Friday, February 23, 2024

A Strange Light Experience

 From time to time I’ve  had experiences certifiably paranormal: telepathic, ghostly, precognitive,  psychokinetic.  But on the day after Christmas in 2020, actually after midnight on the next  day, I experienced something unlike anything I ever experienced before.

 

The context.  I was in high spirits,  working on a large painting and, at that moment, writing a blog-post for the following day. It was about one-thirty in the morning, my body felt tired, but my mind was clear.  I’m concentrating on the point I’m about to formulate and type out on my computer, when I notice a slight tremor on my left eyebrow, exactly at the point where the bone of the skull makes a right angle. I also notice there’s a change in the light around me and a sensation of sudden warmth.

 

Suddenly,  light began to emanate from my left eyebrow—that single point on my skull where I felt a tremor.  I could see and feel the pulsations of light.  During this steady flow, I became conscious of the reality of the light because I couldn’t read my computer screen.  The light from my brow was too bright and it was distracting me.    I decided something odd but real was happening.  It might be wise, I thought, to make friends with it,  so I surrendered to the stream of light that was pulsating from my left eyebrow. There was a quality to the light that was exquisitely peaceful; so I laved myself in it, and stopped thinking.

 

Then I stand up abruptly, and still the streaming continues. I observe how this stream, pouring from the left side of my head, was moving to the right in physical space. What I’m seeing makes no sense. I was wide awake and working; something that seemed to emanate from my own head stopped me from doing my work.   I look around at my studio and all I can see are evenly paced waves of light. I get anxious because I’m suddenly not sure where I am or what’s happening or if this will ever stop.  But the pulsations did diminish, so I get into bed and concentrate on the benign side of the  light.   I retreat under the covers; I can  still see light waves around me; but they weaken and I fall asleep.

 

Morning: refreshed, my left eyebrow back to normal.  For several days some  worry about a repeat performance.  A bit unnerving, but a fantastic experience.  I think a camera would have caught the light.  Thoughts?  How to classify? Understand?

 

There is a literature on the subject of strange and remarkable light experiences.   Light is both a physical phenomenon and also it would seem a mental phenomenon, and both have similar functions.  Without light the world would be shrouded in darkness, and invisible to us.  But the same applies to the  inner light of our mental world.  When we awaken from dreamless sleep, our consciousness lights up the world around and in us. 

 

It turns out that my eyebrow illumination experience is just a kid brother in a huge family of folks who’ve had strange and deeply significant light encounters.  The first example that comes to mind is the often-reported near-death experience.  It’s a paradox that when people in some striking way merely come close to death they often have extraordinary light experiences, in which they feel illuminated and bathed with the purest love imaginable. 

 

Also people on the threshold of their actual death report seeing an all-embracing light of love.  Then there are the mystics and shamans and others disposed to ek-static states of consciousness; here too we find plenty of accounts of strange light experiences.   It would be of value if you have something to share with readers, if you have had a light experience.

 

As is well known, the fact that we are conscious at all is a mystery to science.  Some scientists believe that eventually there will be a physical explanation of consciousness. Others, including myself,  assume that consciousness is irreducibly itself, a fundamental factor in nature.

 

The extraordinary nature of consciousness is normally obscured by all the distractions that occupy our normal consciousness.  The ordinary concerns and problems of everyday life dominate our attention and narrow our consciousness.

 

But there is one important fact that we should remember.  Whenever our normal consciousness is disrupted; it could be by almost anything—fatigue, illness, a shocking event—it often happens that our minds are torn open and we are exposed to new powers, new dimensions of experience.  Transformation and enlightenment are always much closer than we might normally assume. It’s a simple fact easily forgotten: far from remote, our greatest ally is within us.  The question we have to ask: what must I do to mobilize what I already possess within myself?  For more on this inner potential we all possess, see my book: Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

What Our Minds Can Do To Our Bodies

It’s not every day that the New York Times reports on the mysteries of mind and body.  There was, however, a report in the Times (Sept 9, 2023) by Ruth Graham of an apparent case of bodily incorruption in America. It happened to Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster from the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus, a small order located in the hills north of Kansas city.  Four years after her death it was decided to move her body to a more conspicuous place inside the church.  Upon opening her coffin and expecting to find dust and bones, they found Wilhelmina (a Black woman) with her body and face intact.  This was immediately construed as a possible miracle of incorruption, and since then she has drawn thousands of visitors from all parts to witness the extraordinary phenomenon. 

 

Bodily incorruption is a well-documented phenomenon, in which the dead bodies of people who were intensely serious about their religious practice don’t decompose in the normal way, but for decades and more remain intact.  They may emit a sweet fragrance instead of the stench of decomposition; or exude blood or oils. And these anomalies persist.  For example, Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879) whose dead body has remained intact for over a hundred years, without any artificial embalming techniques.  Something about her intense spiritual life had this highly symbolic effect on her corpse.  Needless to say, a mystery as to how this is possible.

 

Fortunately, this strange power (whatever it is) that acts on dead bodies is also known to act on and heal living bodies.  Medical psychology provides our first example with the abundance of data on the placebo effect, which is a mental effect, based on belief.  Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that in many cases, those who believe and expect improvement from doing or ingesting something, show significant improvement.  This leads to another possibility.  Maybe the drugs that work do so in part because the user believes in them.   There is evidence that mental states and intentions sometimes serve as healing agents.

 

There are cases where the mental effects are dramatic, and shocking to common sense, as well to science. Stories from Bible-related beliefs and practices, from indigenous and shamanic societies, and from modern hospital settings, all, if true,  attest to the healing power of our mental life.   We could call it psychic or spiritual power or the energy of the soul.  There are cases where the healing power certainly seems super-natural, meaning beyond what we’re accustomed to find in nature.  All that means is that there are things about nature that we have yet to understand. 

 

Some cases illustrate extraordinary powers over physical reality The story of Pierre de Rudder is thoroughly documented and thoroughly extraordinary. The most striking point: the healing was total and instantaneous.  For eight years de Rudder endured a broken leg that festered and was pain-wracked. His benefactors provided the best possible medical care, but without even slight success.  After eight years, on April 7th, 1875 he with his wife’s assistance hobbled with cane to a train station that took him to the Lourdes sanctuary in Oostacker, near Ghent.


Many witnessed him that morning before embarking on his voyage.  The broken bones were such that he could turn his dangling lower leg so that his foot hung  backwards.  Upon arrival at the grotto he stood before a statue of the Madonna. De Rudder prayed that he be made well, so he could work and care for his wife and children. Quite suddenly, standing before the statue, he found himself instantaneously and totally healed.  He dropped his cane and was able to walk and move exactly as he did eight years ago before the tree fell on him and crushed his left leg.  He was suddenly exactly as he was before the tree had fallen on him, which had sent him into eight years of moral and physical anguish.

 

When he returned home sound and well the town and all who knew him were amazed and word of the event quickly spread all over the country and other parts of Europe. In spite of all the witnesses and doctors who knew de Rudder’s condition for eight years, the anti-clericals tried desperately to prove nothing miraculous occurred.  When de Rudder died years later his bones were unearthed and a strip of newly materialized white bone was visible that formed on the day he was healed.  The doctors were amazed by his sudden complete healing, a process that if it occurred naturally would have taken  months at the very least.

 

Extraordinary healing phenomena from  placebo effects to instantaneous healings of the de Rudder type are one example of macro-PK phenomena. The message here is that human beings possess extraordinary self-healing powers.  These powers, in my view, seem to be part of human evolutionary potential.  If you read Consuming Visions by Suzanne K. Kaufman, which is about the Lourdes Shrine, you will learn how incredibly fanatical was the response to reports of de Rudder’s instantaneous healing. The established materialist medical community and their anti clerical comrades were gobsmacked by what was being called a proven miracle.

 

It seemed like a mortal threat to the skittish tribe of know-it-alls.  The issue was degraded into an attack on the clerics who had an incredibly potent case of something beyond any natural explanation.  In my view, extraordinary phenomena are worthy of close scientific investigation for one very good reason; they  represent capacities we need to liberate and harness for the enrichment of human life.

 

This remarkable self-healing capacity, however, is not the only part of our latent evolutionary potential.   I’ll mention three more examples.  I’ve written two books about levitation (The Man Who Could Fly and Wings of Ecstasy, available via Amazon).  Gravity is one of the basic physical constituents of the universe.  There is compelling evidence for the reality of levitation.  It is related to altered states of consciousness, a state in which one’s ego is completely transcended.

Think about it.  Suppose we could learn to move through space, free from the constraints of gravity?  The evidence proves it possible.  If some people can do it, then all people might learn to or naturally evolve the capacity.  Should this happen, the world-threatening problem of energy would be drastically reduced, and with wholesome effects on the environment.

 

For this reason alone, scientists should be trying to understand how to develop that capacity, given its enormous practical utility.  But there’s a lot more to this possible project.  The potential for a new human in the history of entertainment needs to be underscored.   Surely, should our anti-gravity potential begin to unfold, learning how to enjoy and even cultivate the sportive side of levitation would open a new field for entrepreneurs.    There is reason to believe this line of thought already has a history, as described in Glenn Mullin’s The Flying Mystics of Tibetan Buddhism.

 

We’re thinking about the more extraordinary properties of our consciousness.    Lurking in the invisible planet of our mental life are seeds of a more developed humanity.  Why assume our present human type is the apex of what is possible in nature?  Given that humans are prone to unremitting mutual slaughter and that we have too often treated our mother nature with enormous brutality and self-defeating stupidity, we can only hope that a higher version of our  species is at least possible.

 

Now to my fourth example: another way we might evolve beyond our present species persona, so to speak. But this is not about what our minds can do to our bodies.  It is about how our minds relate to other minds and bodies.   For this  what we need is a particular form of consciousness.  We all, almost all, possess some germ of this particular form of consciousness, some more than others, true, but on the whole, this is a relatively rare and somewhat weakly evolved, aspect of consciousness.  

 

It shows up in a dramatic way during the near-death experience, during the life-review, in which people report entering into the subjectivity of those they  interacted with in life.  In this state, your consciousness is bifocal; you relive a moment of your past from your point of view but at the same time from the point of view of the other.  It’s more than guesswork and good will; your newly expanded consciousness enables you to be conscious of others from their point of view.  Imagine how thongs might radically change when our normal consciousness naturally can overflow into the inner world of the people and natural world around us. We can practice even now with our consciousness overflowing into aspects of the world around us. Try  going for a walk now on the streets of your everyday life, and you can even now try to imagine how it will look and feel with a more evolved bifocal consciousness.

 

What I’ve learned about extraordinary human potential I discuss in my book: Smile of the Universe:  Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. (Available at Amazon or Anomalist Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

The Highest Mental State

Is there a preferred state of mind, an optimal form of consciousness, a way to open  the creative flow of our lives?  It can be a wild beast, that mind of ours.  Are there states of mind that can lift us out of our routine everyday selves?   A particular state of mind we should think about?

 

I think there is, and it’s a state we’re all acquainted with, at least to some degree.  The common word for it is ecstasy.

 

We can all in one way or another relate to this word.  The usage ranges from “Mom, I’m ecstatic about that gorgeous red blouse you bought me,” to the mystical ecstasy of Hildegard Von Bingen, expressed by her transcendent music.

 

Ecstasy is the most interesting state of mind to explore because it seems to be the most creative—even to the point of enabling us to defy the familiar habits of nature.   

 

To be clear about the root meaning of the word ecstasy. Ek-stasis is the Greek, and means standing or being outside yourself.  Definitely, an altered state of consciousness.  In ecstasy, we are lifted outside our normal personality. I once dreamt I was flying in a perfect blue sky on my silver flute—truly ecstatic!  And you? We all, if lucky, can boast of the rare taste of the truly ecstastic.  Love and sex are obvious wellsprings of possible ecstasy.  But we’ll not get into that here.

 

It turns out that there are many ways,  accidental as well as deliberate, to induce ecstasy. A lady friend was driving me across town once when the car hit an embankment, lost traction and began slowly to spin around into the next lane with oncoming traffic.  I saw immediately that I might shortly be dead but then strangely lapsed into a state of blissful admiration of everything around me; I was outside myself and feeling calm and serene. By sheer luck we made it unscathed to the other side of the road, escaping a crash.

 

One of the more famous accidental routes to ecstasy is the well-investigated near-death experience.   When this happens, you are definitely outside your normal human self.  Typically, you may encounter deceased loved ones, see your whole life flash before you, encounter a being of light and love, hear unearthly music, feel what  you never felt before, and emerge from it all, an evolved human being, often with paranormal powers you  never had before.

 

We prefer not to have such terrifying accidents to experience ecstasy and its wonders.  We can, however, turn to more gradual, deliberate methods of exploring the ecstatic zone. For example, like shamans, mediums, poets, prophets, and mystics, we might fast, meditate, ingest psychoactive substances, sublimate our sexual energies, and so on.  All directed to trigger the state of mind we’re discussing. 

 

In fact, there is a specific drug, MDMA called Ecstasy or Molly. My experiments with MDMA, conducted with my wife, taught me first hand about the ecstatic dimension and what it could reveal.

 

It would be useful to have a practice, an art form, a life-style that primes us for ecstasy. It could be anything.  Any practice that tends to free us from our mechanical mental habits.   Yogis of India have the word, sadhana—the practice used to tune into the powers of our latent higher self. “What have you done to surpass yourself?” was the question that Nietzsche put into the mouth of Zarathustra.

 

A great outlet for the ecstatic quest, for finding a healing sadhana, are the arts.  The arts are about transcending our habitual mindsets, rearranging our perception of reality in ways that enlarge our humanity. The arts operate in service to the free spirit of imagination.  As such they can take us out of ourselves, each art form in its own way.  It can be any form you resonate with.  

 

The ecstatic dimension of consciousness can lead to powerful experiences.   A vast range of reports reveal all manner of strange phenomena.  One thinks of  near-death experiences, how  lives are  transformed. There are cases of instantaneous healings resulting from ecstatic prayer.  Found in all spiritual traditions, folks are blown out of their normal personalities—mediums, shamans, saints, yogis. In the well-documented miracles of Hindu and Catholic saints, ecstasy is always central, the key to extraordinary events. There are more interesting ways of being in the world than we normally suppose.   Ecstasy is a doorway into the largely unknown  land of the supernormal.  

 

To explore all this further, the facts behind the new paradigm of consciousness,  see my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. (Anomalist Books or Amazon.) Sharing extraordinary information is the way to transformation. 

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

UFOS and Psychic Phenomena

Ufology and parapsychology are two disciplines not on friendly terms with each other.  But that’s a mistake. The two fields of research naturally converge into one, more interesting discipline than either operating on their own.

 

Full disclosure, I write about this because I’m trying to understand my own experiences.   I am periodically befuddled by experiences that seem incredible and impossible.  So let me begin with a report of my own experience: a UAP, an unidentified aerial phenomenon. My experience was more than a sighting.  It was contact intending religious signaling of some sort.

 

It was 11:30 P.M. April 23, 1971. Relaxing together on the couch, Jane and I were listening to an intense piece of music by John Coltrane, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Impulsively, I got up and walked to the window, and looked up into a blue night sky, still grooving with the music.  Suddenly, out of nowhere I saw a cluster of lights emerge from the sky.  They began to dance back and forth, performing impossible aerial maneuvers, echoing the rhythms of Coltrane—a few hundred feet above our top floor apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, on Bedford Street, NY. I then saw in the sky an apparition of a man, human, smiling and gesturing happily, as if he too was part of our dance. His appearance was not visible like the moving lights, but mental, which only I saw.  And I called Jane to the window who was immediately awed by the dancing lights.

 

Suddenly, the dance ended and the lights stopped whirling about. Instead, they  turned right and sailed in a straight line uptown a short distance where they perched atop the dome of Our Lady of Pompeii, a Catholic Church for immigrants.  There, it beamed several pulsations, as Jane and I watched from the sixth floor of our apartment.  The lights then sailed straight back to where they first appeared before us.  They resumed their dance for a bit, confirming the impression that this was a communication, not just an anomalous flash in the sky. Suddenly, the lights turned right again, but this time in a fraction of a second they shot zigzag uptown, vanishing as they passed over the Empire State Building.

 

Amazed by what we saw, Jane and I stepped out of the apartment and went one flight up to the roof where we met Louie, a neighbor, who said, his eyes popping with astonishment, “Did you see that?” Louie also saw and thought the lights had a pyramid shape. So, there was a third witness to what we saw.

 

Asking around in later days, there were no other reports in the neighborhood of strange lights in the sky.  A layer of coincidences I should mention: It was Jane’s birthday and Shakespeare’s, and I was five days from defending my Ph.D dissertation at Columbia University. 

 

The first comment I want to make. The intelligence guiding the lights certainly  knew the music we were listening to. As often reported, UAPs communicate by telepathy or, in this case, clairvoyance. . The intention seems to have been to connect Coltrane’s music with a Church for emigrants. What that might mean I lay aside as unknown.  It had to be more than an ad for Coltrane’s music.  My guess it was so I could tell this story.

 

As the physical behavior of UAPs clearly transcend present human technology, so do their mental capacities seem to transcend ours. What about the blatant gap between  our abilities, the psychic and the physical? One might suggest that the spectrum of paranormal capacities revealed by modern research represent human evolutionary potential. Ufology might plausibly be construed as the evolutionary complement of parapsychology.  As for the so-called Grays, associated with cases of alleged abduction, it’s worth noting that they apparently have faded slits in place of mouths, a relic perhaps of the talking and eating phases of their evolution. 

A second phenomenon helps us appreciate the link between the two areas of research—levitation.  Abductees often report being levitated to the craft where they are subjected to medical operations.  Further, the energetics of levitation may well be involved in alien forms of transportation.  Apports are kin to levitation insofar as physical objects are observed to translocate instantly and appear to move through solid matter. This turns up in accounts of poltergeist phenomena that seem related to child psychology and ghost phenomenology—another point of convergence of ufology and parapsychology. I once heard David Grusch say, almost as an afterthought, that alien technology is mind-driven.  If mystics like Joseph of Copertino for 35 years managed to defy gravity before innumerable witnesses, it is not hard to imagine a more advanced scientific culture having evolved vastly developed modes of transportation by tapping into the power Joseph had over gravity.

 

Grusch is a notable whistleblower with regard to the now infamous U.S. decades-long cover-up of all it knows about UFOs.[1]  If unknown agencies have evolved somewhere in the universe an advanced mental technology, it would mean their operations might be independent of the constraints of time and space as we know them. The forbidding spatial distances between Earth and other viable planets around the universe might then cease to be an issue. We may be dealing with intelligent beings that travel from one perceptual scene to another though a ‘tunnel’ outside the normal constraints of time and space.

Sticking to what I know from the details describing saint Joseph’s flights, based on about one hundred and fifty sworn eye-witness reports, one fact is clear about his mental state.  Ecstasy was invariably his mental state while levitating.  This was the case, for instance, while saying mass; he would lift off and hover in the air inches above the ground.  Other flights were more spectacular when he flew over people’s heads or aloft to a branch of a tree. 

 

Surely the scientific challenge is to understand why and how a state of mind can serve to release a person from the physical grip of gravity. The only space where that can happen is in dream space. A solution to the enigma of levitation may open the door to a new and more sustainable mode of transportation on earth.  Psychic technology may conceivably become part of the answer to reducing the consumption of fossil fuels.  After all, the current climate crisis is based on fossil fuels whose energy use is heating up the planet.  The challenge is to switch to new eco-friendly forms of energy like wind  and solar. But what about mental energy?  Parapsychology, psychical research, clearly hold clues to new forms of mental energy. New forms of psychic energy may then represent an evolutionary step toward solving the climate crisis. A new form of eco-friendly energy production would be part of the response to the climate crisis.

 

But there’s another more fundamental problem that has to be addressed—the malignant greed,  the paranoid streak, and the violent propensities of the human animal.  Again, the convergence under discussion contains the germ of a solution to this problem—the higher mystical forms of consciousness marked by empathy and emotions centered around the unifying force of love.  The latter are features of near-death encounters, of certain psychedelic episodes, and of yogic and shamanic experiences. All kinds of data suggest that it may be possible to learn how to  activate our extraordinary potentials, and train ourselves to use them for creative purposes—aesthetic, moral, revolutionary. 

 

The question I’m asking—how can we actualize these higher forms of consciousness without having to undergo a near-death experience? One feature of this extraordinary experience may hold the secret to dealing with the darker side of human nature—the so-called life-review so often reported. People review their whole life and report seeing how their actions affected the people they interacted with.  They feel, sense and know what’s going on inside others as clearly as they feel, sense, and know what’s going on inside themselves.  One’s ego expands in a way that includes the consciousness of the other as well as one’s own.

 

So the question is, can we learn to evoke the life review process and experience a more comprehensive sense of human identity? If science and a new psychology could devise ways to induce periodic life-reviews in human beings as part of the education and liberation of their wider humanity, it might  be a turning-point in the history of our species.  

To function in a modern democratic society, you have to be able to read, and as a minimal intellectual achievement you must understand and honor the concept of factual truth, basic to all the higher notions of truth, such as aesthetic, social, scientific, and mystical.  There is another reading skill without which democratic and social life rely on.  We need to be able to read each other, that is, encounter each other with patience and receptivity, with awareness and sensitivity. The interesting news is that a capacity for remarkable intuition and empathy may very well be part of our untapped deep self. We know this in particular from modern studies of the near-death experience. 

 

The importance of the life-review has been underscored especially by one of the American founders of near-death research, Kenneth Ring.  Moreover, as far as I know, Dr. Ring has written the only book that aims to unite parapsychology and ufology, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large.  This book, and others I could cite, point toward a new paradigm of scientific research that promises a more hopeful outlook for our human future. But there are also signs of danger.

 

Countries that have had encounters with UFOs are interested in acquiring their technology. This is borne out by a reading of Coulthart cited above.  Any nation that did so most likely would be able to subjugate the entire world population before long. While such efforts are doubtless under way, I see no evidence of any major progress, i.e., aircraft that can make 90 degree turns at a thousand miles an hour.  But this sort of scientific success would only exacerbate an already explosively violent human condition.  Science needs to focus on research that promises to jump-start the evolution of human consciousness, at least to the point of palliating  climate chaos and murderous human aggression.  

 

Parapsychology and ufology, two outlaw intellectual disciplines, are avoided if not outright denied by most mainstreams of officialdom. Nevertheless, these two research domains have been covering stories about as big as stories can be. In the  first story, beings not of this world are constantly interacting with us in all sorts of ways—beings obviously superior to us in ‘technology,’ if that’s the right word.  Second story—a careful para-psychological look into human experience reveals a body of evidence that points to a possible breakthrough in the evolution of the human species.  Just in time, some might say.  For without some kind of drastic breakthrough in our collective spiritual life, the world process our species has set into motion since the Industrial Revolution is going to bring down world civilization.    

 

 

 

 

 

 



[1] For a thorough back up of Grusch’s good faith, see investigative journalist, Ross Coulthart, In Plain Sight: An Investigation into UFOs and Impossible Science(2021)

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Lying Our Way Toward Global Catastrophe

Despite their great achievements, science and technology have brought us to the brink of nuclear annihilation and launched what may be an irreversible climate catastrophe. As I write, arms sales are sky-rocketing all over the planet. Meanwhile, the corporate energy magnates show few signs of shifting toward sustainable forms of energy production.  They lie and temporize, anything to cling to their enormous profits.   

 

The climate crisis is denied and the weapons salesmen insist on the need for self-defense.  Can a society with a warped sense of truth long survive?  Can we manage when the basic concept of factual truth is spat on.  We are, after all, hacking our way through an age of fake news. The fakery is pervasive. AI, ChatGPT and related programs enormously raise the specter of new forms of deception.   

 

From all sides the idea of truth is facing a crisis. By far the most spectacular assault on truth is the phenomenon of the Trumpian base and Republican affiliates. Truth here lies in bloody pieces thrown into our faces, thanks to the pathological liar, rapist, and polymorphous criminal. Donald Trump.

 

No surprise about the lying that revolves around the American gods of money and power. But what about science? Science, by definition, is dedicated to knowledge and truth.  We expect more from scientists when it comes to matters of truth.  Follow the facts wherever they lead us, is the ideal of authentic scientists.   

 

But scientists are human beings, subject to forces that can deform even their sense of truth. Scientists take bribes from corporate entities in exchange for endorsing—lying about—products on sale.  The money motive for lying here is plain enough.

 

Scientists are sometimes compelled to lie by the government for security reasons.  For example, since 1947 the U.S. Government and scientific personnel actively concealed the truth about UFOs and UAPs from the American people. So, when a psychiatrist like John Mack reported his research on alien abductions he was attacked by his Harvard compatriots.

 

Since 2017 the Government has opened the question for discussion, and admitted the reality of an alien technology that regularly enters our airspace—a “technology” that clearly transcends anything known to current science.  In fact, the presence of this super-technology operating with impunity in our midst is a topic of great significance—but oddly has  retired to the files of YouTube and is rarely discussed in mainline venues.   

 

There’s something else. A scientist may deny or trivialize a matter of fact because it has implications he doesn’t like.  This is the more egregious sin against science.  One  example that comes to mind is the Big Bang Theory of the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago.  This is the theory widely accepted by scientists today, especially in light of the most recent research.  The theory at first was dismissed with contempt by many scientists.

 

 Why? The Big Bang seemed to imply something obnoxious to  physicists firmly committed to materialism and atheism. In 1927, Georges Lemaître published a paper that confirmed the expansion of the universe of galaxies.  There were observations suggesting that startling fact. The idea of an expanding universe was not consistent with what Einstein, Eddington and others believed to be an eternal, static, steady-state universe.

 

Lemaître inferred that an expanding universe must have originated at a previous time from a super dense singularity of some physical reality.  The universe exploded out of this physical singularity creating time and space, a universe that is still expanding  and at an accelerating rate.  Big Bang cosmology has clearly ousted the steady-state cosmology, in spite of the physicists that first rejected the theory.  The  atheists were appalled. In a broad way, the Big Bang seems consistent with Biblical creationism. But so what? The truth is that nobody has a clue to what really caused the Big Bang, if indeed there was a Big Bang.  The universe seems to be an effect with an unknown cause, but a reality with a finite history.  Sorry Einstein.

 

The atheist physicists had a hard time processing this cosmological surprise.  Moreover, Lemaitre, in addition to being a brilliant mathematician and physicist, was a Catholic priest.  But, as Lemaitre rightly understood and clearly stated, the Big Bang model of cosmic creation favors no religion.  Nonetheless, the antagonism toward the theory was (and still is) weighty, precisely because it can be construed as having religious significance. 

 

There is another example of science denying or ignoring highly significant empirical data.  In a way that exactly parallels the hostile reception of the Big Bang theory, most  scientists (not necessarily physicists) have been and still are instinctively on guard and reluctant (at least publicly) to engage with the wide world of paranormal phenomena. Paranormal phenomena like levitation, precognition, instantaneous healing, the materialization of physical objects, indications of postmortem survival, and so on, are construed as supportive of mentalistic worldviews where miracles, life after death, and supernatural beings may in fact be real. All this is rightly construed as a mortal threat to reductive scientific materialism.

 

Respect for factual truth needs to be restored to the common consciousness.    Without it we’re easily misled and manipulated. Materialist science would deny truths that may hold the secret of our evolutionary advance as a species. The unidentified beings the government lied about point to our potential evolution. For a more exact picture of what that may look like, look at the data called supernormal or miraculous—our extended mental, physical and spiritual powers.  In a fact-based model of what is possible, we can contemplate an outline of our futuristic identity.    

 

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Ghost Encounter

To add to the fun of Halloween , let me tell you a true ghost story.  Some years ago I met a woman who told me about a ghost that was bothering her family where she lived in a small town of New Jersey.  This woman was a nurse and a brilliant student of anthropology. She had two younger daughters.  She explained that this ghost liked to appear in the bathroom where she and her daughters showered.  In short, this ghost was a double creep—a creepy ghost and creepy gaper at the girls while they showered.  All in all, about nine people , including her husband and friends had some kind contact with the creepy phantom.

 

So I asked her if she would mind allowing me to spend a night in her house, to see if the ghost would pay me a visit.  She agreed and when I arrived rather late one evening she set me up downstairs on a couch facing a fireplace where this dirty-minded apparition liked to show up.  So I installed myself on the couch with my notebook and pencil, and the rest of the family all went upstairs and left me alone on my ghost watch. 

 

It was well after midnight and I was wide awake and reading a book.  I did not expect anything to happen.  Suddenly—it was well after one in the morning—I heard the sound of a gong ring.  Startled, I looked around and noticed a gong and a stick hanging on the wall.  I got up and used the stick to strike the gong—it produced the exact sound I just heard.  Well, I’ll be! I thought, the dirty old ghost is here—where else could that sound have come from? 

 

I went back to my couch, gleeful at my success over what I heard.  I leaned back and wrote up the time and what I heard.  I then looked up and peered into the fireplace about ten feet away from me.  Something moved.  Then I noticed a human form, sort of transparent rippling in the corner, which then charged right toward me.  It immediately wrapped itself around me, and I was paralyzed.  I wanted to cry out—“He’s here!” but couldn’t.  I was too astonished to feel fear when after a long two seconds it vanished and let me go.  I then wrote it up and recounted my experience in the morning to my friend over breakfast.

 

This was not my only encounter with ghosts, but it was by far the most interesting.

Happy Halloween, folks! I can assure you.  Ghosts are real.

 

Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Sliding Toward Endtimes

 

There is an ancient myth about the death and rebirth of the world that repeats itself throughout history.  I wrote about this age-old human obsession in The Millennium Myth.  In the research for this book, I kept coming across examples of prophets of various creeds predicting doom and end of the world.  It was tedious, a continuous stream of false endtime predictions.  All failed.           

 

Until the climate scientists of the 21st century began to predict a coming world climate disaster. You don’t have to look far for signs of having entered the spring of end times—for example, the fact that the summer of 2023 was the hottest in human history.  The process that is fueling the world-wide climate chaos is out of control. Things are going to get worse, “worse” enough to prompt Noam Chomsky to talk of “world civilization” crashing.

 

Since the industrial revolution, human activities are responsible for the planet heating up—burning fossil fuels, consumerism, etc..  This evolving disaster is not the result of angry deities trying to teach us a lesson. It is science now that assumes the prophetic mantle.  Fires, floods, droughts, swamping of coastal cities, permafrost melting, bio habitats destroyed, migrations of peoples everywhere, growing food shortage, etc. are here already and will get worse.

 

 Climate chaos is a clarion call to humanity to learn how to live in harmony with each other and with the Earth that mothers our existence.   Humanity has never been in a situation of peril where, paradoxically, the enemy is ourselves: the destructive way we treat the environment and each other, human against human. In 2023, for example, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) parceled out $2.04 trillion dollars to the army, air force, space force, navy and marines.  All that colossal wealth and power spent to defend ourselves and kill anyone who seriously threatens us.

 

There is little reason to believe at least right now that enough committed humanity is coming together to cope with the forces that threaten to bring down world civilization.  At first the title of my book, The Final Choice: Death or Transcendence, seemed a  little over the top.  The notion of finality made me uncomfortable.  I rejected the idea of finality. We’re never completely cornered or locked down.  A way out is always possible. 

 

On the other hand, sometimes there are fateful moments of decision.  We’re forced to make a move.  Large consequences may follow that are irreversible. I believe we are in the midst of such a historic moment. By “we” I mean the collective drift of human behavior.

 

The endtime process is  entrenched in global habits, beliefs  and practices.  Stopping, even slowing, this process demands radical changes in the way humans live on Earth.  This is a message that the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Gutteres, has repeated, if there is any hope of palliating the pains and losses of future generations.

 

It’s not hard to figure out the path of possible progress, which has two components.  We have to revise the way we relate to the natural world around us and we have to revise the way we relate to each other in human society.   In both areas, we need to move from discord and exploitation to new forms of creative harmony.   

 

The fact is that we are sliding toward a rendezvous with terminal history.  A fully ripe awareness of what is undoubtedly looming could be useful.  It  might serve as a stimulus to transformation in whatever form it may assume.  We might entertain the possibility of a kind of collective near-death experience that will awaken us to a greater consciousness—the will to fashion a new Earth where all forms of life may flourish in harmony.  

Monday, September 25, 2023

Is Reading a Form of Magic?

The word magic may suggest much that is negative, like conjuring and con-artistry.   But there are positive senses of the word.  I would mention a brilliant book by the scientist Dean Radin, Real Magic, a report on what parapsychology tells us about the ‘magic’ of our own mental life.  In  essence, it consists of our minds having the potential to sense beyond the limits of the senses and to know and do things beyond the constraints of time and space.  In this strong sense, we are all potential magicians.

 

What I want to suggest is an unnoticed sense in which we are magicians.  And this turns out to be something ordinary that most of us do a little or sometimes quite a lot.  I am talking about the psychic ability to read. It does seem  that with the Internet, smart phones, the omnipresence of podcasting, etc., reading in the soulful sense as a form of communication is dying out.   Of course, people read for information, for the news, to play all sorts of games, and, needless to say, to buy and sell things.  There’s a certain magic in all that, I’m sure.

 

But a recent Gallup shows that since 1990 Americans are reading fewer and fewer books.  No doubt this in part is due to the more passive forms of mental activity based on lapping up what appears on the screens of our smart phones and computers. 

 

Reading a book requires the participation of an active mind, all the powers of our consciousness—books on history, drama, poetry, novels, short stories, philosophy, spirituality, all the arts.  I call this soulful reading—reading that stretches the intellect, calls for our empathy, excites and refines our imagination, is attuned to wonder and adventure, and challenges our critical skills.

 

Soulful reading is really a kind of out-of-body experience.  To learn, feel, embrace something new is to get beyond oneself , expand awareness and enrich one’s identity.  When you discover a new idea or emotion through something you’ve read, it’s a kind of telepathy.  Your mind provides the feeling and brings the content of what you’re reading to life. Reading inert words on a page is nothing without feeling, intelligence and imagination. Reading with soul is a creative act; without soul, words are signals without meaning.   

 

The Nazis and other Fascist movements burnt books, aiming to extinguish the option to free thinking.  Efforts to crush the freedom to read are turning up today in the United States, centered on books deemed inappropriate by Christian nationalists  and other fanatics.  This seems to complement the already documented decline of reading, tracked by Gallup.

 

Knowing how to read with soul is not only the key to engaging deeply with our human history and the treasures of world culture, it’s essential to being an intelligent  citizen, capable of grasping the written laws, rights, and ideals of our nation. Book reading skills are essential to understanding and supporting the principles of the U. S.  Constitution.

 

As we plough on toward an increasingly problematic future, there are two ways that promise to color the outcome, two different objects to lay on the table beside our beds before we retire: a gun or a book.

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

The Healing Power of Mind

It’s easy to underestimate the power of our minds—beliefs, attitudes, emotions—and their impact on our health and physical well being.  An example that science fully acknowledges is the power of the placebo. For example, it is well known that drugs used to alleviate depression are just slightly more effective than placebos.  In other words, the mere belief in the healing power of something can produce health benefits.  So, in fact, there is a whole literature of healing phenomena associated with religious beliefs at shrines, with relics, in the context of prayer, etc. 

 

Sometimes we find cases where the effects prompt us to believe in healing miracles. One of the weirdest but well documented mind-body phenomena involves effects on dead bodies, specifically, on the bodies of people who in life were known for their spiritual gifts and intensity.  I’m referring to the phenomenon of incorruption.  There are cases of spiritually evolved persons whose dead bodies do not follow the natural pattern of decomposition.  For example, there is the case of Bernadette Soubirous (1844-1879) whose dead body has remained intact for over a hundred years, without any artificial embalming techniques.

 

I’m raising this question because of a recent report of Ruth Graham in the New York Times (Sept 9, 2023) of an apparent case of such bodily incorruption in America. It happened to Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster from the Abbey of Our Lady of Ephesus, a small order located in the hills north of Kansas city.  Four years after her death it was decided to move her body to a more conspicuous place inside the church.  Upon opening her coffin and expecting to find dust and bones, they found Wilhelmina (who was Black) with her body and face intact.  This was immediately construed as a possible miracle of incorruption, and since then she has drawn thousands of visitors from all parts to witness the extraordinary phenomenon. 

 

Only in an odd sense can we describe this as a case that proves the healing power of mind.  What it does seem to illustrate is the power of the mind to symbolically point to the power of the mind suspending the normal effects of bodily death.  There are, moreover, also numerous accounts of healings of living bodies that challenge science.  But that’s another side of the story of the potential creative power of our minds.  For a full account of the extraordinary creative powers of the human mind, you might try reading Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Available from Anomalist Books or Amazon. (Author, myself.)

 

 

Tuesday, August 29, 2023

A Simple Way to Get Inspired

The Cambridge philosopher of mind, H.H. Price, devised an experiment meant to elicit a creative response from the subconscious mind.  The idea was simple enough.  Before going to sleep, you formulate your request and pose the question to your subconscious mind.  Clearly, you ask for an answer, the insight, whatever, to come to your mind in the morning.  The talk with your subconscious mind might conceivably stimulate dreams that would be part of the answer.  Or, hopefully, your first thoughts upon awakening will contain a response to your request. Price reports that the majority of efforts with this experiment were useful to him.

 

The experiment seems to make sense.   If there is a portion of our mental life alive and well below the threshold of our ordinary awareness, why not become an activist, why not get curious about what lies hidden in our deep mind. It is a mind whose depth and breadth is quite unknown.  Why not try to interact with it? 

 

Religion is performing this experiment all the time with prayer and all manner of rite and ritual. There are all sorts of practices designed to breach the barriers and make  contact with our creative selves.  The practices are not as easy or simple as Professor Price’s experiment.  Fasting, solitude, sacred dance, the erotic, hyperventilation, psychedelics. Or, less daunting, I would say, is using the arts to open the sluices to the magical source within.   

 

A curious image emerges.   We travel on the road of life in the amazing but difficult world around us.  At the same we travel on the same road but also with an amazing  world within us.  We’re in both worlds, seemingly more invested and attached to the world outside us, but  haunted and mystified by the world inside us.

 

And yet the creative source within us poses no more of a challenge than learning how to ask a question.  My experience has been, If you keep asking, answers sooner or later come.  Knock on the door hard enough and the door will eventually open.  Thoughts or questions on the process I’m talking about?   

 

 

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Art As School For Empathy


What the world needs today is a super-dose of empathy.  Given the fact that there are from twenty-three to thirty wars raging all over the planet and that almost everywhere conflict and polarization reign on many fundamental issues.

 

We need to step outside ourselves and enter into the perspective of others—even other animals and forms of nature. What might it feel like to be an owl or a bear?  But how do we do it? We can use imagination and our own experience to get a feel for the other person. But, if you’re trapped in your ego, this will be impossible.  

 

The ability to enter into the soul of the other is contrary to our self-centered instincts.  Our consciousness is centered around the black hole of our egos.  But, no matter how ego-bound we are, there are ways to step beyond ourselves.

 

There are two common inroads to that larger world—play and art.  Children and their play instincts reveal a natural tendency to “make believe” and enter new and other worlds. I love observing children trailing after their parents as they walk down the street.  The children are running and leaping this way and that, reacting and trying to engage with every novel scene, a dog walking by, the pattern of bricks on the ground, a squirrel or bird that shoots by, not to mention people who look and smile at them. Kids at play are marvels of empathy and imagination, without knowing what the words mean.

 

But they grow up.  They (we) are shaped and constrained by the reality-principle. Still, all adults retain a streak of playfulness and empathic curiosity, which can come to life through the arts, either as passive consumers or active creators.

 

In both cases, the raw power we have to work with is imagination. There are images that glamorize and fascinate us. The italics signal I’m using these words in the old magical sense of witchcraft and shamanism.  These two words suggest a type of possession, an altered state where one temporarily loses autonomy.  The gate opens and for a moment anything can enter, angel or demon.  

 

The arts are a place where it’s okay to revolt against the tyranny of the reality-principle.  The arts open spaces where we can explore the impossible, the fantastic, the surreal, the ideal—the prodigiously ugly and the divinely beautiful.

 

For that we need a great deal of inner spaciousness and receptivity.  The arts share in common the freedom to expand our experience,  our ideas of what is possible, our hope of doing what’s never been done before.  It doesn’t have to be world-shaking; all it needs is to be person-making.

 

Back to the need for empathic potential. The arts in a wide sense offer a way to re-imagine the world and alter the quality of our mental life. 

But we should know what we’re up against.  How much of the nation’s treasure is given to the study of higher forms of empathic consciousness?  Answer—next to zero!  

 

But when it comes to having the best technology for slaughtering other human beings, Congress approved 840 billion dollars for the Annual (2023) Defense Budget, a number to send the ‘defense’ industries into prolonged ecstasies.

 

Fortunately, we can practice our arts and work on our consciousness in our own space, by working with the material at hand and in the context of where life is happening.

 

And where death and destruction are happening.  The ‘news’ that I listen to nowadays, NPR, BBC, etc., is changing so now it sounds more and more like a mortuary cavalcade, stories everywhere of groups of people, small and large, losing their homes, belongings, lives, resulting from our overheating planet, wars everywhere and daily mass shootings in America.

 

The game of life on Earth has turned into something highly dangerous and volatile.  The hard part to digest is that the rules of the game have changed.  The danger and destructive chaos are part of an evolving process that’s accelerating faster than scientists originally predicted.

 

It’s hard to imagine how we can prepare for what is coming.  For centuries so-called prophets of various stripes have been predicting cosmic disaster for an imperfect humanity.  But today the climate scientists, using the methods of science, are predicting the apocalypse. This time we better pay close attention.  And we should also be aware that science and technology made global warming possible, causing all the climate mayhem. And now, we hope, the same science and technology will save the world with new ideas about green energy.  But it won’t happen without a revolution of consciousness.  And every one of us has a role to play.

 

 

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

Secret of Never Getting Tired

A jazz musician and friend of mine once joined me during a lesson I took from my teacher of sound yoga, Swami Nadabrahmananda. It was summertime in an ashram in Upstate New York. We had finished with my lesson and decided to step outside for some fresh air and a little stroll. Outside, Nada, (as students addressed the 81 year old Swami) turned to my  friend, and said, “How are you?” John replied, “Tired.”  He had been on the road, doing various gigs, and was always feeling a bit deprived of sleep. 

 

Nada looked at John with a warm smile, and said, “Tired?  What tired?”  He erupted into a mild burst of laughter, and remarked, “I never tired.” What John didn’t know was that there were certain very unusual things about the Swami’s physiology.  Two things I’ll mention.  Nada slept on average two hours a night.  Moreover, he never dreamed.  He once spent three nights in a sleep lab in Ottowa, Canada, and the scientists there determined there were no signs of dream sleep.

 

Why would somebody not dream?  After getting to know Nada, I had an idea why he never dreamed.  The reason, I would suggest, was that, as he told me many times, he saw the world as a dream—not in a metaphoric sense but somehow literally.    In other words, his waking consciousness was so out of this world it affected his mental life.  Ordinary physiological needs may be suspended, as when saints and yogis go on shockingly long fasts.  Nada seemed immune to the normal effects of fatigue.

 

I once asked the celestial musician, “So what is the secret of never getting tired?” His reply was intriguing.  By not thinking!  He elaborated, adding that he never busied himself with making plans. And he never bothered to ruminate on things done and finished. His economy of consciousness was not consumerist.

 

In one of his favorite sayings, “God is the driver.”  I might put it like this.  Nada lived beyond the constraints of his ego in harmony with his creative subconscious.  I’m reminded of an idea from parapsychology, the notion of “release of effort” as a way to access latent powers of the mind.  Memory is the most obvious example.  You try very hard to remember something you know.  You stop trying, walk away, and a while later the memory returns, unbidden.

 

According to Nada, it’s the ego and its constant efforts to certify itself that fatigues our self, which is linked to and draws upon a bottomless sea of spiritual energy.  The problem is that the ego doesn’t know how to float or sail, but is more like a deadweight that sooner or later sinks us.   

 

For the full story of this remarkable man, you can get my book from Amazon,

Yoga of Sound: The Life and Teachings of the Celestial Songman, Swami Nada Brahmananda.

 

           

             

           

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