A few years ago, I asked if religion could survive first contact. Answer: It probably already has done, if we include indigenous medicine practices reaching all the way back into prehistory. The recent discovery of alien looking beings depicted in ancient stone art in India has rekindled debate over just what indigenous peoples have been painting on stone walls. According to archaeologist JR Bhagat, these ancient paintings accord with local legends about something that sounds an awful lot alien contact and abduction.
There are several beliefs among locals in these villages. While few worship the paintings, others narrate stories they have heard from ancestors about "rohela people" — the small sized ones — who used to land from sky in a round shaped flying object and take away one or two persons of village who never returned.
Many not human-looking beings and things that look like flying saucers have been discovered in cave paintings and these have given rise to questions about alien contact. But are these beings from other planets or other dimensions or, perhaps, both? Graham Hancock addressed this most recent discovery on his Facebook page the other day:
Aliens from other planets coming here in high-tech space ships? Or visitors from other dimensions? http://bit.ly/1oWXhn4. A few years ago when I asked Amazonian shaman Pablo Amaringo what the flying saucers were that he saw in his Ayahuasca visions, and painted in his extraordinary art (http://bit.ly/1oKnVfW), he told me they were vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. When a shaman speaks of the spirit world he's not far from the quantum idea of a parallel universe. I think the UFO and "aliens" mystery documented in rock and cave art all over the world may be MUCH more mysterious and intriguing than many believe. In my opinion these phenomena are real, but precisely WHAT they are remains to be established.
In keeping with my new hobby -- identifying obscure archetypes and esoterica in pop culture -- I noticed a sequence in Galaxy Quest the other day depicting wormhole travel. It's really intriguing. Galaxy Quest is a riot, and an old favorite, but I've never really thought of it as a metaphysical film. The relevance of the scene clicked for me, though, when I was listening to William Henry's most recent edition of Revelations.
At about the 19 minute mark Robert Perala relays a life altering experience he'd had that involved contact with some sort of alien or other-dimensional beings. He describes being pulled through a wormhole and finding himself covered with some sort of sticky, oily substance. He was left shaken and nauseated by the experience.
Henry has been talking and writing about this "oil" for some time and theorizes that it's a kind "cosmic condom" that protects the body during stargate travel. He provides references to Enoch being taken up by the Archangel Michael and Jesus who had his feet anointed by Mary previous to his resurrection.
It occurs to me that this is pretty much exactly what happens in Galaxy Quest when Tim Allen, and later the rest of the cast, are transported by aliens to and from their space dock. It's shown in painful detail when a very hungover Jason Nesmith (Allen) -- a William Shatneresque star of an historic sci-fi series and frequent convention guest -- tries to return home from what he thinks is a guest appearance with hard-core fans. Having slept through his limousine-like spaceship ride, and having no idea he's in outer space, he's shown to a platform to wait for his limo. Instead, he is covered in an unctuous substance -- which first anoints his feet. A portal opens onto the vastness of space and he is shot through a wormhole, and deposited next to his swimming pool. He stands for several moments trembling with shock.
It's a very funny scene in a very funny, quirky, little movie, but there are nods to something much deeper. It's well-shot and it's the little details that cinch it. Below are some stills, showing the sequence of events.
Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous, presentation by Graham Hancock. I've read nearly all of Hancock's books and listened to countless interviews, and yet, there were delicious surprises in this lecture for me.
Needless to say, I totally agree with Hancock's take-down of Richard Dawkins. Dawkins uses his Oxford credentials to lend credibility to totally unscientific arguments. I tire of saying this but you cannot prove a negative; you can only fail to prove a positive. But I think I've made my own views on this dogmatic, proselytizing atheist clear here, here, and here.
Hancock also gives a wonderful overview of the Gnostic beliefs in Sophia's error and how this resulted in the Demiurge and the Archons. He also explores the use of shamanic tools to free the mind from archontic manipulation.
He also spends a good bit of time on the correlations between alien abductions, shamanic experiences, and faerie lore. This is a theory that he also lays out well in Supernatural. Another lecture on the subject can be found here.
Of course his discussion of Egypt and the Giza pyramids is thorough and beautiful. That's to be expected.
This is a fairly long presentation and worth every minute of it. I was riveted.
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I just set my DVR to record the Olympics Opening Ceremony tomorrow night, even though I haven't watched or cared about the Olympics since I was a kid. But now I need to know if it will be first contact, or the beginning of the alien war, or just a garden variety terrorist attack, or... who knows. Mostly, I want to see for myself the spectacle of symbolic imagery that William Henry and Chad Stuemke have been talking about.
Henry and Stuemke had another chin wag about the upcoming festivities on Revelations and it's a lot of fun. There is no question that the volume and organization of symbolism we've seen during run-up is staggering -- stargate symbolism, alchemical symbolism, pagan symbolism, alien imagery. Someone is having a lot of fun. And as ever, it's hard to say how much is conscious and deliberate and how much is the subconscious, intuitional, creative process.
While this year seems really over the top, in terms of imagery, I have to say that I really hadn't realized how much the Olympics has been playing with some of these themes in past years -- the alien thing in particular. I didn't know, or didn't remember, until I watched the Red Ice Radio video special, that the 1984 Olympics had produced a spaceship and a giant alien. Says Stuemke, of the 7'8" alien, "Out of this world. Didn't make a lot of sense. But people loved it."
That's the thing. It doesn't seem to make any sense as anything other than cheesy spectacle. The spaceship is kind of cool but the alien made me think of nothing so much as Waiting for Guffman. "Boring, boring, boring, boring, boring..."
But now that the alien theme has evolved into Wenlock and Mandeville, I have to consider the possibility that the Olympic committee is, and has been, trying to say something. My favored possibility there is that it's part of a kind of spiritual evolution zeitgeist and that we are at long last becoming "galactic humans." And I think Henry and Stuemke have really tapped the vein on a very powerful archetypal narrative that points in that direction. But if it turns out that it's really about the royal family orchestrating our total takeover by the reptilian overlords, all I can say at this point is God Save the Queen.
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I posted something here a month ago on the strange, metallic, booming noises that are being reported around the country. As per Linda Moulton Howe in the Dreamland interview posted above, occurrences of these events is on the increase. Reports are coming in from all over the country, parts of Canada, Great Britain, and other places. And in all of these places no plausible explanation has been forthcoming.
I, personally, have not heard anything like this. From the descriptions in Howe's collection of man on the street interviews, it sounds awful. It's most often compared to train collisions... except that the trains are invisible.
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Recently on his radio show Revelations, William Henry discussed some of the challenges of sorting truth from fantasy in the alternative media marketplace with Randy Maugans. The resulting episode, "Hypesters, Lies and Mind Control" could just as easily have been called "William Henry and guest gently take the piss out of David Wilcock." I've been observing this trend in Henry's work for a while. He has been increasingly critical of his colleagues in the broader new age arena. It started with a kind of confusion and has gradually grown into dismay as his questions about the integrity of people in his milieu have grown. I notice it, in part, because I experienced similar disillusionment with teachers and colleagues in the psychic and healing arena I inhabit. There are people in my field with whom I respectfully disagree, which is fine. But I was also startlingly disabused, many years ago, of the notion that my fellow travelers were universally well-intended. I learned to my horror that some of them were self-serving and mercenary. I'm not going to say that Henry has reached the same conclusion but he's been noticeably shocked at the misuse and misrepresentation of his own work and has begun to publicly question the motives of some of his colleagues. In a recently posted interview, Henry talked about someone who had grossly distorted his work regarding the Capital Building. I'm wondering now if he meant Wilcock. He never expressly says it. But if you read between the lines... I don't know. Maybe.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that I have simply never been comfortable with David Wilcock. I learned about him some years ago in the context of his claim that he just might be the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce -- something from which he has more recently tried to distance himself. I listened to a lecture of his on YouTube. Much of it was interesting, if not original. It seemed to be based on solid, esoteric research. But when he started showing pictures of Cayce and his circle of friends and comparing those to pictures of himself and his circle of friends, I winced. It's not just the absurdity of using physical resemblance as a marker of reincarnation. It was something else -- the palpable sense that David Wilcock did not believe David Wilcock. In short, my bullshit detector went off. Now that's a purely intuitive response on my part and I'm not claiming to know Wilcock's heart. I don't know him at all. But I've learned the hard way that when the little hairs on the back of my stand up, I ignore that instinctual response at my peril. I would always implore others to listen to their own intuition and never trust my gut response over their own. So if you love Wilcock's work and think he's awesome, I would never try to disabuse you of that on my say-so. And I would never say that his work has no value. Some of it is quite interesting.
That said, Wilcock's antics this past December raised many a pair of eyebrows. His claims of a death threat are touched upon in this discussion. I became aware of the debate over this in one of Clif High's typically cryptic postings. High can be very frustrating to read because he rarely contextualizes these things. You're either dialed into the woo as he is and fully aware of the preamble, or you're not. I'm not. So I did a little googling to find out what he was talking about and was kind of horrified. I'd present my findings if the computer I was on at the time WAS WORKING but it's not. (But enough about me and my daily irritations.) If you're curious, the search criteria would be something like David Wilcock, death threat, Project Camelot. Like much regarding Wilcock, this incident left me with a deduction of "patently absurd" and I walked away with another check in the "things that validate my intuitive distrust of Wilcock" column.
In this very frank discussion, Henry and Maugans say some things that need to be said. Whether you're looking at the main stream media or the woo-woo, alternative media on the internet, you need to question and evaluate everything. That means thinking critically but it also means listening to the still, small voice. What makes it hard is not so much, as Henry implied recently, that we want to believe what we want to believe and don't want to be bothered with troublesome facts. It's that human beings are creatures of narrative. We like to think we seek facts but the truth is that the items that fit our personal narrative, we accept. The ones that don't get sloughed off, sometimes without our even noticing it. It's human nature and it's something we have to stay in check with by constantly subjecting our own beliefs to critical analysis. We all have an inherent tendency to keep validating our own beliefs while disregarding things that call our beliefs into question. We also have to be really careful about giving our power away to people who we think know so much more than we do. If you find yourself accepting every word another person says, something is very wrong. They're all just people.
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One of the most fascinating theories explored in Graham Hancock's Supernatural is that there is a some correlation between UFO abductions, faerie lore, and shamanic experiences. In this lecture he discusses some of the overlapping elements and addresses the use of hallucinogens in shamanic practice which may date back to the paleolithic era. Brilliant!
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A coded manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered in a public library in the French city of Nantes.
The document was found after a journalist came across a reference to it in a Leonardo biography, the library said.
. . .
The text is written from right to left in Leonardo's trademark mirror-writing and has yet to be deciphered.
James Arthur Ray is refusing to turn over audio recordings of his statements before the deadly sweat lodge. Gee, think they might be incriminating? Remember when Nixon refused to turn over some tapes? Maybe Ray can get a secretary to accidentally delete some things, too.
Witnesses stated that Ray made comments like "You may feel like you are going to die, but you won't" -- "if your bodies are feeling pain, that's alright you are stronger then that," and "it's okay if you pass out, you will not die."
. . .
Ray's team of attorneys have maintained that statements such as those were "taken out of context."
County attorneys are asking that Ray provide an audio tape of the briefing, held just before the sweat lodge ceremony, where those statements were allegedly made. So far, Ray's team has neglected to provide the tape, citing that he is not required to help the state meet its burden of proof.
This is me not being surprised that crystal technology is involved in this attempt to ape Dr. Who's sonic screwdriver.
Engineers have developed a device that is capable of moving and manipulating objects using only ultrasonic sound waves.
They say the technology could eventually lead to devices that can undo screws, assemble electronics and putting together delicate components.
The news will no doubt delight young fans of Doctor Who who have dreamed of owning a sonic screwdriver of their own after watching their hero use the tool to get himself out of many sticky situations.
. . .
Tiny crystals are made to vibrate by passing an electrical current through them, producing an ultrasonic shock wave in the air around them. This shock wave generates a force that can be used to push the cells. The size of the shock wave can be tuned to move cells of different size and so separate diseased cells from healthy ones.
Ufologists were disappointed when NASA's big announcement turned out to be about a newly discovered life form here on earth; albeit a strange one.
NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."
But WikiLeaks is coming to the rescue with the pending release of secret UFO files.
WikiLeaks will publish more secret US diplomatic files relating to aliens and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), said the founder of the whistleblower website Julian Assange and claimed his life was at risk after the recent expose.
Assange revealed he would publish classified US files about aliens and UFOs.
A Catholic priest in Texas graduated from sex crimes to attempted murder.
A Roman Catholic priest has been arrested on charges that he solicited a hit man to kill a teenager who had accused him of sexual abuse. Authorities said John Fiala first offered the job to a neighbor, who blew the whistle and helped police arrange a sting. They said Fiala got as far as negotiating a $5,000 price for the slaying before investigators moved in.
The 52-year-old clergyman was arrested Nov. 18 at his suburban Dallas home and jailed on $700,000 bond. In April, he was named in a lawsuit filed by the boy's family, who accused Fiala of molesting the youth, including twice forcing him to have sex at gunpoint.
The abuse allegedly took place in 2007 and 2008, when Fiala was a priest at the Sacred Heart of Mary Parish in the West Texas community of Rocksprings, a rural enclave known for sheep and goat herding.
Meanwhile, his Holiness has apologized for Vatican delinquency in another egregious case of priestly abuse.
Pope Benedict XVI lamented that the Vatican acted "slowly and late" in a scandal surrounding the Legionaries of Christ, and a Vatican official called Tuesday for an investigation into who covered up for the conservative order's disgraced founder.
The pope insisted, however, that the order has done good and should not be dissolved despite the double life of the late Rev. Marciel Maciel, who was discovered to have abused seminarians and fathered at least three children.
"Unfortunately we addressed these things very slowly and late," Benedict said in a book released Tuesday. "Somehow they were concealed very well, and only around the year 2000 did we have any concrete clues."
Maciel founded the Legion in 1941 in Mexico and it became one of the wealthiest and fastest growing orders in the Roman Catholic Church. Despite long-standing allegations that Maciel was a pedophile, no action was taken until 2006, when the Vatican ordered him to a lifetime of penance and prayer — though it did not say for what.
More esoteric news items can always be found in the Headlines feed in the right-hand column here.
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The girl became the talk of her village when she allegedly vanished on several occasions, only to be found in odd places like inside a cement mixer and a cemetery.
The parents of Siti Balqis Mohd Nor, 22, were relieved with the success of the two bomoh and hoped their life would return to normal as the djinns were said to be behind the woman's mysterious disappearances.
Hundreds of residents flocked to the home of Siti Balqis when they heard that the "culprits" had been captured and imprisoned in special containers.
Curious onlookers jostled to take photos and video footage of the containers and the djinns said to be inside.
Self-improvement guru James Arthur Ray is scheduled to go on trial in February on manslaughter charges prompted by a sweat lodge ceremony held near Sedona a year ago.
The trial originally was to start at the end of August in Yavapai County Superior Court. But the judge running Ray's case was assigned to replace a colleague who fell ill during a high-profile murder trial, and Ray's trial was put on hold.
Druidry has been recognised as an official religion in Britain for the first time, thousands of years after its adherents first worshipped in the country.
The Druid Network has been given charitable status by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the quango that decides what counts as a genuine faith as well as regulating fundraising bodies.
It guarantees the modern group, set up in 2003, valuable tax breaks but also grants the ancient religion equal status to more mainstream denominations. This could mean that Druids, the priestly caste in Celtic societies across Europe, are categorised separately in official surveys of religious believers.
The Vatican's death grip on moral authority continues to erode.
In recent years, Catholic bishops have used their moral influence and deep pockets to push for bans on same-sex unions in states from California to Maine.
But a new corps of increasingly vocal Catholics is urging a "mutiny" against the hierarchy, in the words of one activist, particularly on gay marriage and related matters.
For example, on Sept. 14, Palacios and other advocates launched Catholics for Equality, a group that aims to persuade believers in the "movable middle" to defy the bishops and support civil rights for gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender people.
Intelligent aliens may be living among the stars and are likely to have souls, a senior Vatican scientist said yesterday.
The Pope's astronomer, Guy Consolmagno, said he would be happy to 'baptise an al ien' - but admitted that the chances of communicating with life outside the Earth were low.
. . .
'Any entity - no matter how many tentacles it has - has a soul,' he added.
And now that we're starting to discover "Class M" planets, he may get his chance!
Astronomers say they have for the first time spotted a planet beyond our own in what is sometimes called the Goldilocks zone for life: Not too hot, not too cold. Juuuust right.
Not too far from its star, not too close. So it could contain liquid water. The planet itself is neither too big nor too small for the proper surface, gravity and atmosphere.
It's just right. Just like Earth.
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Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a 'massive, muscular woman' who may have been a female gladiator during the Roman occupation of Britain.
. . .
Archaeological Project Manager Robin Jackson said: 'When we first looked at the leg and arm bones, the muscle attachments suggested it was quite a strapping big bloke.
'But the pelvis and head, and all the indicators of gender, say it's a woman.'
Steven Hawking is afraid of an alien invasion and now we know why. They're scary looking.
Stephen Hawking has taken advantage of the latest computer graphics to display his versions of ET, based on hard science, for a new documentary series, Into The Universe.
. . .
Among the theoretical aliens are terrestrial herbivores and carnivores, lizard-like predators with limb membranes that allow them to glide using venom-loaded stingers to bring down a two-legged herbivore that has a huge vacuum snout to suck up food.
A CHINESE airport was dramatically closed after an ALIEN craft was detected by baffled air traffic controllers.
They spotted the UFO on radar screens forcing bosses to ground flights and divert planes away from Xiaoshan airport in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
His Holiness has replaced the disgraced Macial Marciel to run multinational Legionares of Christ.
Pope Benedict XVI on Friday (July 9) appointed the Vatican's chief financial auditor, Italian Archbishop Velasio De Paolis, to manage the powerful but scandal-scarred Legionaries of Christ order.
The decision comes after an eight-month investigation of the order founded in 1941 by disgraced Mexican priest Marcial Maciel Degollado, who died in 2008.
Meanwhile, in Connecticut, another disgraced priest has taken his congregation for $1.3 million.
The Rev. Kevin J. Gray was a popular priest who appeared to live humbly, forgoing a car and walking to Mass from another parish where he lived so that a Catholic charity could use his space at the rectory. Parishioners thought he had cancer and admired how he helped immigrants in his largely poor parish in Connecticut.
But after a routine audit of the church's finances turned up discrepancies, authorities began a criminal investigation that they say unraveled a secret double life of male escorts, strip bars and lavish spending on the finest restaurants, luxury hotels and expensive clothing, financed with money stolen from the parish.
The Church of England may be on the verge of promoting a gay priest to bishop, a step that would widen the split over sexuality in the global Anglican Communion.
If that happens, it would appear to be a significant turnaround for Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the Church of England and the world's Anglicans, who recently imposed sanctions on the U.S. Episcopal Church for electing a lesbian bishop.
The Episcopal Church has been removed from Anglican committees that engage in dialogue with other Christians and consider doctrinal issues, the latest fallout from the church's consecration of a lesbian bishop last month.
The Rev. Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, the worldwide fellowship that includes the Episcopal Church as its U.S. branch, outlined the demotions in a letter published on Monday (June 7).
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of the communion, proposed the removals last month after Episcopalians in Los Angeles consecrated an open lesbian as an assistant bishop. Bishop Mary Douglas Glasspool is the second openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, after Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, who was consecrated in 2003.
The contentious issue of women bishops will once again be debated by the Church of England's General Synod when delegates and bishops convene in York on Friday (July 9), years after the issue was first raised.
Maybe I've been indoctrinated by films like 2001 and Westworld but I can't help thinking of the truly horrible ways this could go wrong. Ewwwww......
Researchers have developed an intelligent robot that can navigate itself around a city’s streets and collect resident’s rubbish on demand.
An EU-funded project has resulted in a human-sized robot, called DustCart that balances on a Segway base and can navigate itself to stop outside your door when summoned.
In a handful of laboratories around the world, computer scientists are developing robots like this one: highly programmed machines that can engage people and teach them simple skills, including household tasks, vocabulary or, as in the case of the boy, playing, elementary imitation and taking turns.
. . .
Yet the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.
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Needless to say, Sitchin's ideas - like those of another ancient-astronaut author, Erich von Däniken - have been roundly scorned by the scientific community. But now Sitchin is asking that very community to help him with the mystery of Queen Puabi.
Puabi's remains were unearthed from a tomb in present-day Iraq during the 1920s and 1930s, roughly the same time frame as the discovery and study of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt. Forensic experts at London's Natural History Museum determined that Puabi was about 40 years old when she died, and probably reigned as queen in her own right during the First Dynasty of Ur. Sitchin contends she was something more than a queen - specifically, that she was a "nin," a Sumerian term which he takes to mean "goddess."
He suggests that Puabi was an ancient demigod, genetically related to the visitors from Nibiru. What if these aliens tinkered with our DNA to enhance our intelligence - the biblical tree of knowledge of good and evil - but held back the genetic fruit from the tree of eternal life? Does the story of Adam and Eve actually refer to the aliens' tinkering? The way Sitchin sees it, the ancient myths suggest that "whoever created us deliberately held back from us a certain thing - fruit, genes, DNA, whatever - not to give us health, longevity, and the immortality that they had. So what was it?"
I'm a little surprised at his all or nothing approach but he's right that whether he positions himself that way or not it's how it will be taken in the increasingly blinkered scientific community. I, for one, don't share a number of Sitchin's conclusions but that doesn't mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater. There's no denying that many of his once ridiculed theories have been validated by newer scientific discoveries; such as elliptical planetary orbits. Some of these are discussed in the article and quoted interview. Sitchin is provocative and whether he's one hundred percent accurate or not is besides the point. He's done what innovators are supposed to do. He's raised very compelling questions and lent insight into the mysteries of ancient civilizations.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
