Life in B Flat(Science and Spirituality)

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Psychobiological theories do not explain Near Death Experiences

Near-Death Experiences Between Science and Prejudice by Enrico Facco and Christian Agrillo:

Several studies have proposed psychobiological interpretations of near-death experiences (NDEs), claiming that NDEs are a mere byproduct of brain functions gone awry; however, relevant facts incompatible with the ruling physicalist and reductionist stance have been often neglected. The awkward transcendent look of NDEs has deep epistemological implications, which call for: (a) keeping a rigorously neutral position, neither accepting nor refusing anything a priori; and (b) distinguishing facts from speculations and fallacies. Most available psychobiological interpretations remain so far speculations to be demonstrated, while brain disorders and/or drug administration in critical patients yield a well-known delirium in intensive care and anesthesia, the phenomenology of which is different from NDEs. Facts can be only true or false, never paranormal. In this sense, they cannot be refused a priori even when they appear implausible with respect to our current knowledge: any other stance implies the risk of turning knowledge into dogma and the adopted paradigm into a sort of theology.

The full article provides supporting information.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Charles Darwin was not an atheist, he believed in a form of Intelligent Design

I've updated the Eminent Researchers page on my web site to include a section on Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection. He was not an atheist, he was agnostic. He believed that one could not know if God existed or not. Darwin also believed that natural laws resulted from design which indicates that he believed in a form of Intelligent Design.

Wikiquote

Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who achieved lasting fame by outlining the theory of evolution and proposing that evolution could be explained through natural and sexual selection. Prompted by awareness that Alfred Russel Wallace was developing similar theories he published his own sooner than he had originally intended. This theory is now considered an integral component of biological science.

darwinproject.ac.uk

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.

Wikipedia

Agnosticism is the view that the truth values of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—are unknown and (so far as can be judged) unknowable.

Wikiquote

With respect to the theological view of the question: This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

UFO Secrecy and Spirituality

Scientists who have tried to calculate the likelihood of aliens evolving on other planets and coming to the earth have consistently concluded that aliens should be here. Recent discoveries of extrasolar planets have only increased the odds. Many people say they have seen alien vehicles and aliens themselves. This is not accepted by mainstream society most likely because the aliens and the government are trying to keep the presence of aliens secret. The fact that SETI has not detected alien radio communications is not necessarily surprising. Aliens would probably have technology far superior ours, why should we expect them to use the same communication methods we use?

It seems probable that intelligence agencies in the US (and maybe other governments) keep their knowledge of UFOs and aliens so secret and so well compartmentalized that even the highest elected and appointed officials do not have access to the information. This would protect and prevent the information from being be released by political means. There isn't just one reason the information might be protected so securely by the intelligence agencies there are many reasons:

Some aliens seem to be abducting people and there is nothing the government or military can do to stop it. If acknowledged by the government, this could cause panic, and make the government look incompetent. Simply admitting the existence of aliens might not be too disturbing, but saying that some aliens are abducting people and hybridizing with them (raping them), could be very disturbing to many people. Some of the things the abductees have said they were told by the aliens, (imminent wars, disasters, alien invasions that never seem to really happen) if given credence by governmental acknowledgment of an alien presence, could cause panic.
It is rumored that the US government (President Eisenhower) made an agreement with some of the aliens to receive advanced alien technology in exchange for permission to carry out abductions. Since there was no way to stop the abductions it seems to be more of a surrender than a pact. If true, this would be a huge embarrassment if it become public knowledge.
People who claim contact with aliens consistently report alien predictions of imminent natural disasters, wars, and alien invasions that never seem to occur. If the aliens could make these predictions in person to all of humanity, it could cause world wide panic and social disruptions.
Some aliens may look just like humans. This could lead to chaotic situations where some humans claim to be aliens and take advantage of the fear and gullibility of other people. Or, it could lead situations where some humans are accused of being aliens and are persecuted. It also creates the possibility that the highest levels of the government are infiltrated by aliens. It would be very embarrassing for the government to have to admit this as a possibility or a fact.
The technology the UFOs use for propulsion seems to be capable of speeds reaching thousands of miles an hour in the atmosphere without subjecting interior of the craft to extremely high acceleration forces. This technology might be theoretically obscure but it might not be difficult to construct with currently available materials. If this was acknowledged by the government, it could encourage all sorts of dangerous people (national governments and private individuals) to attempt to discover this means of propulsion. That could lead to the development of weapons like extremely fast missiles (long range or short range) that are impossible to defend against. The power source for the alien craft might also be adapted to produce a warhead for these missiles of unimaginable power.
The technology used to power the alien crafts, if made available to the public could disrupt our fossil fuel based economy. Obviously the current power structure doesn't want to change the status quo. But less obviously, if all the people currently employed in energy industries became unemployed, they would stop buying things and stop paying taxes until they found new jobs. The ripple effects could cause a deep recession or world wide economic depression. The new alien technology could ultimately have huge economic benefits and be good for society in the long run, but the transition from fossil fuels could be chaotic and traumatic for many people.
When secret military aircraft are accidentally observed by the public, the credibility of those observations can be damaged by misinformation ridiculing the observations as absurd reports of UFOs. Thus it would be harder to keep new and advanced military craft secret if UFOs were no longer a subject of ridicule.
The aliens don't use money. If a technologically superior civilization was known to not use money, people all over the world would question the current economic system on earth. If people demanded we organize the world economy on the same lines as the aliens organize theirs, it would threaten the power of the current elite which depends on monetary wealth for maintaining its power and luxurious lifestyle. The powerful will do what is necessary to maintain the current economic system.
The aliens may tell us the truth about the human soul or spirit and the truth about the history of human evolution and religion. This may contradict popular religions and scientific theories and could upset many people. Also, some people in the government might not believe this truth and consider the aliens to be demonic deceivers who should not be allowed to propagate heresy to the public.
The aliens may want to avoid disrupting the current cultures on earth. In the past, contact with European explorers led to the destruction of native cultures all over the world. Some aliens may want to avoid something similar and some aliens might be working to keep their presence secret. For reasons that might be ethical or simply selfish some aliens may want to preserve the current cultures on earth. The government may agree that there is a danger to earth culture and cooperate in keeping the alien presence secret.
If the presence of aliens is disclosed, no matter what the true alien agenda is (and there may be different groups of aliens with different agendas), some people will believe what the aliens say and some will not believe what they say. Some people will believe what the government says about the aliens, some people will not believe what the government says. Some people will benefit from the changes the aliens bring about, some people will find their own interests are harmed by those changes. No matter what the alien agenda is, it has the potential to cause intense social disruption. This could lead to fracturing of society into different factions and could lead to massive protests, boycotts, or other forms of resistance against governments, and could have significant effect on the world economy. Many people might feel a greater allegiance and loyalty to the aliens than to the human governments. Certain and factual knowledge of the alien presence is a grave danger to the status quo. Those in power benefit from the status quo and will resist change.
Those people responsible for suppressing information about aliens may have committed crimes or violations of the US constitution in order to keep that information secret. They will be reluctant to divulge what has been going on because they could face criminal charges.

There isn't enough public information to make a correct judgment about whether the government's response to the aliens is good or bad. For example, there are purportedly many cases of military jets trying to intercept UFOs and recent rumors of US beam weapons being used on the UFOs. Is the government trying to prevent abductions or trying to discourage friendly aliens from making their presence known? Also, there could be different factions within the government doing different things with or without coordination or knowledge of each other. Some government actions might be good and some might be bad. It is not really possible for us to judge what is going on due to a lack of information.

Understanding the alien agenda also requires a spiritual perspective. We can't make a correct assessment of the phenomena unless we also know the truth about the human soul and human history on earth. There may be coordination in the spirit planes of aliens and humans on the earth plane, but we don't understand this while we are on the earth plane so we react with fear that is not appropriate. This is a very complicated subject but as an example to explain what I mean, suppose some aliens are hybridizing with humans as some abductees and abduction researchers claim. Where will the souls of the hybrids come from? What if there will be human souls incarnating in the hybrids? How can we tell if the aliens are invading the earth or helping humanity to evolve?

Monday, July 23, 2012

How Physicists Might Discover the Spirit World

In an article on cnn.com, physicist and author Sean Carroll describes how the recently discovered Higgs boson might allow physicists to study dark matter. Dark matter is a form of matter that comprises five sixths of the total mass of the universe, however little is known about dark matter because it rarely interacts with ordinary matter. In his article, Carroll describes how scientists could use the Higgs boson to investigate dark matter.

Some people suspect that the spirit world is made of dark matter. In this case, physicists studying dark matter could soon discover the spirit realm. However, even if the spirit world is not made of dark matter, Carroll describes a process that would allow physics to eventually discover the spirit world. When physicists stumble upon an effect in their laboratories or particle accelerators that involves spiritual physics, further study will inevitably lead to discovery of the spirit world.

Through mediumship and other paranormal phenomena, we know that spirits do have some effect on the physical world. Wave function collapse may be one such effect. Quantum entanglement may be also be a phenomena that links the physical world to the spirit world. Therefore, it is only a matter of time before persistent investigations of mainstream physics will lead to the discovery of spiritual physics.

From the article:

It's possible, even likely, that millions of them [dark matter particles] pass through your body every second. It's like a city with two populations, each speaking a different language, and no translators or bilingual interpreters. The two groups of people go about their separate lives, never directly speaking with each other. Likewise, in our galaxy, dark matter and ordinary matter pass right through each other all the time.

The Higgs boson could be the bilingual particle we've been looking for. We don't know exactly what the dark matter is, but we certainly have our favorite theories. In many of those models, the Higgs is the one particle that readily interacts both with ordinary protons and neutrons and also with dark matter.

...

There are several experiments currently running with the goal of detecting dark matter.

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We're not just waiting around for dark matter to be detected, either. Now that we've found the Higgs, we can start studying its properties in detail.

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But once we better understand the Higgs and the particles it decays into, we might be able to infer the presence of dark matter just by process of elimination, by pinpointing events in which more energy went into the collision than we detected coming out.

...

Friday, July 20, 2012

Eminent Researchers: Alan Turing and Wernher von Braun

I have updated the Eminent Researchers page on my web site to include Alan Turing and Wernher von Braun.

Alan Turing

From Wikipedia.

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS ( 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine.[1][2] Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence.[3]

In a paper where he describes his Turing Machine,
Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-460,
Turing wrote:

I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should
like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.

Turing recognized that the lack of ESP would prevent a computer from passing the Turing Test.

Wernher von Braun

From Wikipedia:

Wernher Magnus Maximilian, Freiherr von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was a German-born rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and, subsequently, the United States.

From Wikiquote:

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.

...

For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without invoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all.

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It is in scientific honesty that I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life and man in the science classroom. It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Doctors Testify to Patient's Spirit Return

Within hours of Burke being pronounced dead at the hospital, two members of the medical team who had treated him received a "visitation" from Burke in their own homes – before they knew that he had passed on. What's more, the men had never met.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Savants and ESP

Last month I posted on Acquired Savant Syndrome. Today I noticed an article Savants: What They Can Teach Us by Larry Dossey, MD that says Savants are often capable of ESP.

Savant is derived from a French word meaning “learned one.” Although they are often mentally or socially impaired, savants frequently possess astonishing creative and intuitive powers of obscure origin, in areas such as mathematics, art, or music.

...

“Savant syndrome” was popularized in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Kim Peek, the developmentally disabled man who was the inspiration for the film, knew more than 7,600 books by heart, as well as every area code, highway, zip code, and television station in the United States.

...

Many clinicians have reported savants capable of extrasensory perception, or ESP, also called psi.

...

The article describes one child who would know when his parents were going to pick him up from school, another who would know about conversations that occurred out of earshot and who had the ability to pick up thoughts, and another who would know when the telephone would ring and who would be calling.

In the same way that Acquired Savant Syndrome is explained by the filter model of the brain, so is ESP in people who are born as savants. The same abnormality in the brain that causes impariments like autism, may also damage the filtering ability of the brain that normally blocks certain facets of consciousness. When that filtering ability is damaged, the abilities that make them savants as well as the ability for ESP can manifest.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Restore Yourself with Tai Chi

I got this book from the library today and I highly recommend it:

Becoming One with Nature: Restore Yourself with Tai Chi
by Martin Lee, Ph.D., Emily Lee, TC Master, Melinda & Joyce Lee

It covers energy healing, self healing, and meditation. It includes an exercise to help you learn to feel the energy (chi), as well as a 64 sequence of forms (tai chi movements).

It's only 144 pages but contains photgraphs and written text of how to do the forms.

My only criticism is that the author tries to give a scientific explanations of why it works. Martin Lee is a physicist who worked on particle accelerators and he is trying to get technical, analytical, scientific, minded westerners to believe in it long enough to try it and prove it for themselves. I can understand his motivation but in my opinion the explanations are not compelling. He does give short case histories of people who have been helped by the techniques including himself and I find that much more convincing - except much of what he is writing about I already know and accept from my experieces with spiritual healing.

I was looking for a book that gave the qigong/tai chi/chi kung perspective on healing because I was interested in expanding my understanding beyond what I have learned in Spritiualist churches and this book satisfies that interest. What surprised me was how similar the two forms of healing are.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Reality is an Illuison

Someone once suggested a person could be an isolated brain in a vat controlled by a virtual reality generator and there would be no way the person could tell the difference between that and an objective reality.

I suppose this could be true, but I think it is more likely that the brain is the virtual reality generator.

Neuroscience has shown that the brain produces the sense of self, and the sense of time.

People who have had Near Death Experiences say that they experience love, timelessness, and oneness while retaining their individuality. They say that when out of the body, deformities, disease and its associated pain, no longer exist.

The sense of time and the sense of self, disease and pain we have while incarnated are not real. They are illusions produced by the brain. All the studies by neuroscientists attempting to show how the brain produces consciousness are really showing how the brain produces a sham reality.

Many of the great mystical traditions have said that reality is an illusion. Neuroscience provides the mechanism for that illusion.

Monday, June 11, 2012

What Near Death Experiencers Have to Say About Reincarnation

Many people who have Near Death Experiences learn about reincarnation during their experience. There are many examples of this described at www.near-death.com

Sandra Rogers:

I was given the choice of remaining with the light, provided I return later to the physical world and experience all that brought me to the point of shooting myself, or I could return now and pick up my life where it was

Karen Brannon:

All of my being wanted to stay there in bliss, but ever since I was six, I knew that reincarnation is the natural fact of life, and now, I had the knowingness that if I chose to stay, I would have to reincarnate to Earth again later.

Thomas Sawyer:

Reincarnation is not a linear thing. One of the problems in defining it is that there is no analogy to it. It is outside of time, yet we can't help but think of it in terms of the past and the future, and this incarnation. The whole story is so big and so involved.

Christian Andréason:

Heaven, I undeniably saw that I had lived an innumerable amount of lives. Yet, what I saw went way beyond our comprehension of what we think reincarnation is. So, I am not exactly speaking of being born again and again on this planet alone.

Arthur Yensen:

Between lives, with the great knowledge of our oversouls, we choose the next life we are going to live and how much karma we are going to meet and settle. For example, if you abused animals, or people, in one life your oversoul would probably cause you to reincarnate into a situation where you'd get abused to make you realize the misery you've caused others.

Amber Wells' research:

...

Her paper was published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies in the fall of 1993. In her study, 70 percent of the group of near-death experiencers demonstrated belief in reincarnation. In contrast, a Gallup Poll found that only 23 percent of the general population endorse this belief.

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"It is a matter of personal knowledge from what the being with whom I spoke during my near-death experience told me about my older son, that he had had 14 incarnations in female physical bodies previous to the life he has just had."

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"My whole life went before me of things I have done and haven't done, but not just of this one lifetime, but of all the lifetimes. I know for a fact there is reincarnation. This is an absolute. I was shown all those lives and how I had overcome some of the things I had done in other lives. There was still some things to be corrected."

...

"I had a lot of questions, and I wanted to know what they [the light beings she encountered in her near-death experience] were doing – why are you just kind of milling around here? And someone stepped forward ... it wasn't just one ... I got information from a number of them ... that they were all waiting for reincarnation."

...

Some experiencers interviewed during Ms. Wells' study described the general process of reincarnation as one consciousness separating into individual souls to be embodied in matter. One experiencer took this idea even further, stating that reincarnation takes place more on a collective level rather than an individual level. In other words, this experiencer felt that a collective energy recycles itself through matter and that our sense of individuality is a product of our present incarnation only.

...

Some experiencers indicated that the cycle of reincarnation would probably come to an end for earthly embodiments, but that one would continue to incarnate into other realms or dimensions.

Betty Bethards:

As you are ready, and as you choose, you will be shown your past lives. If you do not believe in reincarnation it may take a long time before you are able to deal with this. Eventually, you must learn to understand yourself in a continuity of growth over many lifetimes. You must recognize all the strengths you have built and all the karmic ties you have created which must be dissolved.

David Oakford:

The being told me that each planet has a theme for learning and that any of them can be chosen by a soul when we are between physical lives.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Acquired Savant Syndrome

Acquired Savant Syndrome occurs when a exceptional talents arise after a brain injury. The “Acquired” Savant—“Accidental” Genius by Darold A. Treffert, MD explains:

A 10-year-old boy is knocked unconscious by a baseball. Following that traumatic blow, he suddenly can do calendar calculations. He can also remember the weather, along with other autobiographical details of his daily life, from that time forward. An elderly woman who had never painted before becomes a prodigious artist after a particular type of dementia process begins and progresses. Another elderly patient with dementia has a similar sudden epiphany of ability, but this time in music. A 56-year-old builder, who had no particular prior interest or skills in art, abruptly, for the first time in his life, becomes a poet, a painter and a sculptor following a stroke that he miraculously survived. An 8-year-old boy begins calendar calculating after a left hemispherectomy for intractable seizures. These are examples of what I call the “acquired” savant, or what might also be called “accidental genius.”

Materialists will say acquired savant syndrome occurs when part of the brain is injured because, either inhibitory function is lost or another part of the brain becomes more active to compensate for the damaged part. But why should compensating for lost functions result in new abilities that never existed before? That is not "compensation". It also seems unlikely that evolution and natural selection could account for the existence of these exceptional abilities that are only expressed as a result of brain injury. The materialist explanations are even less plausible when you consider the details of the cases.

For example:

Derek Amato:

A man who suffered concussion after diving into a shallow pool has made a seemingly improbable discovery: it made him a musical genius.

...

Amato, who can not read music, explained that he knew what to play as he could see black and white squares in his head that triggered his fingers to move.

Tony Cicoria

At a park in 1994, Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon, was hanging up a pay phone when lightning from a gathering storm struck the booth, shooting through the phone and into his head.

...

Shortly afterwards, he had a mysterious, insatiable need to listen to classical piano music. But he soon found that just listening to the music wasn’t cutting it. So, despite never showing any desire to play an instrument before, he bought sheet music and began teaching himself the piano. Learning was slow going though, because instead of playing the Chopin composition in front of him, he kept wanting to play the melodies that were echoing inside his head instead. When he realized these songs were of his own creation, he began furiously writing them down until he had dozens composed. In 2008, Cicoria released a CD of his music called, Notes From An Accidental Pianist and Composer. His best-known song from the album is fittingly titled, “The Lightning Sonata.”

This is how the brain compensates for an injury?

These new skills do not require the training an uninjured person would need to develop them. Some people may be able to learn to use uninjured brain tissue to compensate for functions lost due to brain injury. For example, after a stroke a person may be able to relearn how to move paralyzed muscles. However this requires a long period of physical therapy and usually does not return full function. Yet in Acquired Savant Syndrome, skills that the subject didn't have before the injury arise fully formed without effort or intention.

Natural selection occurs when a trait evolves in response to an environmental factor. How can the ability to do calendar calculations or playing the piano in response to seeing black and white squares in the mind's eye be explained by natural selection? What is the survival advantage in having these abilities in response to an injury? Pianos and calendars have not existed long enough for natural selection to play a role in humankind's ability to use them without making an effort to learn how.

Compensation, and or natural selection are not good explanations for these phenomena. A better explanation for acquired savant syndrome is that the brain does not produce consciousness but is a filter of non-physical consciousness:

The filter model is superior to the hypothesis that the brain produces consciousness because the filter model explains more evidence. You can damage a filter in two ways. You can clog it or you can punch a hole in it. When brain damage causes loss of function like amnesia, that is like a clog in the filter. When brain injury results in increased function, that is like a hole punched in the filter. Examples of increased function include Acquired Savant Syndrome and when people have increased psychic abilities after a brain injury.

Update: Also see my more recent post: Savants and ESP

Monday, June 4, 2012

Free E-book by Eric Weiss: The Long Trajectory: Reincarnation and Life After Death

http://ericweiss.com/the-long-trajectory

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Assessing Skeptical Claims

I often see questions on internet discussion forums asking if there is any known rebuttal to some skeptical claim. When assessing skeptical claims, it is important to understand that there have been many cases of misleading claims by skeptics.

Because there are so many misleading claims made by skeptics you should:

Demand the same level of proof for skeptical claims that you demand for proof of the paranormal. An accusation of fraud is not proof of fraud, just as a claim of a paranormal phenomenon is not proof of a paranormal phenomenon. Skeptics demand scientific statistically significant evidence and replication and they still don't believe any paranormal claims. But when it comes to accusations of fraud, despite many misleading claims made by skeptics, people tend to assume that any accusation of fraud is reliable without considering it may be incorrect due to ignorance, incompetence or duplicity of the skeptic.
Never make up your mind on a skeptical claim until you see how the other side rebuts the skeptics on that issue. Just like sometimes there is a simple natural explanation for a supposed paranormal phenomena that is overlooked because people are ignorant of science or magic tricks, sometimes a skeptical claim may be easily rebutted by someone who knows the details of the situation. The skeptic may be ignorant of the phenomenon he is criticizing, or there may be indisputable evidence the skeptical claim is false.
Be especially suspicious of any side to a dispute that relies heavily on ridicule, persecution, tenuous unproven alternative hypotheses, and misleading statements rather than a simply relying of facts and arguments. People who can't argue based on the facts and logical analysis will resort to other means to convince people of their beliefs.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Physicalism is Dead: Ex-Skeptic talks about why he left the Skeptical M...

Physicalism is Dead: Ex-Skeptic talks about why he left the Skeptical M...: Stephen Bond, former skeptic, had this to say: Of course, there is nothing inherently elitist about reason or the scientific method. Cri...

Thursday, May 31, 2012

Psychic Contributions to Physics

Extrasensory Perception of Subatomic Particles (PDF), (HTML)

Abstract - A century-old claim by two early leaders of the Theosophical Society to have used a form of ESP to observe subatomic particles is evaluated. Their observations are found to be consistent with facts of nuclear physics and with the quark model of particle physics provided that their assumption that they saw atoms is rejected. Their account of the force binding together the fundamental constituents of matter is shown to agree with the string model. Their description of these basic particles bears striking similarity to basic ideas of superstring theory. The implication of this remarkable correlation between ostensible paranormal observations of subatomic particles and facts of nuclear and particle physics is that quarks are neither fundamental nor hadronic states of superstrings, as many physicists currently assume, but, instead, are composed of three subquark states of a superstring.

Occultism and the atom: the curious story of isotopes

http://www.cwlworld.info/pw_article_sept03.pdf (PDF), (HTML)

For example, Besant and Leadbeater reported in 1908 in the journal The Theosophist their discovery of a variation of neon - five years before the English chemist Frederick Soddy gave the name of "isotopes" to atoms of an element differing in mass. Their colleague, C. Jinarajadasa, who made sketches and notes during their investigative sessions, wrote in 1943 to Professor F. W. Aston, inventor of the mass spectrograph, at Cambridge University, England, informing him that Besant and Leadbeater had discovered in 1907 the neon-22 isotope by psychic means five years before scientists found it. (How the two Theosophists identified isotopes will be explained later). The distinguished scientist replied that he was not interested in Theosophy!

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Skeptiko Interview with Dr. Melvin Morse

In the skeptiko podcast interview with Dr. Melvin Morse, Morse tells of the case of a child drowning victim who had been underwater for 17 minutes and after being rescued had no heartbeat for an additional 45 minutes. Dr. Morse never saw any sign of life in the patient. At the time he thought she had died. It was only long afterward that he found out she survived.

Yet during that time, the patient experienced floating out of her body and remembered being intubated, hearing a phone conversation the doctor had, and hearing the nurses talking about a cat that died. When she regained consciousness she asked the nurses where her friends from heaven were. She also remembered that heaven was "fun".

The full interview is here.

So by chance or coincidence or fate or whatever, I happened to be in Pocatello, Idaho and there was a child there who had drowned in a community swimming pool. She was documented to be under water for at least 17 minutes. It just so happened that a pediatrician was in the locker room at the same community swimming pool and he attempted to revive her on the spot. His intervention probably saved her life but again, he documented that she had no spontaneous heartbeat for I would say at least 45 minutes, until she arrived at the emergency room. Then our team got there.

She was really dead. All this debate over how close do these patients come to death, etc., you know, Alex, I had the privilege of resuscitating my own patients and she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. In fact, I had told her parents that. I said that it was time for them to say goodbye to her. This was a very deeply religious Mormon family. They actually did. They crowded around the bedside and held hands and prayed for her and such as that. She was then transported to Salt Lake City. She lived. She not only lived but three days later she made a full recovery.

Alex Tsakiris: And what did she tell you…

Dr. Melvin Morse: Her first words, the first words she said when she came out of her coma, she turned to the nurse down at Primary Children’s in Salt Lake City. She says, “Where are my friends?” And then they’d say, “What do you mean, where are your friends?” She’d say, “Yeah, all the people that I met in Heaven. Where are they?” [Laughs]

The innocence of a child. So I saw her in follow-up, another one of these odd twists of fate. I happened to be in addition doing my residency and just happened to be working in the same community clinic in that area. My jaw just dropped to the floor when she and her mother walked in. I was like, “What?” I had not even heard that she had lived. I had assumed that she had died. She looked at me and she said to her mother, “There’s the man that put a tube down my nose.” [Laughs]

Alex Tsakiris: What are you thinking at that point when she says that?

Dr. Melvin Morse: You know, it’s one of those things—I laughed. I sort of giggled the way a teenager would giggle about sex. It was just embarrassing. I didn’t know what to think. Certainly, I’d trained at Johns Hopkins. I thought when you died you died. I said, “What do you mean, you saw me put a tube in your nose?”

She said, “Oh, yeah. I saw you take me into another room that looked like a doughnut.”

She said things like, “You called someone on the phone and you asked, ‘What am I supposed to do next?’”

She described the nurses talking about a cat who had died. One of the nurses had a cat that had died and it was just an incidental conversation. She said she was floating out of her body during this entire time. I just sort of laughed. And then she taps me on the wrist. You’ve got to hear this, Alex.

After I laughed she taps me on the wrist and she says, “You’ll see, Dr. Morse. Heaven is fun.” [Laughs] I was completely blown away by the entire experience. I immediately determined that I would figure out what was going on here. This was in complete defiance of everything I had been taught in terms of medicine.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Meditation Music

Here is some music that may help with the meditation I discussed yesterday:

Put a Little Love in Your Heart
Think of your fellow man
lend him a helping hand
put a little love in your heart.
Get Together
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
Shower the People
Shower the people you love with love
Show them the way that you feel

If you click on the links above you will go to another site which has the lyrics of the song.

If you search the internet, you may be able to find mp3 downloads or youtube videos of this music.

Monday, May 28, 2012

How to Tap into Universal Love

Update: I have added this post to my web site and made a few updates to it. Please refer to Tapping into Universal Love on the meditation page on my web site for the most recent version of this information.

God is love.

People who experience being in the presence of God during near death experiences describe having an overwhelming feeling of being loved.

God is omnipresent.

You can tap into this source of universal love without having a near death experience.

To do it you use your spiritual capabilities - the capabilities that all spirits have and that as an incarnated spirit you have access to even though you are incarnated.

Spirits interact with their world through their mind. They think of a place they want to go to and they start moving there. They are telepathic, they think of someone and their thoughts go off to that person. Spirits use their mind the way an incarnated person uses tools. Spirits create by using their mind.

We use the same word "create" to describe how people use their imagination because it is the same thing.

To create a tap into universal love, use your imagination. Imagine a light beam of love coming down to you from above. Hold your hands in front of you with your palms facing upward to receive it. Relax any tension or tightness you may feel in your chest, open your heart, and let the love flow out into the world.

Try this meditation:

Step 1:

Imagine a light beam of love coming down upon you from above. Hold your hands in front of you with your palms facing upward to receive it.

Say to yourself, "Love is all around why don't you take it?" (If you know the tune, you may sing it to yourself).

Step 2:

Relax any tension or tightness you may feel in your chest, open your heart, and imagine love emanating from your heart and flowing out into the world, or to a situation you don't like (to desensitize yourself to the situation), or to someone who might be a problem for you (to develop forgiveness and tolerance).

Say to yourself, "Love is all around why don't you make it?" (If you know the tune, you may sing it to yourself).

Repeat these two steps for the duration of the meditation session.

If you feel like smiling while you do this, go ahead and smile. It is probably an indication that you are doing it right. Also, sometimes smiling a little bit can help you reenter this state.

Update:

I recommend some music to play during this meditation in this post.

Friday, May 25, 2012

The Experience of Oneness

I made a minor change to my web page on Varieties of Mystical Experiences in the section Kensho and Kundalini. I added a link to a web page by Christine Farrenkopf discussing scientific research on the changes in brain activity that occur when meditators experience a sense of oneness sometimes referred to as a nondual state. (UPDATE: I changed the link on my web site to go to this post.)

From Farrenkopf's web report:

The "peak" of meditation is clearly a subjective state, with each individual attaining it in different manners and having different time requirements. However, the sensation and meaning behind this moment is consistent among all who reach it. At the peak, the subjects indicate that they lose their sense of individual existence and feel inextricably bound with the universe. "There [are] no discrete objects or beings, no sense of space or the passage of time, no line between the self and the rest of the universe" (Newberg 119).

...

The subjects then meditated. When they reached the peak, they pulled on a string attached at one end to their finger and at the other to Dr. Newberg.2 This was the cue for Newberg to inject the radioactive tracer into the IV connected to the subject. Because the tracer almost instantly "locks" onto parts of the brain to indicate their activity levels, the SPECT gives a picture of the brain essentially at that peak moment (Newberg 3). The results revealed a marked decrease in the activity of the posterior, superior parietal lobe and a marked increase in the activity of the prefrontal cortex, predominantly on the right side of the brain (Newberg 6). Such changes in activity levels demonstrated that something was going on in the brain in terms of spiritual experience. The next step was to look at what these particular parts of the brain do. Studies of damage suffered to a region of the brain have enabled us to draw conclusions about its role by observing loss of function.

It has been concluded that the posterior, superior parietal lobe is involved in both the creation of a three-dimensional sense of self and an individual's ability to navigate through physical space (Journal 216). The region of the lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain allows for a person to conceive of the physical boundaries of his body (Newberg 28). It responds to proprioceptive stimuli, most importantly the movement of limbs. The region of the lobe in the right hemisphere creates the perception of the matrix through which we move.

From a subjective point of view, when in the nondual state, it seems like the self disappears and the experiencer becomes "one with everything". From an objective point of view, research on meditators shows that the experience is due to a decrease in activity of the posterior, superior parietal lobe in the brain. These results are consistent with other research which shows that region of the brain is responsible for the sense of self. At first glance, this may seem like a materialist explanation for the experience of oneness, but it is consistent with hypothesis that consciousness is non physical and the brain acts as a filter of consciousness. It indicates that the sense of self is not an objective fact. The sense of self is a subjective opinion, an illusion, produced by the brain.

It is also interesting that people who have near death experiences also report a sense of oneness which suggests the experience of oneness is a real experience of our true nature when we are not constrained by the physical brain. Whatever the explanation, the experience of oneness does show that the sense of self and separateness we consider to be our normal reality is merely a subjective opinion.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Mario Beauregard on Near Death Experiences

Mario Beauregard's recent article on Near Death Experiences, Near death, explained discusses some cases of NDEs and discusses why skeptical explanations for the phenomena are wrong. He concludes NDEs are strong evidence for the afterlife.

The scientific NDE studies performed over the past decades indicate that heightened mental functions can be experienced independently of the body at a time when brain activity is greatly impaired or seemingly absent (such as during cardiac arrest). Some of these studies demonstrate that blind people can have veridical perceptions during OBEs associated with an NDE. Other investigations show that NDEs often result in deep psychological and spiritual changes.

These findings strongly challenge the mainstream neuroscientific view that mind and consciousness result solely from brain activity. As we have seen, such a view fails to account for how NDErs can experience—while their hearts are stopped—vivid and complex thoughts and acquire veridical information about objects or events remote from their bodies.

NDE studies also suggest that after physical death, mind and consciousness may continue in a transcendent level of reality that normally is not accessible to our senses and awareness. Needless to say, this view is utterly incompatible with the belief of many materialists that the material world is the only reality.

His response to criticisms of the article are provided in a second article: Near-death, revisited

Corroborated veridical NDE perceptions during cardiac arrest (and several other phenomena discussed in “Brain Wars”) strongly suggest that so-called “scientific materialism” is not only limited, but wrong. In line with this, nearly a century ago, quantum mechanics (QM) dematerialized the classical universe by showing that it is not made of minuscule billiard balls, as drawings of atoms and molecules would lead us to believe. In other words, QM acknowledges that the physical world cannot be fully understood without making reference to mind and consciousness, that is, the physical world is no longer viewed as the primary or sole component of reality (this was well explained by Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of QM...)

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