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

 

 

 

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.”