The Bockscar Children

I was in third or fourth grade. when one of the best teachers I ever had the joy of knowing, Ms Hungerford, read this book to our class. I think this is probably when my obsession with reading and everything that comes with it started.

Here is a bit from Dennis Stillings about the theology of the atom bomb-I will explain why I am connecting these two disparate points of the line of my personal reality after it: The Trinity test was scheduled for 4:00 a.m. Monday, July 16, 1945, near Alamagordo, N.M., on the bleak desert plain known as the Journada del Muerto-the Journey of Death. On Sunday the 15th, toward mid-afternoon, thunder was heard. Wind and rain collapsed tents in the base camp, ten miles from ground zero. Mist enveloped the test tower, and storms were reported heading for it. Rumors were circulating about the possibility of the Bomb setting the atmosphere on fire. At 2:30 a.m. the storm reached ground zero and knocked out the principle searchlight, leaving the test area in pitch darkness. With the very tiniest tendency towards superstition, one might suspect that something miraculous was in the air. An ancient reader of signs and portents would have cancelled the whole operation on the basis of such events, clearly announcing the birth of forces hitherto unknown on earth. Participants noted a zombie-like alteration of consciousness at this point, as though ruled by a force demanding that they continue. Oppenheimer himself evinced this state quite clearly. The test was rescheduled for 5:30 a.m. Oppenheimer waited for the hour of the Trinity test, his face "white and lifeless" thinking, "I must remain conscious."

At the time of the explosion, 5:29:45 a.m., July 16, 1945, William L. Laurence of the New York Times, prone on his belly, thought of the Lord's command, "Let there be light!"...Kwiatkowsky, another of the Los Alamose self-admitted "science slaves," remarked, "I am sure that at the end of the world, in the last millisecond of the earth's existence, the last human will see what we saw."

Thus the Bomb imagery encompasses the light of the beginning and the fire at the end of the world. This "Death Light" represented one aspect of the Bomb phenomenon "where theoretical calculations had been off by a big factor. Much more light was produced than anticipated."

Again that was from "Theology of the Atom Bomb" by Dennis Stillings. I have read an enormous amount of material in the last few weeks that makes me wonder if some of humanity's inventions change the very nature of time and the fabric of reality itself even. Things must have seemed rather spooky indeed to even the most hard-boiled scientists on that morning at the Trinity site. Of course, it could have been just a normal little 'ole storm combined with the enormity of what was about to be undertaken that produced some 'intense' psychological effects.

Two ideas came to mind when I read of the Trinity test. One-entertain for just a moment, that somehow, someone was trying to send a message back in time and it didn't quite get through so all that happened was the 'storm' at the site. The reason for the 'message' would have been that people in the future were trying to avert the catastrophe of the Bomb ever being used--ever! Two- perhaps the 'supernatural' feeling at the site was a 'real' Super-natural feeling that implanted both in the physical reality at the site and in the very minds of the scientists as they were about to initiate for lack of a better word a "God Sequence" of events that ultimately leads to transcendence of three-dimensional physical reality for any species in the Universe that reaches the "nuclear" level.

Or-is the Bomb still the ultimate question mark of this day and age? A 'cipher-Buddha' posing a question for the world collective-the world Soviet if you will. Do you want to live or don't you? Lately I have been having some feelings-don't know if they mean anything or not -but when I have them they do indeed have a soul-reaching level of meaning for me.

Some of them seem to be intuitions hopefully 'Rigorous' Intuitions (wink) about subjects I have always been fascinated by-the biggy of these- the very nature of reality itself. Many times these feelings seem to be about a small, but significant fractal part of reality. Out of the 'blue' the other day, while looking over some old and new articles and my own notes, about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I remembered the sweetness of Ms H reading the tale of "The Boxcar Children" to us and how rapt/wrapped/en'raptured' up several of us kids had become as she expertly (she was one of these people that could turn the smallest thing into a song) told us the tale of a story told long ago. A lightning-flash shudder went through me when I thought of the name of the plane that dropped the last (and hopefully truly last -like in forever!) atom bomb (the "Fat Man") used in anger-"Bockscar." This was a pun on the nickname of the B-29 itself and the commander Captain Frederick C. Bock (although he wasn't on the Nagasaki mission itself) of the plane. It hit me right in the gut with a flood of meanings and associations- We Really Are The Bockscar Children! Even the 'nose art' of the airplane (this wasn't on at the time of the Nagasaki mission) suggests another flood of associations to me -one of them strangely enough being the 'LoGo' of a recent PreziDent-very recent actually! How about you? More to come! Links Bockscar Boxcar Children Trinity Dennis Stillings Tooth Marks Apple

A Sort of Revelation

First off, I would like to wonder out loud now that OBL is dead (LOL) are the PTB preparing some newfangled 'meme' to keep the fear circulating throughout society like a diseased form of some new Tsunami of Terror. Don't fall for it if they do! The OBL thing this eve was yet another Dark Ritual brought to you by the Dark Ones. MayDay, MaYDaY O great Beltane Feast!

But here is what I wanted to actually post - the OBL stuff just happened as I was thinking about it. I think one of the greatest barriers to TRUE growth and spiritual change is FEAR-or- False Evidence Appearing Real. And I feel I have some true knowledge of this and I am not just posting stuff out of a book or something. In fact, I think it is the biggest 'rod' that the PTB use to control us-IOW-we are more 'Rod Acknowledgers' than 'Carrot Eaters'-although the visions of MaaTerial ThINGs also -obviously-greases the wheel that keeps our FAllen version or REALm of RealITY going. Hopefully we will soon grow a Pair and a Hare and become TRUE Cosmic Rabbits in the Year of the Rabbit and start making our own OZs and WEalds!!
Someone told me Tuesday Weld would gno something about this!!

OK --back to FEAR--those of us who have lived in FEAR of a great many things most of our lives --and here we are almost at the 'GONG/OOHHM MANI PADMI HUM' part ;-) --we have also inVESTed a lot in our various fears and terrors--almost as if we had a fucking bank account where we were savin up for something!! Well -you gno what?? -I think an equally large part of letting shitty stuff go where shitty stuff should go and the difficulty of it arises from the inVESTment factor. An inVESTment that no good inVESTitTURE can ever come from.

My advice -advice I am trying to live right now -find ways to start letting it GO-and make this THE priority in your life -I am not being hypocritical with this -and have started certain spiritual practices in EARNest the last 2-3 days (prayer, deep meditation-and THANKing the Creator of ALL of US for my LIFE-and I intend to add to these practices including FASTing which I don't recommend for everyone -but 24 hour fasts have helped me in the past) and intend to keep amping it up until I am a better person--notice I didn't say PURRfect as no one ever will be!
And I also hope to post stuff here and there about it with regards to this journey I am departing on.

Here/Hear are some things I need help/advice for. I need to undergo EGO DEATH--I gno -haha --just the smALL shIT right??? I NEED to LEGGO mY Eggo! If anyone stumbles by here that knows anything about this can you help me? I am in the Phoenix Metro area/arena. Even thought of doing a "Please Help" type of add on CL-don't know how that would work:-)!

OK-thats enuf for now -I will post this bit by Richard Grossinger from Waiting for the Martian Express (who is becoming a much-loved research source-I can't believe some of the stuff he was coming up with in the mid-70s up to late 80s when this book was published!) From pg 131: The validity of the metaphysical processes generating shamanic jaguars and condors is not affected by the existence of animal ones, and in fact there is an important synchronistic connection between the two that lies at the heart of a universe seamlessly producing creatures through flesh and archetype both. That was from 1987. Happy Beltane Everyone!

Richard Grossinger & Waiting for the Martian Express

Here is a bit from Richard Grossinger's "Waiting for the Martian Express: Cosmic Visitors, Earth Warriors, Luminous Dreams" published in 1989 that some folks might enjoy. From the chapter "The Homeless," What is remarkable about our time is not how much but how little we know...Science seeks the source of matter in equations generated by stars and the remains of stars. Observations are turned into integers and signs whose own origin is as obsure as that of the stars, and different. We have no sense of the context of these numbers, how they bind us, what abstract formality they promote. In our knee-jerk advocacy of a quantitative universe we are not even aware of the problem. E= MC^2, for sure, but in relation to what?; formed out of symbols and languages how?

The proposal within physics to explain the universe is delusionary; the assorted mobs and cartels could care less, for they rule the universe of meaning, of the shaman and the wild pig.

We do not understand the extinction of the dinosaurs, the Bermuda Triangle, the origins of AIDS, the assassination of John Kennedy (or its weird parallels to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln), or the fireball that blasted Siberia in 1908. We think we know why the space shuttle exploded and who shot down the KAL jet. At a meeting of the American Anthropological Association it was declared, irrefutedly, that Carlos Castenada had invented the shaman Don Juan.

We do not know Pol Pot, Khomeini, Gorbachev. We do not even know Ronald Reagan, though we poured the collective presidency into his being...We do not fathom how Nazis could have prevailed in an advanced nation in a civilized century. Yet slaughterhouses of sentient beings are everywhere. The Earth has become a mechanized flesh and blood factory.

Cocaine? Crack? Child pornography? Yin/Yang? Shadow. Light. Who are we kidding? For every act of science unveiling the universe, a compensatory intuition drives us deeper into mystery.

As sexuality becomes explicit, something else becomes obscure. This is axiomatic. Fucking and masturbation occur on stage, bondage and orgies in suburbia. Businessmen and -women do not even drop their personae as they pleasure themselves and each other ritually. Desire is now business; business desire...The compulsive religion of the moral majority, the strategies of corporate merger represent the same "looking out for number one" grab at ego rapture.

But the mystery, the impalpable allure that was once a sexual escapade is now the stuff of life itself. When the fantasy of desire is charmed to the surface, the mystery of eros sinks to the heart...It is our hearts that are closed as we go about our businessses. Something beyond desire now haunts the world. Why else would we return to Nazi Germany for redemption?; why continue to clone the Bomb?; why run no one against no one in elections? Why make it a pretense of progress and elightenment in this misasma?

The homeless are no surprise. They are not withdrawn from reality; they have simply retreated to where no more harm can be done, no more tricks can be played. By their prescence they establish ideology. They are our scientists, but their specialty is not substance. What passes them on the street is a clutter of hungers, petty jobs, fake resolutions. By making themselves powerless and brief, they cast the spell of cornucopia back over the masses.

Theirs is not a sophisticated desire or sly strategy of sensuality; it is a pure hunger, the sense that the cauldron is empty. They would rather sit and let the rain of futility gradually work in their bones.

Some become angry, hard and throw themselves at the walkers; they are waiting for Godot too, less patiently. Others are as soft as a feather, and there is no excuse not to give them some of the coins we find ourselves carrying-the make-believe integers that turn to gold in their hands.

I know the ego doesn't survive. If it did, this would be a demonish eternity, for us as for the street people. I know the ego doesn't survive, though at times I think I want that more than anything. I fear death openly. But I see in the beggar's face that consciousness is no meager thing. We share a pinched, luminous reality as ghosts.

Consciousness will not be obliterated, for consciousness is the universe. The part of me I know the least, will go on. These images of a winter's night will not be kept in the holograph's heart--the rain on the beggars along storefront walls, the feeling of unexplored depths, the now-acrid, now-sweet obscurity in me, that even my attempt to locate and feel radiates as petals of deeper, more devious obscurities--a memory of childhood, a fragment of a tune I can't place, the cold that wants warm, the tug toward home, all together, all making me up this one moment--that will be dashed on rocks harsher than either atoms or stars, because atoms and stars are abstractions that transform nothing.

My hope is their hope--that this will all be made into a robe of the finest light. (Don't be fooled into assuming they have given up hope or that the rest of us have escaped their fate).

I don't need angels or stories of eternity, and I don't expect the timeless void of transcendence or a merger with a superconsciousness. I want the obscurity that nothing will touch in the rain."

Richard Grossinger I had almost forgotten about this little gem of a book in the intervening twenty years-was very happy to have found it again! Flowers by Alex Robinson:)

Meanings, Maps and Territories Part Three

Don't like this reality? Get your own! Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, among many others in both the research of physics and parapsychology have noted how deeply connected we are to each other. A person in a completely different room can register a reaction to a person in another room who is given an electic shock on a polygraph. Light flashed in the eyes of a test subject will also register in the ECG (electroencephalograph) chart of another test subject isolated in a different room. A plethysmograph, which measures the blood volume in a person's finger, which in turn is a great indicator of a person's autonomic nervous system functioning can also be helpful in these types of experiments. For instance, when a "sender"in another room reads the name of someone they know off a list of names mostly unknown to them. On pages 143-144 of Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe, he talks about an experiment conducted by Charles Tart, a professor of psychology at the Davis campus of the University of California. Professor Tart (with the help of Profs Slattern and Ho-sorry another lousy joke) wondered what would happen if two people were put into a deep trance and were able to communicate. He thought of this when he began to realize how much scientific research was showing how interconnected our world is.

And-what if these two people had extremely good visualization skills? "Tart found two graduate students, Anne and Bill, who could go into deep trance and were also skilled hynotists in their own right. He had Anne hypnotize Bill and after he was hypnotized, he had Bill hypnotize her in return. Tart's reasoning was that the already powerful rapport that exists between the hypnotist and the subject would be strengthened by using this unusual procedure. He was right. When they opened their eyes in this mutually hypnotic state everything looked gray. However, the grayness quickly gave way to vivid colors and glowing lights, and in a few moments they found themselves on a beach of unearthly beauty. The sand sparkled like diamonds, the sea was filled with enormous frothing bubbles and glistened like champagne, and the shoreline was dotted with translucent crystalline rocks pulsing with internal light. Although Tart could not see what Anne and Bill were seeing, from the way they were talking he quickly realized they were experiencing the same hallucinated reality."

" Of course, this was immediately obvious to Anne and Bill and they set about to explore their newfound worlds, swimming in the ocean and studying the glowing crystalline rocks. Unfortunately for Tart they also stopped talking, or at least they stopped talking from Tart's perspective. When he questioned them about their silence they told him that in their shared dreamworld they were talking, a phenomenon Tart feels involved some kind of paranormal communication between the two. In session after session Anne and Bill continued to construct various realities, and all were as real, available to the five senses, and dimensionally realized, as anything they experienced in their normal waking state. In fact, Tart resolved that the worlds Anne and Bill visited were actually more real than the pale, lunar version of reality with which most of us must be content...Anne and Bill's ocean world is the perfect example of a holographic reality-a three-dimensional construct created out of interconnectedness, sustained by the flow of consciousness, and ultimately as plastic as the thought processes that engendered it."

The realities created by Anne and Bill were more flexible and flowing than our "normal" spacetime. Soemtimes Anne and Bill would forget to "make" their own bodies in these realities and often times appeared to each other as floating faces or heads! On one occasion Bill asked Anne to give him her hand and she reported, "I had to kind of conjure up a hand." Finally from Talbot's book: "How did this experiment in mutual hypnosis end? Sadly the idea that these spectacular visions were somehow real, perhaps more real than everyday reality, so frightened both Anne and Bill that they became increasingly nervous about what they were doing. They eventually stopped their explorations, and one of them, Bill, even gave up hypnosis entirely."

I hope anyone reading this enjoyed yet another exploration of some of the subjects in Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe. I do hope to be online tomorrow and hope everyone is about to-or is having-a beautiful weekend!

Mind, Soul and Reality-The Mothman Un-Prophecy

At the very beginning of John Keel's book, The Mothman Prophecies, he tells the story of a couple awakened by a bearded stranger at the ungodly (unless you are an insomniac like me) hour of 3 AM. The morning was wet and cold. It was late November in 1967. This was a place where strangers were rare and suspect. The stranger who had hammered at their door was described as over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. His face which was barely visible in the darkness sported a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. The flashes of lightning behind him added to the eerie effect. "May I use your phone?" he asked in a deep voice that didn't have the familiar West Virginian accent. The woman who answered the door was so frightened that she backed away, said, "Talk to my husband" and closed the door. Some minutes passed and a rugged young man returned with his wife and said through a crack in the door, "We aint got a phone here," and slammed the door. The stranger disappeared into the night. In the days following the encounter with the stranger the young couple told their friends about the man and the strangeness of the encounter. Bearded, men in black formal suits with muddy black dress shoes and strange accents appearing at people's houses at three in the morning were-needless to say-an extremely uncommon occurrence in the poor back hills of the Ohio Valley

The couple concluded that the man had been a fearful omen-maybe the devil himself. Three weeks later this couple was killed in the worst tragedy to strike that section of West Virginia. They were driving across the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, when it suddenly collapsed. The friends of the couple remembered the story of their friends strange visitor of the weeks before. This confirmed their religious beliefs and superstitions. Perhaps the devil himself had visited Point Pleasant, West Virginia before a terrible tragedy. There turned out to be a very prosaic explanation as to the identity of the "devil" in the rain that night. Paranormal investigator and "dedicated nonconformist" John Keel's car had gone off the road and he had been searching house to house in search of a telephone to use so he could call a tow truck! He had driven up from Atlanta, Georgia where he had delivered a speech to a local UFO club. By the time West Virginia was almost a second home to him. He had already visited the state five times investigating strange events and had many friends there. One of these friends, Mrs. Mary Hyre, a reporter for the Athens, Ohio, Messenger was with him that night. The pair had been out talking to UFO witnesses that night, and earlier in the evening had seen a very strange light in the sky themselves.

Keel writes in The Mothman Prophecies, "Since there was a heavy, low cloud layer it could not have been a star. It maneuvered over the hills, its brilliant glow very familiar to both of us for we both had seen many such lights in the Ohio Valley that year. Mrs. Hyre waited in the car while I trudged through the mud and rain. We had been trying to climb a slippery hill to a spot where we had seen many unusual things in the past. I found the telephones in the houses closest to our location were not working, apparently knocked out by the storm. So I had to keep walking until I finally found a house with a working phone. The owner refused to open his door so we shouted back and forth. I gave hima phone number to call. He obliged and went to bed. I never knew what he looked like. My point, of course is that Beelzebub was not wandering along the back roads of West Virginia that night...But from the view of the people who lived on that road, something very unusual happened. They had never before been roused in the night by a tall bearded stranger in black. They knew nothing of the reasons for my prescence so they were forced to speculate. Even speculation was difficult. They could only place me in the frame of reference they knew best-the religious. Bearded men in city dress simply did not turn up on isolated back roads in the middle of the night...So a perfectly normal event (normal that is to me) was placed in an entirely different context by the witnesses. The final proof of my supernatural origin came three weeks later when two of the people I had awakened were killed in the bridge tragedy.

Some future investigator of the paranormal may wander those hills someday, talk with these people, and write a whole chapter of a learned book on demonology, repeating this piece of folklore. Other scholars will pick up and repeat his story in books and articles. The prescence of the devil in West Virginia in November 1967 will become historical fact, backed by the testimony of several witnesses." I wanted to include this bit from Keel's book because I think it is very instructive as to how easy it is for people to misconstrue events and misinterpret facts. Also I didn't want to 'waste' the research I had done when I thought I might be doing an actual Mothman series;-). I think no matter what one's stance is on the paranormal, that anyone objectively looking into the events going on in Point Pleasant, West Virginia and its environs from late 1966 until the Silver Bridge collapse on December 15, 1967 will agree that something very strange was happening. Some folks are saying there are "aftereffects" going on until the present day-but I don't want to delve to much into this in case I come back to the story-and also know more about what these more recent people are saying. The story of the "Mothman" has everything from, of course the mothman itself-himself -whatever;-), Men in Black or MIBs, UFOs, Poltergeist phenomena, odd phone calls and seeming other wordly contact-very spooky contact at that. Thanks again so very much for all of your thoughtful, intelligent and insightful comments. I had a "nice" surprise this morning when I got an email and comment-I say this not to bitch-but just because some of my surprises of late haven't been of the nice variety. I hope things like this continue in my life as I do in all of the people I am in contact with -through emails, blogs or "real life"-Best wishes to all of you! The top image is the "best" rendition of the Mothman according to the two young couples who witnessed it on 18 November 1966. I better double check-but I believe the drawing was done by the fantastic Loren Coleman himself. The next image is of a very handsome man holding a ball-I think that image is courtesy of stevo's Hot Men Appreciation Society. Someone kindly send the man with the ball to my address and I will do something nice for you! Here is a link http://www.lorencoleman.com/

Mind, Soul and Reality-My Life of Spiritual Crisis & Other Stuff

In his excellent and thought-provoking book-Breaking Open the Head-Daniel Pinchbeck talks about the deepening spiritual crisis that led him to explore the psychedelics and modern day shamanism. A note here -I am wondering if I should call this a rough draft as about an hour ago my back started acting up and I am in a lot of pain -plus I took some pillz for the pain. I just don't think modern folk-least of all yours truly are made of the same stuff in relation to fighting off pain. There is an beautiful thought -from the Buddhist religion I think-that says when you are in a lot of pain you should pray that your pain can take away the pain of other sentient beings -so this is my prayer for the moment. And if this post doesn't make any effin sense whatsoever I will re-do it and aplologize beforehand if it is unreadable. The spiritual crisis he was going through had or has some echoes in my own life-and perhaps many of you have felt the same way at one time or another. At times the emptiness I have felt in my own life has been so overwhelming that I am somewhat surprised at times to still be here. I think one of the reasons for my survival is that I come from a strong loving family and at the times of the deepest darkness I have been lucky to come in contact with exactly the right friends and people who have helped me get through.

These feelings of otherness and alienation came to me quite early in my life-even before my teenage years. Compared to a lot of other gay women and men I have talked to over the years I don't think my particular "spiritual crisis", alienation-whatever you want to call it was born much at all from my very early in life realization that I was homosexual. I don't know exactly why this didn't add to my sense of disaffection with the world-it could have been that as a lifetime member of a club called "Bookworms", I realized from an early age that I was not the only gay guy in the world. A man I talked to in the 1980s told me that he actually felt he was the only homosexual in the world back when he was growing up in a small Kansas town.

One of the ways I remember feeling that did begin as a teenager after I had begun to know just a little about what the adult world was like was along the lines of "Gee-if I work hard and behave all my life will I get something resembling a big fucking hunk of cheddar cheese at the end-like a mouse or rat rewarded for running through a maze?" The 'values' and 'enchantments' of modern life seemed horribly empty to me. It seemed -to me anyway-that at the ass end (or would it be the mouth?:-) of capitalist consumer culture that there was this wide chasm of terrifying proportions. It appeared like the maw of this beast of 'wants' and 'needs' (needs have always been somewhat confusing to me-for I have known people who consider a Mercedes-Benz or a Mont Blanc pen a 'need' like a man dying of thirst needs water) would never be fulfilled. Perhaps this was the whole idea? So many people seemed hypnotized-entranced by this ravening beast of desires -but I only saw an unspeakably horrifying abyss and emptiness that would never be sated.

The situation in consumer-mass production society reminded me a great deal of the realm of the "Hungry Ghosts." These hapless beings (also from Buddhist thought I believe)that are supposed to inhabit this most unfortunate level of existence have huge bellies to fill, but only tiny mouths and long thin necks. So they are never full and without want. I actually wonder if some people when they pass from this life that are addicts and the like are where the reports originate of some ghostly and paranormal behavior. I think the "out of body" or OOBE investigator Robert Monroe claimed to have seen many departed spirits who were in places like bars trying to pick up a 'real' glass which they found they couldn't --but it didn't stop them from trying-and he also saw other spririts frustrated in their attempts to smoke cigarettes and other things that cause addictive behavior.

And added to this was the hugely 'introspective' 'intellectual' and 'questioning' nature of modern culture itself (sarcasm)-especially in the United States. Of course I will admite here and now that I was guilty of partaking of its 'insights.' I can still remember watching the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. I had always thought and hoped it would be Sue Ellen, played by the lovely actress Linda Gray-but this is probably a topic for another post:-)

However, I wasn't without ideas or notions of what i could fill my empty soul up with. The names of the two 'friends' who came to my 'rescue' in this matter I will call by the pseudonyms Stoly and Dick. I will say a bit about these two vacuum filling entities in the next post. Before going I would like to give a quote from Breaking Open the Head from page 15 that I feel is very relevant to the feelings that started me on my spiritual journey: "As I wondered the streets in a desolate funk, I would ask myself the impossible, the embarrassing, the ultimately childish question of Why?-Why this city? Why this life? Why anything? Of course I knew that why was a question you were supposed to stop asking around the age of ten, but I couldn't free myself from it."

I would love to hear from any readers who may have felt they have gone through a kind of spiritual "emergency" in their lives and if they were able to remedy the situation. I do not have any idea when the next post will be here and don't worry it will not be so much about me-but it may contain examples from my life about the theories of the soul and reality I am trying to bring forth in this set of posts-anything from near death experiences, reincarnation, psychedelic experiences, ghostly encounters-you name it. For some reason I feel a great need in my life to be surrounded by the ineffable, magical and the unexplained. Thanks again for all of your thoughtful, insightful and intelligent comments! OOOPS I did it again. I am trying to edit HTML to take out stupid space at top-there are two "div" thingies-when I try to delete these blogger gives me the message: Your HTML cannot be accepted: Closing tag has no matching opening tag -and then it gives me another "div" symbol I am afraid to put here to mess it up even more haha-O well its not as bad as some of my other multiple image efforts:-)

Mind, Soul and Reality

One of the most brilliant mathematicians (and physicists) who ever lived was a Hungarian born man named John von Neumann. He calculated that over the course of a human lifetime the brain stores about 280,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information. This is an incredibly vast number. Scientists have thought about the ways this immense amount of data could be both stored and retrieved by the brain. Could the holographic theory explain this? Remember that holograms have an enormous capacity for information storage, and as far as retrieving the information goes, with the part containing the whole perhaps this makes it much easier? I wonder if there is a law of the conservation of not only energy-but also information and memory. Maybe all of the things the billions of people (and other species too) have experienced down from the dawn of time are never lost. I wonder if there might be some truth to the universal library or Akashic records. The great investigator of the human soul, Dr Carl Gustav Jung had a fantastic "synchroncity" event that happened while treating one of his patients. The woman Jung was treating at the time had a very stern, materialist and rational approach to life. This was a woman who simply had no need-and maybe want of the ineffable and sacred dimension of human existence. The woman's attitude was severely hindering her progress in therapy.

She had a series of frustrating sessions with Jung, but one day told him of a dream she had that involved a scarab beetle. Jung knew a great deal about mythology worldwide and this was hardly the first time a symbol from ancient mythology came up in a patient's dream. In ancient Egyptian mythology the scarab was a sacred representation of rebirth. As he believed dreams were greatly influenced by the collective unconscious, Jung wondered if the dream meant that she was about to go through a psyhcological transformation-a rebirth. Jung had just started to tell her of his interpretation, but before he could he heard a tapping on the window from outside. He was astonished to see a gold-green scarab beetle on the other side of the glass. Keep in mind, he was in the mid-European latitudes and sightings of scarab beetles were extremely rare to non-existent in these climes. Jung opened the window and let the scarab fly in as he presented his interpretation of the dream. The entry of the scarab beetle both in the woman's psyche and then physically amazed her and she was able to let go of some of her excessive rationality. From this day forward her response to therapy improved.

Quoting again from Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe: "Jung encountered many such meaningful coincidences during his psychotherapeutic work and noticed they almost always accompanied periods of emotional intensity and transformation: fundamental new insights, deaths, births, even changes in profession. He also noticed that they tended to peak when the new realization or insight was just about to surface in a patient's consciousness. As his ideas became more widely known, other therapists began reporting their own experiences with synchronicity." Talbot also gives another example of a synchronicity involving an associate of Jung's based in Zurich named Carl Alfred Meier. A woman surgeon, who had headed a mission hospital in China for twenty years was suffering from serious depression. She traveled from Wuchang, China to Zurich, Switzerland to be treated by Meier. In the course of her therapy she told Meier of a dream in which she had seen the hospital she worked in with one of its wings destroyed. She was originally from America but had become involved in Chinese culture and was an expert in Chinese philosophy. Meier thought that her dream meant she was losing her sense of self, her American identity and that this cultural dislocation was causing her depression. Dr Meier advised her to return to the United States, which she subsequently did. After her return her depression ended quickly. This woman had also given Meier a detailed sketch of the crumbling hospital in her dreams before she left. Years afterwards, the Japanese attacked China and bombed Wuchang Hospital. The woman sent Meier a copy of Life magazine that had a double page photograph of the partially destroyed hospital. The photographs and her drawing of nine years previously were identical!

I thought this synchronicity of the woman, the hospital, her dream and the eventual bombing of the hospital was a fascinating-though tragic in ways-example of a synchronicity that had a deep personal meaning (via the interpretation of the dream) and also because the dream image had gone beyond the boundaries of the woman's psyche and became a part of physical reality nine years later. "Because of their striking nature, Jung became convinced that such synchronicities were not chance occurences, but were in fact related to the psychological processes of the individuals who experienced them. Since he couldn't conceive of how an occurrence deep in the psyche could cause an event or a series of events in the physical world, at least in the classical sense, he proposed that some new principle must be involved, an acausal connecting principle hitherto unknown to science." The Holographic Universe, pg 79. Leaving synchronicity for a bit and going to some ideas I have talked about here before-how is 'reality' created? -does 'reality' exist independently of conscious observers? Most physicists ignore the implications of the theory of quantum mechanics. They accept the theory and standard interpretation of it, however, they also insist on the reality of quantum systems (in other words the deepest level of 'reality') even when they are not being observed. However, in experiment after experiment pertaining to quantum physics it has been shown that the best description of a quantum state when it is not being observed is an infinite superposition of states. Without an observer nothing is concrete. And of course you can go beyond these deep questions to ask-what constitutes an observer?

"Human consciousness may not be the only thing that participates in the creation of reality-fields. Remote viewing experiments have shown that people can accurately describe distant locations even when there are no human observers present at the locations. Similarly subjects can identify the contents of a sealed box randomly selected from a group of sealed boxes and whose contents are therefore completely unknown. This means that we can do more than just tap into the sense of other people. We can also tap into reality itself to gain information. As bizarre as this sounds, it is not so strange when one remembers that in a holographic universe, consciousness pervades all matter, and "meaning" has an active prescence in both the mental and physical worlds." The Holographic Universe, pg. 145.

In his book The Spectrum of Consciousness, Ken Wilber has some excellent thoughts and information about just who and what the 'observer' in all of us is at the very core of our beings. "Now in speaking of Reality as non-dual consciousness, most of us conjure up ideas of consciousness as somehow being connected with subjectivity. That is, we feel consciousness belongs not to "objects" such as this page but rather to myself as the subject who is supposedly "conscious" of this page. This is of course dualistic to the core. But since consciousness is Reality, and Reality is actually non-dual, it would be much more accurate to view consciousness not as a relative subject confronting objects but as Absolute Subjectivity above the dualism of subject vs. object. Consciousness, as Absolute Subjectivity, belongs exclusively to neither subject not object, but embraces both. In this sense, Absolute Reality is Absolute Subjectivity...Every individual habitually feels that his ego, his self, is the subject of his own experiences, feelings, and thoughts, that his subjective self is now reading the words on this page. And this he expresses by saying "I am aware of myself reading." But the fact that something in me can look at my subjective self, that is, the fact that there exists in me right now an awareness of my "self" reading this page, should show me clearly that my supposedly subjective self is really an object of awareness!" Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness, pages 70 and 71.

I was going to say some extra things here about other aspects of our souls and personalities, things along the lines of how sometimes I wonder if the "dumbing down" of the world and also its surfeit of mundane sensual pleasures (such as the Oreo cookie I am eating now) are intentional? I wonder if there is some part of the human personality that some forces or aspects do not want to go any higher. Sound insane? Yes I know it must to a lot of people-and if you have an opinion against this -please by all means comment. Perhaps these thoughts are best left to be developed in the next post. I am a bit tired and I do not like to tread so much terra incognita when I am not 100 percent wide awake. I would like to leave you with this bit from the always magical and masterful William Blake: To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.

Thanks again everyone for your thoughtful and intelligent comments! I hope to have the next post here in two to four days. The image on top is Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and the beefcake is Jae Garcia from stevo's Hot Men Appreciation Society blog. What a hottie! You have great taste stevo! I will try to include an image for my straight guy and lesbian readers next time;-)

Mind, Soul and Reality

It's very easy. Instead of thinking of things as things, you have a habit. We all have a habit of thinking that everything around us is already a thing, existing without any input, without my choice. You have to banish that kind of thinking...Instead you really have to recognize that even the material world around us, the chairs, the tables, the room, the carpet, the camera included, all of these are nothing but possible movements of consciousness. And I'm choosing moment to moment out of those movements to bring my actual experience into manifestation. This is the only radical thinking that you need to do, but it is so radical. It's so difficult, because our tendency is that the world is already out there, independent of my experience. It is not. Quantum physics has been so clear about it. Heisenberg himself, codiscoverer of quantum physics, said atoms are not things. They're only tendencies. So, instead of thinking of things, you have to think of possibilties. There are possibilites of consciousness.--Amit Goswami Ph.D.

In study after study, whether the person suffered from a psychological disorder or not, Grof found the same general levels of the unconscious were uncovered a step at a time. Again from page 70 of The Holographic Universe: "It was almost as if LSD provided the human consciousness with access to a kind of infinite subway system, a labyrinth of tunnels and byways that existed in the subterranean reaches of the unconsciousness, and one that literally connected everything in the universe with everything else." In the 1960s Grof coined the term transpersonal to describe the experiences where the person "tripping" would visit territories beyond the traditional boundaries of the personality. In the late 1960s, Grof joined with Abraham Maslow and other professionals to found a new branch of psychology called transpersonal psychology. One theory that would explain transpersonal psychology is the holographic model of the universe. A holographic image is created when a single laser beam is split into two seperate beams. The first beam is bounced off the object to be photographed. Then the second beam is made to collide with the first. The resulting interference pattern is recorded on film. The image on the film doesn't resemble anything like the original object. The image looks more like the colliding waves and troughs that are created when a handful of pebbles are thrown into a pond simultaneously. The magic happens when another laser beam (sometimes just a bright light is used) is used to illuminate the interference pattern on the film. A three dimensional image of the object will appear.

These images are so life-like that you can actually walk around them and view them from different angles. If the photographic plate with the holographic interference pattern is broken in half-either of the halves will still contain all the information to recreate the original three dimensional image when illuminated by a laser. The plate can even be broken into fourths and eighths and so on, and will still produce the image when illuminated, although the detail and clarity of the three dimensional image will be compromised. The reason this happens is that unlike normal photographs, every small portion of the holographic film contains all the information recorded in the whole. This reminds me somewhat of a bit of Hindu (I think?) mythology. There is a saying that in the heaven of Indra each pearl reflects the infinity of other pearls -the part does indeed contain the whole. I wonder if this is the way our brains, souls and universe itself are constructed-or at least encoded? The holographic model would explain a lot.

I think one of the most fascinating areas that the holographic model would explain are synchronicities-meaningful coincidences. A great example of a synchronicity that I always think of is from UFO researcher Jacques Vallee's life. In the mid-1970s he was trying to look up information on an obscure group called "The Order of Melchizedek." He hadn't been having any luck in his search. He was in downtown Los Angeles at the time and at one point needed to take a cab. The driver's name of the next cab he got into-A. Melchizedek. Surprised, Vallee later looked in the Los Angeles phone directory to see how common this last name was. There was only one Melchizedek listed in the whole directory for Los Angeles-his cab driver. It was as if Vallee had asked the universe for a Melchizedek and the universe offered him the closest one on hand!

Getting back to Stanislav Grof and transpersonal psychology, it would be a good idea to go back to Michael Talbot's, The Holographic Universe. From pages 70 and 71: "If our current way of looking at reality cannot account for transpersonal events, what new understanding might take its place? Grof believed it is the holographic model. As he points out, the essential characteristics of transpersonal experiences-the feeling that all boundaries are illusory, the lack of distinction between part and the whole, and the interconnectedness of all things-are all qualities one would expect to find in a holographic universe. In addition, he feels the enfolded nature of space and time in the holographic domain explains why transpersonal experiences are not bound by the usual spatial or temporal limitations.

Grof thinks that the almost endless capacity holograms have for information storage and retrieval also accounts for the fact that visions, fantasies, and other "psychological gestalts," all contain an enormous amount of information about an individuals personality. A single image experienced in an LSD session might contain information about a person's attitude toward life in general, a trauma he experienced during childhood, how much self-esteem he has, how he feels about his parents, and how he feels about his marriage-all embodied in the overall metaphor of the scene. Such experiences are holographic in another way, in that each small part of the scene can also contain an entire constellation of information. Thus free association and other analytical techniques performed on the scene's miniscule details can call forth an additional flood of data about the individual involved.

The composite nature of archetypal images can be modeled by the holographic idea. As Grof observes, holography makes it possible to build up a sequence of exposures, such as pictures of every member of a large family, on the same piece of film. When this is done the developed piece of film will contain the image of an individual that represents not one member of the family, but all of them at the same time. "These genuinely composite images represent an exquisite model of a certain type of transpersonal experience, such as the archetypal images of the Cosmic Man, Woman, Mother, Father, Lover, Trickster, Fool, or Martyr," says Grof. A final quote from Grof's Beyond the Brain, that is given in Talbot's book would also be good to end this post with: "Bohm's concept of the unfolded and enfolded orders and the idea that certain important aspects of reality are not accessible to experience and study under ordinary circumstances are of direct relevance for the understanding of unusual states of consciousness. Individuals who have experienced various nonordinary states of consciousness, including well-educated and sophisticated scientists from various disciplines, frequently report that they entered hidden domains of reality that seemed to be authentic and in some sense implicit in, and supraordinated to, everday reality."

I didn't realize when I started this that I was going to begin a whole new series. I had actually thought of keeping this blog "lite" for awhile as I tried to get work done at my other blog. I am going to have to come up with some sort of schedule for when I do work for the two blogs-maybe two days on one-and then two days on the other? I am also not sure how soon posts will be appearing here as I am working from 4 main books and 2 others here and there and do not want to get the information and thoughts hopelessly confused. Still and all I am happy about the new series-one of the books that I will use later down the road brought up a new (to me anyway) idea of how NDEs and encounters with poltergeists and ghosts have so much variety and yet so much the same. The two books by Stanislav Grof that I used to own and wish I still did were Beyond the Brain and The Adventure of Self-Discovery if anyone reading these posts would like to look more into transpersonal psychology and the depth and the variety of the experiences people who were undergoing various forms of transpersonal therapy reported. Thanks again for your extremely intelligent and thoughtful comments! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Talbot

Mind, Soul and Reality

Stanislav Grof has a successful life in the United States these days, however he wasn't always a US citizen and earlier in his career he could not have foreseen the new areas he would explore. Grof began studying nonordinary states of consciousness in the 1950s in his native Prague, Czechoslovakia. Starting out in his career Grof was a believer in the tenets of Marxism and thought that there was no reality beyond the material world we see around us. Many scientists and psychiatrists felt that the unusual states of consciousness induced by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and other psychotropic drugs were nothing more than the brain's way of reacting to a foreign substance. Of course, many scientists probably still feel this way. But while Grof continued his research at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague, he began to feel there was a continuity of experience in his patient's records that was hard to explain by the brain reacting to noxious chemicals theory. "Rather than being unrelated and random, the experiential content seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels of the unconscious," stated Grof in his 1976 book, Realms of the Human Unconscious. What Grof and his colleagues discovered is that serial LSD sessions jumpstarted the psychotherapeutic process and greatly shortened the time needed to treat many psychiatric disorders.

Repressed traumatic memories that had disabled the patient for many years were brought to the surface and the terrible hold they had over the patient was diminished or banished completely. Sometimes such crippling disorders of the mind were even cured including one of the most terrible of them all-schizophrenia. More incredible was the fact that many patients moved beyond personal issues into transpersonal areas that had never before been explored by Western psychology. One common experience was the reliving of what it was like to be in the womb. The following is from page 67 of Michael Talbot's, The Holographic Universe: "At first Grof thought these were just imagined experiences, but as the evidence continued to amass he realized that the knowledge of embryology inherent in the descriptions was often far superior to the patient's previous education in the area. Patients accurately described certain characterisitics of the heart sounds of their mother, the nature of the acoustic phenomena in the peritoneal cavity, specific details about the various cellular and biochemical processes taking place. They also described important thoughts and feelings their mother had during pregnancy and events such as physical trauma she had experienced." There were occasions that Grof could directly question the mother and other people involved in the experience the patient was reporting and was able to verify them.

Even more astonishing, patients began reporting experiences that extended far beyond the boundaries of the ego. They would report what it was like to be other living creatures and even inanimate objects. Patients were also able to explore ancestral memories. Again from page 68 of Talbot's book: "One woman experienced what it was like to be her mother at the age of three and accurately described a frightening event that had befallen her mother at the time. The woman also gave a precise description of the house her mother had lived in as well as the white pinafore she had been wearing-all details her mother later confirmed and admitted she had never talked about before.. Other patients gave equally accurate descriptions of events that had befallen ancestors who had lived decades and even centuries before." Racial and collective memories could also be accessed by the patients. Patients of Slavic descent relived the experience of what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan, to undergo tribal initiation rites, and even to die as a human sacrifice of the Aztecs. Once again both the quality and quantity of the historical facts they reported contained a degree of information that was totally at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. An uneducated patient gave a very insightful and detailed account of Egyptian embalming and mummification procedures-all the way down to what certain amulets symbolized, the materials used, the sizes of those materials and other esoteric data about Egyptian funeral services. Certain patients with no knowledge or connection to the Far East and other areas of the world were able to describe what it was like to have an Asian psyche and also had esoteric knowledge of Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist teachings.

There didn't seem to be a limit to whatever source the patients were acquring there knowledge from. The patients described so many different aspects of reality that the whole array of existence seemed to be with their grasp-knowing what it was like to be a plant, animal, a blood cell, an atom, a star-even the consciousness of the entire planet and even the cosmos itself. The patients would gain eerily accurate precognitive information. At times they also encountered many different types of nonhuman intelligences. Every now and then subjects would seem tto transcend "our" level of reality and perceive other universes and levels of reality. From page 69 of The Holographic Universe, "In one session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a prescence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to either Grof or the young man and seemed totally unrelated to the young man's treatment. Still, Grof could not put it out of his mind. "After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues jokes, had they found out," says Grof. "I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kromeriz and asked if I could speak to Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: 'Our son is not with us anymore; he passed away, we lost him three weeks ago.' " I am calling this a rough draft because as someone whose dance card isn't what you would call full-I forgot a social engagement this afternoon-so I need to get off the puter. When I am back on tomorrow I want to check and make sure the post "reads" right and that I have credited Michael Talbot's book properly. I used to own two books by Stanislav and Christina Grof that had a huge variety of experiences in them in regards to psychotropic and holotropic breathwork therapy-sadly I don't anymore, but I would like to see if any of these experiences are mentioned on the net. I haven't done anything new here in a while and I hope to start a new series soon about many different theories and experiences of the mind and reality. Thanks so much for all of your wonderful comments! http://www.stanislavgrof.com/