Stumbled upon something interesting

Most listeners of "Coast To Coast A.M." have a nodding acquaintance with the "forbidden archeology" theories of Michael Cremo. What is often overlooked is that Cremo's theories have a strong religious foundation: Wikipedia describes Cremo as an "American Hindu creationist" (something that, until now, I did not know). It was Cremo's name that popped into my mind while perusing the Creation Evidence Museum (which apparently has not registered a domain name yet). The artifacts listed on this creationist website are truly fascinating, from a Fortean viewpoint. The site attempts to persuade the general public that these artifacts prove that human beings co-inhabited the earth at the same time as dinosaurs. Years ago, when I was enrolled at a well-known local Christian Bible college, I picked up a pamphlet that tried to argue the same thing. The evidence for evolution, which is almost definitively suggested by the fossil record, would have to be discredited in order for the creationist viewpoint to prevail. I just found it amusing to stumble upon such evidence at a website that espouses a viewpoint that I discarded decades ago, if, indeed, I ever seriously held it.

This general phenomenon of discovering artifacts where they cannot, scientifically, exist is known in Forteana as "out of place artifacts," and science has no explanation for their existence. The preponderance of evidence--in both the fossil record and in contemporary genetics research--overwhelmingly supports the theories of natural selection and evolution... although what we think of as "evolution" may merely be a small part of a much larger, more complex process that is not yet completely documented. The theory of evolution also reinforces the universal perception of time as being linear and progressive. To me, out of place artifacts do not prove or disprove anything, except to suggest that, perhaps, time is not as absolute or as linear as we perceive it to be.... which, to me, is a far more radical and fascinating concept than evolution or creationism.

View outside Hampton's Inn, Cullman

Martin's Package Store, Sweet Water, Alabama

Possible premonition of the Arab Spring

Back in '07, I purchased "Suicide: What Really Happens in the Afterlife?" by Jon Klimo and Pamela Heath. I bought this on a whim in '07 (along with the heavily discredited "The Keepers: An Alien Message for the Human Race" by Jim Sparks). I expected little from the Klimo book--I'm skeptical of channeled material--but I perused it. And I made a mental note of something unusual that I found near the end of the book: A channel / medium indicated that "soon" (within the decade), a shift would occur in the Middle East that would change the consciousness of many in the Arab world, and there would be a turning away from terrorism. This has actually happened, quite dramatically. This change was inconceivable in '06 and '07. I would like to transcribe those sections and present them here. My main criterion for a "real" psychic / prophet / seer is that said seer actually predict the future, and in a dramatic way--none of the usual "there will be an earthquake somewhere in the world" kind of stuff. (By the way--John Hogue was wrong about the hurricane hitting Texas.)

Granted, my promiscuous plundering of various metaphysical texts is in no way scientific, critical, or even representative... But there is presently no formal methodology for studying stuff that doesn't fit into accepted categories of thought.

Unfortunately, there's no digital copy of this book (pirate or otherwise), so looks like I will have to physically transcribe any parts that I want to highlight... which, if they correspond to what I remember reading, will be worth the trouble.

Journey thought the South, part 1.

Mainstream science article describing historical "mass extinction" event

Without even looking for it, I found this article on my Google news home page from a relatively mainstream (though pop) news source. The article drew a "causal link" between an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and a mass extinction event 250 million years ago. Though this is relatively distant history, and it may or may not be relevant to today's controversy over a runaway greenhouse effect, I still think it's interesting to stumble upon an article like this without even looking for it.

Intrusive gods: A re-accessment of Whitley Strieber's "The Key"

I have been hop-skipping through "The Key" and have started to reassess the book's message.  I am finding it as dark and perplexing as I did ten years ago, but I am also seeing new details in it that were invisible to me back then.  I was particularly intrigued by the section, mid-book, on Freemasonry, which meant nothing to me back then, but is, to me now, the focus of my understanding of this book. This short section articulates an obscure truth, which was enough to inspire a second look at the rest of the book.

I still think that the book is dark and catastrophic (although if, in fact, the "Northern" civilization is soon destroyed in a massive climate disruption, any survivors would likely say that it was remarkably prescient).  It is a melange of several conflicting strains of belief and philosophy.  There is a strong theme of conventional religiosity (particularly in the numerous references to the conventional "God," "sin," and "surrendering" to the "will" of God) that would be quite welcome in a Catholic diocese (most of 'em, anyway) side-by-side a strong Darwinian theme that warns humanity to evolve or die, with the adviso that "God" (or the aliens) will not lift a finger to save us if we don't. There's a liberal dose of scientific humanism that counsels humanity to extend its native intelligence in the construction of "intelligent machines" to solve the existential challenges that we face, along with significant strains of old-skool gnosticism with preaches "ascenscion" and cultivation of a "radiant body" that will free the soul from the evolutionary wheel, with dire warnings that if the planet is destroyed, those souls that are not "radiant" will be forever chained to a dead world, eternally prevented from ascending.

It is all provocative and intriguing stuff, but as skeptics have noticed, it doesn't quite fit together and is inherently contradictory. But I now think that this is because "The Key" is a brittle, brutal, but faithful Cliff Notes summary of the world and philosophies of Whitley Strieber, exteriorized, with all its inherent contradictions, occasional absurdities, and overall brilliance.  It is Truth as he sees it.  And I think that, distilled to its essence, a lot of it is true.

Before the time of our separation from Nature, the mythical era when the gods walked among us, various angels, demigods, and nature spirits visited humans and dispensed assorted teachings and truths. Per Seth, our species chose separate itself from Nature in a grand experiment--to construct the objectified material world that we think we possess, but no longer are part of. God was exiled to the sky, with his truths codified in texts and dispensed by priests.

There was an acknowledgment, however, that when the experiment concluded--when it had run its course--the human race would rejoin Nature, bringing with it the lessons it had learned. Seth is quite specific in describing the transition as a time of danger--that if it was not navigated successfully, the human race would "retreat" as the dominant species on the planet and be extinguished. The "Master" is more specific--he mentions that we have several "decades" from his visit (1998) to prepare, and if we failed to prepare, our race would be extinguished--as it indeed almost has been in previous cataclysms. The Master identifies two mechanisms that will force the transition--one specific (sudden climate change) and one implicit (the exhaustion of our natural resources).

In 1998--indeed, in the early '70s, when "Seth Speaks" was written--these mechanisms were dimly glimpsed possibilities; but with each approaching year, the growing breakage in our world economy, caused by our excess consumption of scarce resources, and our increasingly disruptive weather, cause the approaching headlights to grow brighter. The future that the Master warned about is now a probability.

Seth foresaw several potential outcomes of this challenge. While he acknowledged that our world might be destroyed, his hope--his belief--was that our race would rise to its challenges and "ascend"--transcend our current limitations, creating a new world and transforming the species in the process.  Like the Master, Seth foresaw the development of intelligent machines to aid the process. The walls that currently separate us from the knowledge of past lives would fall, along with the barriers that keep us from perceiving the "energetic" world and communicating with the dead. These developments were set in our future as probabilities that would serve as both signposts and as aids of the transition.

As of this writing, 2011, the mechanisms described by both the "Master" and implied by Seth are becoming more clearly focused. We can measure the dwindling amount of oil left in the ground--estimate the increasing demand for it by the developing world--and, by doing a few calculations, see that petroleum--the foundation of our world economy, is running out. We can measure the increase of carbon in the oceans--observe the growing dead zones, the extermination of sea life, the bleaching of the coastal coral--and make a rough guesstimate of when our oceans will be dead. We can measure not only the increase of summer arctic temperatures but, more importantly, the acceleration of the annual increases--and plot a rough graph of when the tipping point, or trigger, of sudden climate change will happen.

Counter-balancing this has been an exponential growth in the development of computer technology that will likely reach a point of singularity, also in the near future. Tools and implements of a developing mass consciousness--the most visible example of which is the Internet (for now, I'd like to exclude Facebook)--are also accelerating. Breakthroughs are occurring in consciousness studies, and credentialed scientists are now arguing that consciousness does survive physical death and that it is possible to communicate with the "energetic" world that they inhabit.

If you accept the framework proposed by the "Master"--one of a dying world with finite resources and an existential deadline--the parameters are clear.  We will have to succeed--ascend--transcend--before the bottom drops out. Not a month, or a minute, later.

I've spent a lot of thought imagining a civilization that metaphorically rejoins Nature.  Such a civilization would inhabit an experiential reality that, for now, might be unrecognizable to us. But we would find relics of such a future in our "past." We now think of our gods as alien beings, apart from us; but perhaps the "gods" are a part of the Nature, walking among us, even barging into our hotel rooms (or exiting craft) to dispense knowledge, information, and other nifty stuff.  We can accept or reject the information, but we must accustom ourselves to such intrusions.  The emergence of intrusive gods might be signposts that our present experiment in physical consciousness is wrapping up, and that we'd best prepare for the transition.

Confirmation of Whitley Strieber's sudden climate change--from a surprising source

I was listening to "Earth And Sky" this morning on my way to work and was startled to hear a description of a sudden climate change scenario that was practically identical to the one that has been given by Whitley Strieber for the past few years.  Actually, I had just finished listening to the discussion on climate recently posted in the Unknowncountry subscribers section.  Per geologist Richard Alley: about 11,000 years ago, Greenland's temperature rose by about 15 degrees Fahrenheit over a ten-year period.  The cause: "melting polar ice, which altered ocean circulation and weather patterns."  And: "As today’s climate warms, ice is again melting near Earth’s poles."

This is probably a fairly conservative analysis; Whitley's climate change scenario happens in the course of a year or two, which actually sounds more probable than a ten-year shift--if you factor in evaporating pools of methane.  However, this is a radical statement by a mainstream scientist, even if he is "just" a geologist, and not a climatologist.

I would like to find the exact quotation in The Key that specifies that a shift in ocean currents would bring about sudden climate change.  If it is there, it would be significant.  I'm not sure to what extent Whitley's views on climate change has been informed by scientific research. While it is likely that climatologists have been too compromised by the political mongering over climate change, a geologist would theoretically have no such axe to grind.

While for a long time I have considered the "superstorm" scenario possible--but by no means likely--I'm willing to give it a greater than 50/50 chance of happening--with the question now being "when," not "if."

Whitley Strieber's past lifetime hypnosis regression

The major reason that I sprung for an unknowncountry.com subscription was to download Whitley Strieber's hypnosis session, where he is regressed to an apparent past lifetime circa 200 AD, in Rome. I am fascinated with that era--not really for religious reasons, but for historical ones--but historical records, especially relating to the nascent Christian religion, are few and far between.

Seth once said that if you could hop into a time machine and go back to the first century AD, you probably would not find much of what you would expect to find, if your source of history was the New Testament. I suspect that this is correct--but I would still like to try. Barring a discovery of a second Dead Sea Scrolls, we have few resources that could inform us about this period, except unconventional ones--the most unconventional being that old bugaboo, hypnosis, to plumb what purports to be past lives.

I won't wade into the hypnosis debate, except to notice that there appears to be some interesting parallels between hypnotically-retrieved material, and dreams. Some of the information retrieved from these sources is strikingly valid and prescient, and some of it seems pure fantasy--no correspondence at all to physical reality. Most serious students of the paranormal don't have the patience or desire to sort out what from what.

Still, I think that it's intriguing, even if, in the end, it's not "true."

So, was the Strieber hypnosis session worth the subscription? I would say that it was--despite all the caveats. My primary quibble with the session is that hypnosis was apparently induced over the phone; second, it was induced by a practitioner who is not, to my knowledge, medically certified to conduct what should be a medical procedure.

Despite all this, what resulted was very interesting. But I want to compare it to two other interesting sources: "Seth Speaks," and the remote view by Joe McMoneagle, and come back with a more informed opinion of it.

The questions I am forming is this: What if there really was an advanced being known as Jesus, born when and where history tells us he was--but that much of the true record of that period has been lost, distorted, or deliberately altered? What events, then, could explain how an obscure Jewish sect could, within a couple of centuries, subsume the Roman empire and become a persistent world religion lasting two thousand years?

What we've been officially given as history of this period--the "New Testament"--really does not explain this phenomenon... which is why many Biblical scholars identify themselves as agnostic.

The Whitley Strieber hypnosis session--for all its methodological flaws--gives hints of what might have really happened, and what it means.