment, a spasm of imagination, no more.  But if you actually investigate cases of alleged miraculous phenomena, you will find matter of great interest.  It’s easy to imagine that real miracles are strictly from olden times or in more backward corners of the world.  Not true.

 

Before we go on, a quick definition of “miracle.”  Beside the subjective reaction of astonishment is a more crucial criterion: we call it a miracle if we cannot physically explain it. Miracles are usually pretty self-declarative.  When Pierre de Rudder was instantly healed of 8-years of a broken suppurating leg and walked back home, totally restored, it was to everybody an obvious miracle.  When the great 17^th century levitator Joseph of Copertino flew over the heads of a visiting Spanish ambassador and his pushy wife, they were speechless in awe.  Obviously, a miracle.

 

In more modern times, we have events witnessed by large numbers of people that qualify as miraculous, challenging our idea of what is possible in nature. In the mid nineties, we find what Hindu spokespeople called the miracle of the millennium.  In this case, I had two students who witnessed this particular mind-blowing miracle of  dematerialization. People brought milk for a statue of Ganesh to drink which  disappeared.  I witnessed it being proven by a BBC reporter.    

 

In short, there are miraculous phenomena taking place today.  Let me give you one example reported recently this year. There is a phenomenon in cases of spiritually evolved persons (found in different traditions) called incorruption. When these folks die their bodies to not decay. 

 

Sister Wilhelmina, OSB,  a Benedictine nun, in Gower, Missouri, died May 29, 2019. Her body was exhumed on April 28, 2023, almost four year’s later. The wooden casket she occupied had deteriorated, but instead of a skeleton they found her body, habit and clothing perfectly intact.  The medical experts concluded that her body showed none of the natural signs of decay, despite not being embalmed or treated in any special way.  Thousands from all over came to visit and contemplate the incorrupt nun’s body, perceived as a miraculous sign.

 

As it turns out, there is a long history of documented cases of this phenomenon. See, for example, Herbert Thurston’s factual study of The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism.  What is clear from this classic study is that people given to certain types of altered states of consciousness seem able to change physical reality in shockingly dramatic ways.

 

Our mainstream science and culture is very slowly coming to grips with confronting the mysterious powers of consciousness.  Mainstream scientists have uniformly been compelled to admit that the obvious fact of consciousness is a persistent mystery.  We know a lot about the brain, but nobody has a clue as to how you get from the brain to something radically unlike anything physical such as consciousness, dreams, feelings, memories, artistic and intellectual creative states.  If you are a rigid materialist you will feel driven to deny Sister Wilhelmina’s incorruption.

 

If, however, you are an authentic scientist, or just an open-minded curious human being, you might feel the excitement of an explorer reacting to hints of something that promises a new dimension of adventure.  For an overview of the world of miracles, see my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief.

A Psychic Explanation of Trump's Near Assassination

 I’ll begin with a story. I was once traveling through Oaxaca, Mexico, where I met a pale-faced American with a strange tale to tell.  The first thing I noticed when we shook hands in the heat of the afternoon, his hand felt unusually cold. He was recovering from an attack he suffered from some kind of witch or sorceress.  According to his story, walking past a house on the edge of town, he noticed to the side of the house an attractive naked woman under an outdoor shower.  Apparently, he lingered there too long gawking at the woman.   

 

That night he was unable to fall asleep but when he did he had terrifying dreams of wild birds and animals attacking him. He woke up feeling as if he were literally mauled and torn by something that seemed to cling to him, and drain his breath.  Once awake he couldn’t shake himself free from his nightmare.  All that day and days after he was oppressed by a dark presence. He soon discovered that the woman he watched taking a shower was known as a talented medium and sorceress. He was directed to an evangelical preacher who explained that he was the victim of demonic assault.  The woman took umbrage over him catching her unawares and paid him back by sending him all sorts of terrifying and debilitating dreams and presences.    This surely sounds very strange and timid rationalists are apt to recoil from such spooky claims.

 

Can people be attacked by external agents of ill will, mentally or physically injured or controlled by them?  I knew a volunteer Doctor that had to flee from a house that she rented in Haiti. She found that the house was cursed by a couple forced out because they couldn’t pay the rent.  There were forces in that house that made the doctor’s life unbearable, and as well showed the uncanny destructiveness of human ill will.  It can manifest in strange ways.  

 

Now, whether mainstream science accepts it or not, evidene shows that our minds, our intentions and feelings can influence physical reality—directly, magically, so to speak.  This is called psychokinesis, demonstrated in  controlled experiments and in spontaneous case histories repeatedly.  How it works is of course a challenge to science.   

 

So to the question of the near assassination of the former president.  All sorts of conspiracy accounts of how it may have happened seem pretty weak to me.   But there are two undeniable facts I would underscore.    First, as stated above,  there is something called psychokinesis (PK), which is about physical things we can do with our minds.  PK is something we all possess but scarcely understand how to use.  Second, it is certain that large numbers of human beings are mortally opposed to  the former president. They see him as an extreme danger to American democracy.   I’m curious about the possible relation between these two facts. 

 

On the day before the near-assassination, Trump was looming large and confident concerning the election, especially in light of his much weakened  Biden opponent.

 

Surely among the millions of anxious and angry Americans were those who wished   Trump out of the way, removed from the scene—deanimated, we could say.    Imagine a great storm of intentionality careening around the United States, in search of an outlet, an instrument, a way to remove the  Trump menace.

 

Meanwhile, in a small town in Pennsylvania, 20 year old Thomas Crooks was googling Biden and Trump.  Crooks was a loner, highly intelligent, but was politically indifferent, certainly no ideologue. No sign of a motive except the motivation of the typical mass-shooter we have come to know who wants to be noticed and acclaimed for something spectacular.  

 

I believe it possible that the massive, emotionally charged opposition to Trump, the collective perception of him as a mortal danger to democracy may well have been picked up by the vacillating Crooks and translated into literally trying to off Trump.  In this way. Crooks unwittingly sacrificed himself to serve the collective will of countless Americans desperate to get Trump out of the presidential race. It was  close, but Trump got lucky and instantly claimed divine intervention, boosting his megalomania. 

 

I think it possible that the collective ill will toward Donald Trump somehow found a passageway into the waffling mind of Crooks and drove him to pick and shoot Trump. One would have to assume that the collective will to do away with Trump was more irresistable than the will to eliminate Biden.  So Donald leads in the murderability contest.

 

The purpose of this little post is to think about the various powers and agencies  that operate on our lives. And to remind us what Shakespeare said about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy classrooms.

Donald Trump's "Near-Death Experience"

It was perfectly normal for Donald Trump to feel that God intervened and saved him from his would-be assassin. He barely ducked a bullet intended for his head.  It was “an angel,” not luck that saved him, I heard Trump say.

 

Of course, the rational view is that Trump was in fact lucky; he moved his head and just had his ear nicked, enough to draw a little blood. More luck, the red blood resonates with Trump’s MAGA red tie!  Evangelicals for Trump are especially buoyed by Trump’s close brush with near-death. They see his escape as part of a divine plan. 

 

In the case of the former president, we  have a person already convinced of his divine specialness. But really? Apart from his numerous crimes, Donald Trump has been diagnosed by a raft of psychiatrists as a “malignant narcissist.” The record is littered with endless illustrations of Trump aggrandizing himself as the greatest of all time in one way or another.  

 

Trump, as everyone  knows, is a pathological liar.  This by itself is enough to disqualify him for any role in society that presupposes respect for simple, factual truth.  Without  it, civil society is impossible.

 

But now there’s something new in Trump’s tale, his close call with death. He wasn’t physically impaired, except for being nicked in his right ear.  Could God be trying to say to Donald, “About your ear, sir, it would help if you learned to use it and try to listen to folks instead of bragging about yourself all the time. More ear, less tongue!”

 

I often wonder if former president Trump believes the enormous swell of BS that pours out of his mouth continuously.  In any case, the narcissistic dialectic now has a new element of inspiration—religion. To the believer, God’s miraculous intervention proves that Donald Trump is destined to win the election and save America from the diabolical democrats and the hordes of murder-celebrating, rape-loving, immigrants invading our country.   

 

One imagines an impassioned Trumpian saying: “Watch out all you crawling anti-American vermin! Now that we know that God saved Trump from that bullet—we know He’s on our side and against you!   As for the rest of the good Americans, don’t worry if you hear some guns go pop and a bullet or two whiz by. Trust that God will make you duck whenever you need to.”  

 

 

The Most Important 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 a 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 making mountains   of corpses and mangled bodies, flattened houses, blasted churches, hospitals and  schools reduced to rubble, and 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 into ourselves.  If we’re not happy with ourselves, relating to other people and the natural world are bound to suffer. The key to the three relationships then is the relationship we have to ourselves.

 

‘Know yourself,’ was incribed on the pediment of the temple of Apollo. A signpost of ancient Greek wisdom.  Our relationship to ourselves is the primary challenge we are invited to explore.

 

The relationship to oneself contains the potential for something, to use that seductive word, transformative.  New forms of consciousness, being psychically opened up in radically new ways are possible.

 

We find ourselves in a space 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 terribly abused, poisoned, polluted, blasted in air, land, and sea.

 

Human intelligence has learned to plunder the material Earth as if it were raw material for human consumpton.   Nature is treated as a soulless resource to be exploited in whatever way serves human desires, above all, for profit.  Technology, by appropriating nature spells the death of the sacred. Henceforth all things are for sale.

 

So here we are, facing an uneasy future, but hope to advance a little, and get to know ourselves. 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 question we might ask: am I walking about in a trance on a treadmill, oblivious to what lies just below my entrenched surface awareness?  Ask the right questions of yourself, and replies are apt to come.  Of the three relationships we have, the one to ourselves is key.  The greatest challenge but also the most interesting and the most creative.  And it’s the relationship impossible to escape from.

Contact With Our Hidden Mental Life

 

At any given moment we’re conscious of a tiny portion of our immense, multi-layered mental life.   It’s worth reminding ourselves of that.  There is more going on in us than we suspect. More forms of consciousness and creativity than we might imagine.  I’ll take that as a bit of good news from nature.

 

Each of us, I believe, harbors a portion of creative genius within us. But how do we  contact this hidden power?  Easier said than done. If only we could go to the supermarket and pick up a supply of creative energy when in need. But no.  It’s a tricky matter to get into a relationship with your subconscious genius.

 

And yet people have devised ways to make the connection. Religion and even some scientists talk about tapping into our higher potentials. During our waking day, consciousness is absorbed in whatever our experience is at the moment.  The world in and around us is fills our consciousness to the brim.  That’s normal.  But it’s not the way into the deep creative mind.

 

Now imagine the following.   You are born with some part of your brain damaged, reducing your cognitive capacity to “idiocy.”   The range of your conscious awareness and behavior is drastically reduced.  Doctors recommend lobotomy or being retired to an institution.  Born in 1951, your parents reject all those solutions, and keep you in their loving care. 

 

Your name is Kim Peek, and it turns out that you are the model for the movie, Rain Man. a person with “savant syndrome.”  Kim has been called the “Mt. Everest of memory” by researcher Darold Treffert.  He has memorized–perfectly—over 12,000 books!  His memory may well be the most colossal in human history.

 

Kim is one of a rare company of people with damage to their brains who have amazing mental abilities—in memory, art, music, and other skills.  There are cases of acquired savant syndrome, for example, being struck by lightening, followed by amazing musical ability.  

 

So we are looking at a strange paradox.  One way to access our hidden genius is to be in some way deprived of brain function.  It appears as if consciousness, deprived of its normal outlets, may connect to more deeply hidden regions of the brain and psychic life.  

 

I can think of another example that illustrates this paradox, the near-death experience.  Again, it seems strange, but for the majority of people who have an NDE, the experience is amazing and transformative.  And again, the paradox: in the near death experience, your consciousness, ripped from normal perception, gets funneled into a whole new multiplex-dimension of reality.

 

So the trick seems to be to somehow shift consciousness away from everyday reality, and allow it to relocate in other parts of our mental universe. Now, the yogis, shamans, saints and mystics of the world have worked out various methods of doing this. This is a big topic, for sure, but we can mention a few possibilities. 

 

For example, shamans and psychic explorers everywhere have learned to use certain plants to plumb the mysteries of consciousness, marijuana and magic mushrooms, being popular examples in the U.S. today.    

 

Yoga and all the meditative practices are designed to take control of consciousness, so as not to dissipate the energy of psychic life; they are used to encourage the harmonics of higher consciousness.  The purpose of meditation is to limit the possible distractions you have to contend with in everyday life.

 

There is another way we can open to our full creative potential.   If we hope to break through to our creative core, we need to speak to it, as if to another person. We need to imagine ourselves talking with the benevolent genius within us.  But there has to be an ongoing dialogue. You do it in a way that works, according to your own plan.

 

Of course, there are many people who do this and call it prayer—conversation with the transcendent.  All the ways of opening up consciousness are welcome.

 

Finally, consider the Buddhist symbol of the Void as summing up the argument.  The paradox again, the Void is the way to break through to an enlightened consciousness.  In short, consciousness attached to nothing is open and therefore receptive to the creative powers—poised to flood and transform us. 

 

I forgot to mention another  traditional method of tuning into the unknown genius within—Solitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facing The Final Choice

The editor of my first book suggested I call it The Final Choice.  I thought the title was  overdramatic and a bit grandiose.  I did in part write the book in response to what seemed like the growing threat of nuclear war.   Recently (2017), White Crow Books graciously offered to reprint the book.  I reduced the size of it and changed the subtitle to Death or Transcendence?  The book then is a question.  Either we get beyond ourselves, renounce our fanatical lust for land, power, and privilege, or we go on killing and laying waste to each other, until we get sucked into a terminal nuclear war.

 

Why not? America is in the midst of refurbishing its nuclear weapons arsenal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, costing $756 billion dollars. Money, in my opinion, stolen from the American people. We don’t need to beef up our killing power.  We who invented the diabolical A-bomb and alone have used it twice are already capable of blasting the entire planet to radioactive rubble.  But the upgrade will make the war-machine industries richer, enable us to sell our homocidal products to certain favored parties, and as well scare the shit out of the world, by advertising the might of the American Empire with its 800 military bases plastered around the planet.  What we really need is to refurbish, not our nuclear arsenals, but our people—the appalling poverty, homelessness, and lack of medical and education resources for vast numbers of Americans. We could use that $765 billion. to improve rather than destroy life.    

 

Here in 2024, the old title of my book no longer seems overdramatic. It seems that now we really are facing a final choice. As a species there are two major ways we’re facing finality.  First, the risk of nuclear war is at a new high today.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight. The closest yet to midnight on record. Midnight means we’re all toast.

 

As for the second, we’re facing finality from manmade climate chaos, which is already wreaking havoc on planetary life.  A million species are threatened with extinction, including humans. This may be the first challenge to the human race as a whole; for without universal cooperation toward controlling the output of various gases we produce that are heating up the planet, world civilization is pretty much doomed.  We, the entire planet, need to reduce our carbon footprint, to use another metaphor.  Not easy, though, because we have to change the way we live.  A big challenge, for sure.

 

 

Bertrand Russell on the Middle East

 

The great, socially engaged philosopher and mathematician,  Bertrand Russell, died on February 2, 1970. On the last day of his life, he wrote the following about the Middle East.

 

 

“The latest phase of the undeclared war in the Middle East is based upon a profound miscalculation. The bombing raids deep into Egyptian (Palestine today) territory will not persuade the civilian population to surrender but will stiffen their resolve to resist. This is the lesson of all aerial bombardment. The Vietnamese who have endured years of American heavy bombing have responded not by capitulation but by shooting down more enemy aircraft. In 1940 my own fellow countrymen resisted Hitler’s bombing raids with unprecedented unity and determination. For this reason, the present Israeli attacks will fail in their essential purpose, but at the same time they must be condemned vigorously throughout the world. The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression.

The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annexe foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate. The refugees who surround Palestine in their hundreds of thousands were described recently by the Washington journalist I.F. Stone as “the moral millstone around the neck of world Jewry.” Many of the refugees are now well into the third decade of their precarious existence in temporary settlements.

The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign Power to another people for the creation of a new State. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their number have increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled in masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.

We are frequently told that we must sympathize with Israel because of the suffering of the Jews in Europe at the hands of the Nazis. I see in this suggestion no reason to perpetuate any suffering. What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Not only does Israel condemn a vast number of refugees to misery, not only are many Arabs under occupation condemned to military rule; but also Israel condemns the Arab nations only recently emerging from colonial status, to continued impoverishment as military demands take precedence over national development.

All who want to see an end to bloodshed in the Middle East must ensure that any settlement does not contain the seeds of future conflict. Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967. A new world campaign is needed to help bring justice to the long–suffering people of the Middle East."

 

Another Tale of Animal Psi

 When I was a kid in New York City I remember watching with awe a movie called Lassie Come Home.   About a lost dog and the adventures finding its way back home—I was enthralled by this story, myself not having a cat or dog in our small apartment.  At that time, I had no idea about dogs or people with so-called “psychic” abilities.  When I grew up, however, I started to hear stories about psychic people, and had  some odd experiences myself.

 

Discussing the idea of psychic ability with a fellow graduate student at Columbia University, he told me a story hard to forget. When he was a small boy he and his family moved from a house on Long Island about forty miles to an apartment in Manhattan.  The boy had a pet dog he loved but pets were not allowed in the new apartment.  So the family had to leave the little terrier behind with a neighbor.  The boy, needless to say, was unhappy about losing his canine buddy.  

 

So the family moved to the big city and left poor Nino behind.  About two months later, however, the boy was on a lunch break outside the elementary school he was attending.  Suddenly, his long absent dog Nino, dirty and looking worn out, was at his heels.  His dog had come home! Imagine the boy’s heart.  The mental connection is all they had, but the dog found him through forty miles of houses and traffic and a river he had to cross.  

 

There are lots of stories like this. I recommend an excellent book on animal psi by Rupert Sheldrake, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Animals, like humans, display unexplained powers, often when they’re most stressed out or highly excited. With humans, the most spectacular example is the near-death  experience.

 

Danger, stress, even looming death often seem to liberate extraordinary mental powers. Nino the terrier was an example of a stressed out dog who against all odds found his way home. Stories of strange animal behaviors would be fun to share, and useful to remind us of one of the great mysteries of nature.  All living things seem to be linked together in what seems to be a great mind at large.

Intentionality of a Cat

 

 I’ve often wondered about the scientists and philosophers of the 17^th century—and right on till thirty or forty years ago—the errant materialists that believed nonhuman animals were devoid  of mind and consciousness.  Did they not ever observe or play with a cat or a dog?   Many of this persuasion also doubted the reality of their own mind and consciousness.  Again, one wonders if these materialists ever spent much time observing and reflecting on their own mental life.

 

My thoughts on this were triggered by a recent encounter with a cat.   One morning  I opened the side door of my house to find a strange cat staring  at me.  I checked my mail and closed the door. The next two mornings there was a repeat performance; I open the door and there is the same grey-brown-striped cat with white paws staring intently at me, each time stationed a little closer to my door.

 

On the fourth morning, I opened up, and lo! In steps the cat!  She immediately butts my ankle with her head and proceeds to march around my living room, rubbing herself against chairs, book shelves, and so forth. I sat down at my desk and she came and nestled between my feet. Of course,  I then reached down and pet  her on the head, which she seemed especially to savor.  What struck me was the sheer intentionality of the cat’s behavior.  It took four days for her to accomplish her goal—humans give up more readily at their tasks.

 

Intentionality is a property of consciousness—it is always directed toward  something.  I discovered that the cat belonged to a couple two houses to my right, and could be seen at odd hours wandering about.  Her name was Clio, after one of the ancient Greek muses.  After about five minutes, Clio strolled toward the door, I followed, opened the door, and she shot out.

 

The next day I was at my desk at work when I glanced to the right and there is the cat sitting on my windowsill gazing at me.  Okay, I let her in—the side or the front door? The moment I decide to open the front door, the cat leaps off the windowsill and walks straight toward the front door.  I quickly learned two things about Clio: she was very intelligent and, as it seemed to me, psychic.   Those old mechanists got it wrong about animals.

 

I enjoyed what became daily visits from Clio, never tried to feed her, and whenever I gave the sign for departure, she would gracefully vanish.  I liked to watch her behavior.  She learned how to ‘speak’ one English word—hand! Whenever chance permitted, she would butt my hand with her furry head, and the meaning was clear: “Please pat me on the head! I love it!”  She would explore every room in detail and was always looking for the highest thing to leap on top of and look out a window. One thing she always did—I think it was a game she played—she would spin around in circles very fast trying to catch her tail.  She also  found certain comfortable places to lie down and nap, and I could hear her purring away.

 

The cat would leave and return later, peering at me through windows and doorways, letting me know she wanted back in.   One afternoon, during a visit with a colleague, Clio appeared on the windowsill.  I got up and closed the window shade.  I was too busy to entertain the cat. A few seconds later we were distracted by  scrapings and sounds on the side glass door.  What we saw caught our attention.  Clio was pounding on the door with both her paws.  Who thought a cat could be so amazingly willful?

 

It was a treat getting to know Clio.  She liked to leap on to the kitchen counter when I was sitting there having lunch.  She had no interest in food.  It was pure playful rapport.  We were sitting almost face to face, and for a moment I felt I was peering into the eyes of a human being. Her green eyes  spoke to me, and for a moment it felt as if I was looking into the eyes of a woman reincarnated as a cat.  

 

Things took a wrong turn when Clio wanted to stay in my house. I would let her out in the afternoon, but I soon noticed that she hung around my house, even late into the  night. Once at around midnight I opened the door and she tried to dive into my house.  And she was there first thing in the morning. But she was not my cat, so I had to terminate our relationship.   I’ve had cats that I lived with but never did I meet a cat with such focus and intentionality.

 

The modern scientific study of animal consciousness is a recent development. Until recently the scientific assumption was that animals have no consciousness or inner life.  A convenient assumption that makes it okay to slaughter animals for food, clothing, hunting, ‘sport,’ religious sacrifice, etc. By denying the consciousness of animals we rationalize their brutal exploitation. One of the dumbest form of human malice is to call the people we despise animals.   As if humans are not animals when in fact  they are the cruelest and most destructive animal on the planet.

 

And now for a final note—talk about coincidence or maybe telepathy.  A minute  ago when I finished writing the last  paragraph, I looked up, and there was psychic Clio on my windowsill.  Staring at me.  The perfect punctuation mark.  I have not seen her at all for at least two weeks.  But she shows up exactly the moment I finished writing and thinking about her.  By the way, there are wonderful stories about the psychic adventures of animals.  So much to learn about the mystery of life.