"Do not try to bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead, try to realize the truth... There is no spoon... Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends; it is only yourself." -- The Matrix
This blog will be moving. I have been informed by Blogger that they will be discontinuing FTP to externally hosted domains. All blogs will have to be hosted entirely on their servers. I have not decided if I will migrate this blog, as is, or try to merge it into the Celestial Reflections group blog. I have to evaluate my options. Either way, any bookmarks or feed settings used by readers of this blog will need to change. I will provide updates as needed.
One could argue that shamanism has been surviving the discovery of Grey-like aliens going all the way back to the paleolithic era. But I don't think shamanism was what Ted Peters of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary had in mind when he conducted a survey on how religious people would weather the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Study participants were mostly Buddhists and Christians of various denominations.
None of the 70 Buddhists questioned thought that the discovery of ET would undercut their belief systems, although 40 per cent thought it could pose problems for other religions.
More Roman Catholics believed ET could pose a problem for their faith. Only 8 per cent of the 120 surveyed thought that their individual beliefs would be shaken, but nearly a quarter – 22 per cent – said it could adversely affect their religion. Even more – 30 per cent – thought it could threaten the beliefs of other religious people.
I should point out that the Vatican has already weighed in on this issue, and determined belief in aliens to be no threat to Catholicism.
The patterns were similar for the other Christian sects surveyed, including evangelical and mainline Protestants, but there was not enough data to draw firm conclusions about people of other religions, such as Hindus and Muslims.
What I find far more interesting than the question of how religion would withstand proof of alien life, is the total disconnect between what people can accept and what they think other people can accept. This disconnect becomes even more pronounced when we look at the next group; the non-religious.
Of the 205 people who identified themselves as non-religious (either atheists or those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious), only 1 per cent thought it would affect their atheist or spiritual outlooks. But 69 per cent thought the discovery of ET could cause a crisis for other world religions. An average of only 34 per cent of religious people shared that belief.
That atheists and others who have rejected organized religion would perceive churchgoers as fairly close-minded and resistant to dramatic change, shouldn't really come as a shock, I guess. But the whole thing is a fascinating commentary on the nature of tribal behavior or "group think." We are always either rejecting or bending to the collective will of our communities; and few of us seem comfortable rejecting it, outright. Most people choose conformity, because it makes them feel safe. One of the things I hear a lot from my clients is that they can't talk to their friends or neighbors about their spiritual beliefs -- or God forbid, that they consult a psychic -- because people would think they were crazy. Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't. I decided a long time ago not to get too invested in what other people think. It's exhausting. But a lot of people are controlled by it. This study is not the first evidence I've seen that suggests that people are capable of much greater flexibility, in their thinking, than we give them credit for. Many of them are probably just too scared to admit it.
Comments on this entry are closed, on this blog. If you wish to comment, please find this and all newer blog entries crossposted on Celestial Reflections.
Really fun interview with Graham Hancock exploring his body of work. Hancock makes the most of rather surface questions asked and manages to cover significant features of very diverse areas of his research and experience. He retraces his journalistic progression from East Africa correspondent for The Economist to his quest for the Ark of the Covenant in The Sign and the Seal, and how this opened the door to his incredible research into ancient mysteries and the possibilities of a great, lost civilization. He also goes into a fair bit of depth on Supernatural, his exploration of psychotropes in shamanic practice, and discusses the theories surrounding the correlation between UFO experiences and legends of the Fae. The lucidity with which he explains these very challenging concepts, and even distills the information down to soundbites, is quite astonishing. Like all of his work, very worthwhile.
Graham Hancock's books and other media can be found in the bookstore.
Comments on this entry are closed, on this blog. If you wish to comment, please find this and all newer blog entries crossposted on Celestial Reflections.
Zecharia Sitchin: Where Creationism and Evolution Collide
There's a little write-up on Zecharia Sitchin in the New York Times metro section the other day. It definitely treats him like a curiosity, but there's no such thing as bad publicity, I guess.
In Mr. Sitchin’s Upper West Side kitchen, evolution and creationism collide. He is an apparently sane, sharp, University of London-educated 89-year-old who has spent his life arguing that people evolved with a little genetic intervention from ancient astronauts who came to Earth and needed laborers to mine gold to bring back to Nibiru, a planet we have yet to recognize.
Outlandish, yes, but also somehow intriguing from this cute, distinguished old man whom you may have seen shuffling slowly down Broadway with his cane, and thought, “Is Art Carney still alive?”
. . .
“Well, you could start by calling me the most controversial 89-year-old man in New York,” Mr. Sitchin says. “Or you could just say I write books. I understand you’ve got to have an opening sentence, but describing my theories in a sentence, or even something like a newspaper article, is impossible. It will make me look silly.”
Mr. Sitchin has been called silly before — by scientists, historians and archaeologists who dismiss his theories as pseudoscience and fault their underpinnings: his translations of ancient texts and his understanding of physics. And yet, he has a devoted following of readers.
His 13 books, with names like “Genesis Revisited” and “The Earth Chronicles,” have sold millions of copies and been translated into 25 languages. “And Albanian is coming,” he notes, spooning the Taster’s Choice into two mugs.
You get the idea. He's one of the many endearing, eccentric Manhattanites the city takes such pride in displaying.
The complete works of Zecharia Sitchin can be found in the bookstore.
Comments on this entry are closed, on this blog. If you wish to comment, please find this and all newer blog entries crossposted on Celestial Reflections.
A freshly minted and recent interview with Graham Hancock gives a wonderful overview of his career and views. Primarily focused on his book Supernatural, but also discussed are Fingerprints of the Gods and Sign and the Seal.
The Vatican newspaper made news last week when it forgave John Lennon's notorious blasphemy. The world was startled when Lennon suggested that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and that Christianity would "go." Lennon's comments were far better reasoned and considered than the Vatican's current dismissal, as the musings of young buck overwhelmed by fame, allows.
The Vatican continues to take slow, lurching steps toward modernity. In another bold move, last spring, the director of the Vatican Observatory acknowledged that the universe is very large, indeed, and that it was not a violation of faith to believe in extraterrestrial life. But, the bitterest pill for the church to swallow is that both music and aliens have much more resonance with the populace than traditional religion. Ghosts too, it appears.
More people believe in aliens and ghosts than in God, a new survey finds, according to a British newspaper.
The survey, however, was done by a marketing firm in conjunction with the release of an X-Files DVD, and details of how the poll was conducted were not reported in the Daily Mail. Survey questions, depending on how they are written, can greatly skew results, along with how subjects are sampled.
That said, the poll of 3,000 people found that 58 percent believe in the supernatural, including paranormal encounters, while 54 percent believe God exists. Women were more likely than men to believe in the supernatural and were also more likely to visit a medium.
Indeed, humans are prone to believing in things they can neither see nor find logical evidence for.
Perhaps the bigger news is that neither the church, nor the tsking of scientists, can disabuse people of their belief in things that cannot generally be independently verified or consistently perceived with the five senses.
Monsters are everywhere these days, and belief in them is as strong as ever. What's harder to believe is why so many people buy into hazy evidence, shady schemes and downright false reports that perpetuate myths that often have just one ultimate truth: They put money in the pockets of their purveyors.
The bottom line, according to several interviews with people who study these things: People want to believe, and most simply can't help it.
. . .
A related question: Does belief in the paranormal have anything to do with religious belief?
The answer to that question is decidedly nuanced, but studies point to an interesting conclusion: People who practice religion are typically encouraged not to believe in the paranormal, but rather to put their faith in one deity, whereas those who aren't particularly active in religion are more free to believe in Bigfoot or consult a psychic.
Yep. Left to our own devices we'll believe just about anything, I guess. Why is that, I wonder. Education doesn't seem to help. Indeed, college graduates are more open to the paranormal than freshmen.
Church orthodoxy has a long history of quibbling over what extrasensory perceptions are "of God" and which ones aren't. One of the more famous cases of such quibbling came about when Joan of Arc was burned as a heretic and a short 24 years later named a saint. Turns out she really was hearing the voices of saints, not the pagan idols of the "fairy tree."
Great attempts were made at Joan's trial to connect her with some superstitious practices supposed to have been performed round a certain tree, popularly known as the "Fairy Tree" (l'Arbre des Dames), but the sincerity of her answers baffled her judges. She had sung and danced there with the other children, and had woven wreaths for Our Lady'sstatue, but since she was twelve years old she had held aloof from such diversions.
It was at the age of thirteen and a half, in the summer of 1425, that Joan first became conscious of that manifestation, whose supernatural character it would now be rash to question, which she afterwards came to call her "voices" or her "counsel." It was at first simply a voice, as if someone had spoken quite close to her, but it seems also clear that a blaze of light accompanied it, and that later on she clearly discerned in some way the appearance of those who spoke to her, recognizing them individually as St. Michael (who was accompanied by other angels), St. Margaret, St. Catherine, and others. Joan was always reluctant to speak of her voices. She said nothing about them to her confessor, and constantly refused, at her trial, to be inveigled into descriptions of the appearance of the saints and to explain how she recognized them. None the less, she told her judges: "I saw them with these very eyes, as well as I see you."
My first thought, on reading of God's dismal poll numbers, is that those paranormal experiences are actually more tangible. Many people swear that they've actually seen aliens and ghosts. God, not so much. Although, in fairness, 4% isn't that great a disparity. The real challenge for organized religion is that God doesn't seem to present in the way "he's" described in scriptures. When we encounter some vaguely anthropomorphized entity, we're more inclined to call it an angel or an alien, than presume to call it the one true "God." The challenge for skeptical scientists, however, is that many people swear that they've actually seen aliens and ghosts. Who are you gonna believe? The double-blind studies or your own lyin' eyes?
It becomes difficult to disabuse people of something that is, for many, quite experiential, even if it can't be consistently replicated in a lab. How do you stop people consulting mediums when so many, who consider themselves quite average, have had experiences around the time of deaths; received messages, seen flashes of light, felt strange, unearthly breezes, and even had clearly definable visitations from their departed loved ones.
As long as people keep unintentionally "piercing the veil," no amount of reason will dissuade them from those pesky paranormal diversions.
Lord Drayson, the government minister in charge of science, believes he has an uncanny ability “like a sixth sense” to know and predict some events instinctively.
The multi-millionaire businessman and Labour donor says he believes humans have strange abilities that are not widely understood. “In my life there have been some things I have known, and I don’t know why,” he said in an interview with The Sunday Times. “I think there is a lot we don’t understand about human capability.”
By way of explaining his sometimes uncanny insight, Lord Drayson cites Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink; a book one friend of mine describes "a book on intuition even men can understand."
In Supernatural, Graham Hancock posits that the intriguing parallels between shamanic experiences, extraterrestrial encounters, and legends of the faerie folk, can be explained by psychotropes. Faeries are often depicted around fungi known for their psychadelic properties. Many shamanic cultures use various psychotropes. At issue, specifically, is DMT. DMT is a naturally occurring brain chemical. It's produced in minute, rapidly absorbed quantities by the pineal gland. It is also present in a variety of plants. But, ingesting those plants has no effect, because the stomach secretes an enzyme that immediately deactivates it. Ayahuasca is used by many native tribes, not because it has hallucinogenic properties of its own, but because it suppresses the enzyme that deactivates DMT. Mixed with plant material high in DMT, it creates a powerful hallucinogenic cocktail, that the shaman can use to access non-ordinary reality. But, it may also be, according to Hancock, that some people simply produce higher quantities of DMT in their brains. Such people could spontaneously access the hidden world, experiencing alien encounters, and who knows what else.
It's an intriguing theory, and one worthy of exploration. For myself, I don't know what makes me psychic. I just am. I've always seen and felt presences. I've always been able to feel what other people are feeling. And I fall in and out of non-ordinary reality, pretty much at will. Could that be, at least in part, due to an excess of DMT? Perhaps. Whatever it is, the one thing I'm quite certain of, and always have been, is that it is not a unique ability. It is not some special power. It's our human birthright. Everyone is psychic. Some of us are just more actively aware of it than others. For many people it only rises to consciousness in extraordinary circumstances, like during times of major transition. Or, as Gavin De Becker explains, in periods of danger, when a very basic intuition kicks in with warnings best heeded. We're all capable of perceiving beyond the five senses, and, try as they might, the best religious and scientific minds can't rob of us of that fundamental ability.
Ezekiel saw de wheel Way in de middle o' de air Ezekiel saw de wheel In de middle o' de air
-- Traditional "Negro Spiritual"
The Vatican has weighed in on the debate over the existence of life on other planets and pronounced it plausible and consistent with a belief in God.
The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
"How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?" Funes said. "Just as we consider earthly creatures as 'a brother,' and 'sister,' why should we not talk about an 'extraterrestrial brother'? It would still be part of creation."
. . .
The interview, headlined "The extraterrestrial is my brother," covered a variety of topics including the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and science, and the theological implications of the existence of alien life.
Fumes also tried to salve the wounds of barbaric persecutions of its past.
Funes urged the church and the scientific community to leave behind divisions caused by Galileo's persecution 400 years ago, saying the incident has "caused wounds."
In 1633 the astronomer was tried as a heretic and forced to recant his theory that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.
No indication, at this time, of similar advancement on gay tolerance or abortion rights.
LaVaughn is a psychic intuitive with clairvoyant, clairaudient, and empathic ability. She is certified in Aromatherapy by the Morris Institute of Natural Therapeutics, Crystal Therapy by the Academy of Earth's Medicine, and Sandlin Technique Bodywork by Virginia Sandlin, Cherokee Mystic and founder of the Sandlin Institute of Matrimatix.
All new blog entries are now crossposted at Celestial Reflections, a group blog. All comments on newer entries are welcomed there. If you are a spiritually themed blogger, and wish to crosspost entries there, just let me know.
Site Navigation
