Can I Be Frank?

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

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

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

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

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

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

                     They filled the ground, were all

                     Around.  I wanted to get through.

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

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

                  I further came to recognize when my fears get denied

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

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

 

 

              

 

 

 

 

 

Mind and Obesity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

How to Avoid Scaring Yourself to Death

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Living By Song Magic

        

                                        

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

UFOs--Why So Shy?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Our Unfinished Evolution

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Technology and the Paranormal

 

 

 

What could be more at opposite ends of each other than technology and the paranormal? And yet, once we think about it, we notice a curious connection.  Technology, in fact, seems to represent the mechanization of psychic power. Technology, we could say, is the materialization of our psychic potentials.

 

We’re always reaching out.  We listen to people talking, and we can connect with them telepathically, rarely, however. And then one day Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone! Now, after thousands of years of cultural evolution, you can share the thoughts and voice of friend or foe located on the other side of the planet.  Not by ESP, but through your phone.  The phone is mechanical telepathy.  You would also like to see the face of the other you’re listening to. Instead of relying on rare clairvoyance, you have photography or a televised or zoomed interaction.  And you can save it from the ravages of oblivion, creating a kind of eternity from the fleeting moments of time.

 

Our psychic needs and impulses have begun to morph into machines. As noted, telepathy and clairvoyance have evolved into their machine counterparts.  Now consider pre- and retro-cognition.  So far we have not devised a machine that can accurately extend consciousness into the future.  But we can use our enormous information technologies to anticipate likely possibilities.  Technology cannot handle the future of human activity because of that little devil, free will; no machine will ever be invented that has free will.   We can create robots but not robots with free will or the consciousness that is the basis of free will.

 

The story changes when we consider psychokinesis, the capacity of minds to directly influence physical events including our bodies—for instance, levitation.  The saints, buddhas, and yogis were levitating long before the Wright brothers constructed the first flying machine in 1903. On this question, however, technology wildly outdoes the flying of saint Joseph of Copertino, who, as far as I know, did not ever manage to fly to the moon and back.

 

The automobile is the perfect illustration of a PK fantasy morphed into a machine.  An automated factory is a highly evolved image of mechanized magic.  But there’s a problem: the proliferation of machines we’ve invented to make life easy for us has also resulted in the climate crisis that is wreaking havoc on the entire global ecosystem.

 

That brings us to the danger-ridden side of my thesis. Unfortunately, as free agents humans regularly resort to violence to act out their intentions.  So, we evolved from using clubs, spears, and the horse to AR 15’s, tanks, battleships, jet fighters, and atomic bombs to slaughter our enemies.

 

To combat the violent propensities of human beings, we’re only at the beginning  of the creation of a peace-inducing technology. There are two interrelated forms of consciousness that consistently give rise to a peace-loving mode of being—the oneness of the mystical and of the near-death experience.

 

The near-death experience (NDE) reveals the psychological type of peace we need.   In the NDE, consciousness of the external world, mediated through brain and nervous system, is totally displaced, starting to induce the death of the body. But consciousness, not part of the brain or body, is not destroyed.  It withdraws and refocuses on the inner environment.  That is the scene where the near-death experience, its revelations and transformations, unfold. 

 

Technology need not exclusively be machine-based. We can think of a technology of behavior. So, we can ask, what can we do to gain access to the near-death consciousness without literally nearly dying?  Various parts of the answer to this question may be found in the behaviors of shamans, mystics, yogis, and saints.  Instead of having one’s consciousness violently cut off by cardiac arrest or some other near-mortal incident, like being struck by lightning, we can interrupt the normal flow of consciousness by meditation, isolation, chanting, fasting, ingesting psychedelics, and so forth. 

 

There are all sorts of procedures designed to redirect the flow of our consciousness out of the trance of mundane existence toward the light of the internal universe.  But

mainstream science has yet to accept the challenge of learning how to develop a spiritual technology. It has yet to assist us in making contact with the forms of creative consciousness that lurk beneath our everyday mental life.  But the possibilities do exist. We need to get working on it before it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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