At this point in my life, I'm ready to move on to reading "normal" material, beyond the metaphysical, but interesting books, like the above, manage to reel me in. The 9/11 attacks were traumatic on both a personal and national level, and though they have begun (fortunately) to recede somewhat in the collective memory, we daily live with the effects of that singular event. The obtrusive security state, the delusions of the alternative paranormal field, the endless wars, and the dysfunction of the American political process, arguably, began here. This book is an effort to find meaning in that trauma from a spiritual perspective.
In my opinion, McEneaney's book is a landmark work in the emerging "New Thought" belief system, which I see as supplanting conventional religions in our century. It is impeccably researched, sensitively written, and utterly sincere, and any open-minded reader will have to acknowledge that it presents a compelling case that a greater "unknown" reality guides the observed physical one.
The book is a collection of premonitions, synchronistic events, and actual post-death materializations of victims of the 9/11 tragedy. I can't even begin to summarize all that's presented, but these are the things that I noticed as significant:
The 9/11 victims that are examined all had premonitions, of varying degrees, of their impending death. The premonitions almost always began in the summer of 2001, and peaked in the weekend before the attack.
The victims seemed to be of an unusually high moral character, admired by co-workers, loved by family, happy, devoted, and characterized by a high degree of selflessness, going above and beyond to help those less fortunate.
Universally, the victims managed to convey to their surviving friends and family that while they subconsciously foresaw the event, and could have avoided it, they chose not to.
[To be continued]
Monday, May 21, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Richard Dolan's new podcast
I was casting around for something new to listen to when I discovered that Richard Dolan--the guest of many paranormal shows--has launched his own podcast. Since it is called "Truth Out," I expected a sort of ramble-rousing political screed, but I was pleasantly surprised that his first three-hour solo podcast kept my attention without difficulty, even though I'm only peripherally interested in UFOs nowadays. Plus, he has cooler bumper music than Coast. So I'm downloading more.
Among the stuff he covered.... He addressed, tangentially, Alex Jones, who I've always thought was unbalanced. He brought up some valid points reiterating the view of many in the paranormal counterculture, that the American republic is turning into an Orwellian police state. He related an encounter with Glenn Beck that made Beck sound mainstream. He told some fascinating UFO stories. Richard Dolan is sure to add some intellectual heft to the paranormal counterculture, which is in dire need of it. I'm able to listen to him without my usual filters and BS detectors, knowing that he has thought about what he says before saying it.
There is only one observation that I would like to make, and that's on the issue of government secrecy. I think that most of us who were persuaded to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 have been very disappointed with his administration's tendency to expand the police state apparatus that his predecessor developed. However, if you take a long, careful look at history, you can discover that with every extremist tendency or movement, there has always been a balancing counter-movement. I believe that the Internet was developed, and has exploded as it has, in direct response to the increasing authoritarianism of our age. True, if you watch CNN or the other mainstream news outlets (which I don't), you are essentially getting establishment propaganda, and if that's all we had, we'd be lost. But that's not all we have. We have a choice. And I predict that in twenty or so years, any regime that aligns itself with reactionary authoritarianism will fall. This is why I believe that China, for all its prosperity, cannot continue along its current path as an authoritarian state. And neither can the United States.
Among the stuff he covered.... He addressed, tangentially, Alex Jones, who I've always thought was unbalanced. He brought up some valid points reiterating the view of many in the paranormal counterculture, that the American republic is turning into an Orwellian police state. He related an encounter with Glenn Beck that made Beck sound mainstream. He told some fascinating UFO stories. Richard Dolan is sure to add some intellectual heft to the paranormal counterculture, which is in dire need of it. I'm able to listen to him without my usual filters and BS detectors, knowing that he has thought about what he says before saying it.
There is only one observation that I would like to make, and that's on the issue of government secrecy. I think that most of us who were persuaded to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 have been very disappointed with his administration's tendency to expand the police state apparatus that his predecessor developed. However, if you take a long, careful look at history, you can discover that with every extremist tendency or movement, there has always been a balancing counter-movement. I believe that the Internet was developed, and has exploded as it has, in direct response to the increasing authoritarianism of our age. True, if you watch CNN or the other mainstream news outlets (which I don't), you are essentially getting establishment propaganda, and if that's all we had, we'd be lost. But that's not all we have. We have a choice. And I predict that in twenty or so years, any regime that aligns itself with reactionary authoritarianism will fall. This is why I believe that China, for all its prosperity, cannot continue along its current path as an authoritarian state. And neither can the United States.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Found a curious ebook on amazon.com...
It is called "The Lives Of Jesus" by Eldon Peat. I can't find much out about the author, and there are no reviews of the book--but it's free, and it's a top-seller in the New Age / Reincarnation category at Amazon.com.
Purportedly, it was channeled from the "Akashic records," a claim that automatically invites skepticism, but it doesn't read like any channeled work I've read. Quite the contrary, it is both scholarly and contemporary. A human being seems to have written it.
The book's claim is one that I happen to agree with: That Jesus was, contrary to myth, an ordinary man, born in a normal way, who lived a normal life, but who had extraordinary charisma and a powerful message. The true history of the life of Jesus has been distorted, twisted, and mythologized, but something happened in the first century C.E. involving this person that, within a couple of centuries, propelled a local Jewish sect to world domination and contributed to the downfall of one of the most odious and brutal empires ever to inhabit the planet.
This singular feat cannot be easily explained away as the act of a simple carpenter's son, which leaves those of us who reject many of the core tenets of established Christianity searching for clues of what, instead, it was.
Part of me wants to dismiss the book as a fabrication, yet I can't disagree with its principle arguments, and the historical data seems to check out.
As an example, the author makes a couple of obscure observations about the Essenes that ring true. I have never embraced the mainstream scholarly argument that the Essenes lived an ascetic life, and the invisible author of this book says that they most assuredly didn't. The book also argues that many of the Essene texts that were extant were forgeries--something that "Seth" goes to great length discussing in "Seth Speaks"-- and that these forgeries inadvertently formed the basis of a significant portion of Christian mythology.
For the moment, this book is falling into my self-defined category of "too internally and externally consistent to be true"--on my assumption that "truth" is both messy and ambiguous--but I welcome any input from any stumblers-upon this entry who might wish to instruct me otherwise.
Postscript: I've decided that "The Lives Of Jesus" is a well-written fictional narrative that reminds me of the alternative history genre. It reads too much like a novel. (The preface hints that Eldon Peat was not the actual author, which, if I am interpreting this correctly, is strange.) And I doubt that it's channeled, for the reasons above.
Purportedly, it was channeled from the "Akashic records," a claim that automatically invites skepticism, but it doesn't read like any channeled work I've read. Quite the contrary, it is both scholarly and contemporary. A human being seems to have written it.
The book's claim is one that I happen to agree with: That Jesus was, contrary to myth, an ordinary man, born in a normal way, who lived a normal life, but who had extraordinary charisma and a powerful message. The true history of the life of Jesus has been distorted, twisted, and mythologized, but something happened in the first century C.E. involving this person that, within a couple of centuries, propelled a local Jewish sect to world domination and contributed to the downfall of one of the most odious and brutal empires ever to inhabit the planet.
This singular feat cannot be easily explained away as the act of a simple carpenter's son, which leaves those of us who reject many of the core tenets of established Christianity searching for clues of what, instead, it was.
Part of me wants to dismiss the book as a fabrication, yet I can't disagree with its principle arguments, and the historical data seems to check out.
As an example, the author makes a couple of obscure observations about the Essenes that ring true. I have never embraced the mainstream scholarly argument that the Essenes lived an ascetic life, and the invisible author of this book says that they most assuredly didn't. The book also argues that many of the Essene texts that were extant were forgeries--something that "Seth" goes to great length discussing in "Seth Speaks"-- and that these forgeries inadvertently formed the basis of a significant portion of Christian mythology.
For the moment, this book is falling into my self-defined category of "too internally and externally consistent to be true"--on my assumption that "truth" is both messy and ambiguous--but I welcome any input from any stumblers-upon this entry who might wish to instruct me otherwise.
Postscript: I've decided that "The Lives Of Jesus" is a well-written fictional narrative that reminds me of the alternative history genre. It reads too much like a novel. (The preface hints that Eldon Peat was not the actual author, which, if I am interpreting this correctly, is strange.) And I doubt that it's channeled, for the reasons above.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
First impressions of the Kindle Fire
The Kindle Fire has been the only Android tablet that I've been interested in buying. I picked up a refurb unit for the good price of $139 and have been using it all weekend. Compared to my iPad "3," its like driving a Subaru after riding in a Porshe--reliable, no-frills, and adequate, which is not a bad thing. It all depends on what you want--and expect--a tablet to do.
Basically, the Fire is a gateway drug to Amazon Prime. Included with the purchase of a Fire is "one free month" of Amazon Prime. You can get this free month anyway without a Kindle, but the main attraction of Prime for me--the ability to "borrow" Kindle books for free--is worth the price, and these borrowed Kindle books can apparently be viewed only on the Kindle. They do not show up in my iOS Kindle apps. Assuming I borrow one $8 book a month, the Prime account pays for itself.
The overall user experience of the Fire is fair-to-good. The Android tablet can do a few things that an iOS device can't. I can browse the entire file structure... I can download and save YouTube videos. I can access Flash content, theoretically--I've yet to see any Flash content--and the essential apps seem to be there. There's no DropBox, but a third-party app called "File Expert" can access DropBox folders. There's no Opera, but there's something called "Maxthon" that is actually better than Opera, and I use it whenever I don't want to bother with Silk's irksome dependence on Amazon's cloud server buffering. However, the iPad user experience is so superior to the Droid tablet's that one doesn't miss any extra marginal functionality that the "more open" Droid OS might offer. The Fire is clunkier than the iPad; basic functions like typing, error-correction, system-wide navagation are far less intuitive and elegant than the iPad's. Not to mention--the Fire is only secondarily a Droid tablet. If is primarily a content delivery system that just happens to use a fork of the Android OS.
It is apparent that Amazon is using the Fire to break Apple's monopoly on digital content, which is both laudible and understandable. But in so doing, they are creating yet another walled content garden--albeit one with much more content. As such, the iPad holds the edge. I can import and access digital content from both Google and Amazon on the iPad, whereas there appear to be no Google apps for the Fire. This prevents the Fire from being a full-fledged tablet. It is essentially a platform the delivery of Amazon.com content, with a few common apps thrown in.
I am seeing the Apple - Windows wars of the early '90s being repeated, and I fear that the outcome will be same. Apple introduces a quality device that is both disruptive and transformative, changing the entire user experience, only to have hungrier companies copy the form, hardware, and intellectual property of said device, and produce a cheaper, more basic knockoff. So while the iPad will live on, I am not sure that it will remain the dominant player in the category that it trailblazed. Which, depending on your point of view, can be good or bad.
(Sent from my Kindle Fire)
Basically, the Fire is a gateway drug to Amazon Prime. Included with the purchase of a Fire is "one free month" of Amazon Prime. You can get this free month anyway without a Kindle, but the main attraction of Prime for me--the ability to "borrow" Kindle books for free--is worth the price, and these borrowed Kindle books can apparently be viewed only on the Kindle. They do not show up in my iOS Kindle apps. Assuming I borrow one $8 book a month, the Prime account pays for itself.
The overall user experience of the Fire is fair-to-good. The Android tablet can do a few things that an iOS device can't. I can browse the entire file structure... I can download and save YouTube videos. I can access Flash content, theoretically--I've yet to see any Flash content--and the essential apps seem to be there. There's no DropBox, but a third-party app called "File Expert" can access DropBox folders. There's no Opera, but there's something called "Maxthon" that is actually better than Opera, and I use it whenever I don't want to bother with Silk's irksome dependence on Amazon's cloud server buffering. However, the iPad user experience is so superior to the Droid tablet's that one doesn't miss any extra marginal functionality that the "more open" Droid OS might offer. The Fire is clunkier than the iPad; basic functions like typing, error-correction, system-wide navagation are far less intuitive and elegant than the iPad's. Not to mention--the Fire is only secondarily a Droid tablet. If is primarily a content delivery system that just happens to use a fork of the Android OS.
It is apparent that Amazon is using the Fire to break Apple's monopoly on digital content, which is both laudible and understandable. But in so doing, they are creating yet another walled content garden--albeit one with much more content. As such, the iPad holds the edge. I can import and access digital content from both Google and Amazon on the iPad, whereas there appear to be no Google apps for the Fire. This prevents the Fire from being a full-fledged tablet. It is essentially a platform the delivery of Amazon.com content, with a few common apps thrown in.
I am seeing the Apple - Windows wars of the early '90s being repeated, and I fear that the outcome will be same. Apple introduces a quality device that is both disruptive and transformative, changing the entire user experience, only to have hungrier companies copy the form, hardware, and intellectual property of said device, and produce a cheaper, more basic knockoff. So while the iPad will live on, I am not sure that it will remain the dominant player in the category that it trailblazed. Which, depending on your point of view, can be good or bad.
(Sent from my Kindle Fire)
Friday, May 4, 2012
The template of meaning
I've had an interesting life, philosophically speaking. At a very young age, influenced by the humanism of Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek," I was an atheist. In my teen years I joined a fundamentalist Christian church while simultaneously dabbling in emerging New Age philosophies. I then became an agnostic, which I remained throughout the '90s. I have sampled many beliefs and religions, discarding much, retaining some core insights.
I now hold, as a core belief, something that most Southern Americans are taught from an early age to believe: that there is meaning and purpose behind human experience, and there is a positive guiding force that moves human events... And that this guiding "force" can be engaged; that we can walk in partnership with it.
Unlike others, however, I arrived at this belief through personal experience, and despite the subtext of catastrophism that informs both the American religious mainstream, and the extremes of New Age and paranormal ideology.
I can't rule out the very real possibility that I believe the way I do, and interpret reality in this way, because it is how I want reality to be; that I'm projecting onto my experiential reality a template of meaning, and cherry-picking the memory of my experiences to conform to this belief.
Furthermore, my readers may strongly disagree with my view of reality. They may insist that events are generated by random occurrences of biological action, or rather psychological gestalts that evolved from primal survival mechanisms, that have no connection to an altruistic "creator," or first cause. We throw the dice, and what we get, we get... And nothing from my experience will convince them otherwise.
Such believers may well be "right." In fact, I'm sure that they are... just as I am "right." Because, in the end, the human mind / brain is a powerful reality-creating tool, powerful enough to mould a reality that faithfully, consistently, and measurably gives us what we believe that it will. To peek behind the curtain, to glimpse the ultimate nature of reality, is the goal of both the materialist particle physicist working on the frontiers of science, and the humble metaphysical blogger working on the fringes.
I now hold, as a core belief, something that most Southern Americans are taught from an early age to believe: that there is meaning and purpose behind human experience, and there is a positive guiding force that moves human events... And that this guiding "force" can be engaged; that we can walk in partnership with it.
Unlike others, however, I arrived at this belief through personal experience, and despite the subtext of catastrophism that informs both the American religious mainstream, and the extremes of New Age and paranormal ideology.
I can't rule out the very real possibility that I believe the way I do, and interpret reality in this way, because it is how I want reality to be; that I'm projecting onto my experiential reality a template of meaning, and cherry-picking the memory of my experiences to conform to this belief.
Furthermore, my readers may strongly disagree with my view of reality. They may insist that events are generated by random occurrences of biological action, or rather psychological gestalts that evolved from primal survival mechanisms, that have no connection to an altruistic "creator," or first cause. We throw the dice, and what we get, we get... And nothing from my experience will convince them otherwise.
Such believers may well be "right." In fact, I'm sure that they are... just as I am "right." Because, in the end, the human mind / brain is a powerful reality-creating tool, powerful enough to mould a reality that faithfully, consistently, and measurably gives us what we believe that it will. To peek behind the curtain, to glimpse the ultimate nature of reality, is the goal of both the materialist particle physicist working on the frontiers of science, and the humble metaphysical blogger working on the fringes.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Unusual NDE
This account of an NDE by a woman who almost died during childbirth was relayed to me third-hand, but I'm personally acquainted with the experiencer, and I consider her account to be true. To my knowledge, she's not a paranormalist. For many years, she belonged to a fundamentalist Christian denomination, and as far as I know, fundamentalism is the main filter through which she views the "supernatural."
Her NDE happened in the 1990s in a hospital, following a very difficult pregnancy. She said that a man appeared beside her bedside and said, simply, "It's your time," and indicated that she should follow him. She was an unwed single mother, and she said, "I can't leave; there's no one to take care of my son." The man the looked up, then back down at the mother, and said, "You're right." The man then left. After he was gone, demonic-appearing forms rose up from the floor and tried to persuade her that what she had just experienced was an illusion.
I regard this as a genuine NDE... Unlike most of the published NDEs, this individual was supposed to die. In most classic NDEs, the experiencers are near death but are told, "It's not your time." I think that this is an important distinction.
Why the consistent references in these accounts to "your time"? This phrase runs throughout NDE accounts, but as far as I know, no researcher has wondered why. To me, it implies that while our lives are governed by free will choices and consequences, karma, life plans followed or not followed, our "time" is less negotiable. It is an absolute, in most cases. (Some NDEers are given a choice whether to "stay" or not, but I suspect these accounts are rare.)
The arrival of demonic-seeming entities at the end of the experience is also a feature that's common to many supra-physical experiences. Be it contemporary men-in-black who lecture experiencers that they did not actually see a UFO, to the various historical devils that have tried to persuade the righteous to abandon monotheism, these dark beings seem to know just when to show up--immediately after the transcendent encounter. Never before, never during--but immediately after. Perhaps they are not so much evil as they are necessary. Perhaps our physical world must have this dichotomy to function in any useful way.
Her NDE happened in the 1990s in a hospital, following a very difficult pregnancy. She said that a man appeared beside her bedside and said, simply, "It's your time," and indicated that she should follow him. She was an unwed single mother, and she said, "I can't leave; there's no one to take care of my son." The man the looked up, then back down at the mother, and said, "You're right." The man then left. After he was gone, demonic-appearing forms rose up from the floor and tried to persuade her that what she had just experienced was an illusion.
I regard this as a genuine NDE... Unlike most of the published NDEs, this individual was supposed to die. In most classic NDEs, the experiencers are near death but are told, "It's not your time." I think that this is an important distinction.
Why the consistent references in these accounts to "your time"? This phrase runs throughout NDE accounts, but as far as I know, no researcher has wondered why. To me, it implies that while our lives are governed by free will choices and consequences, karma, life plans followed or not followed, our "time" is less negotiable. It is an absolute, in most cases. (Some NDEers are given a choice whether to "stay" or not, but I suspect these accounts are rare.)
The arrival of demonic-seeming entities at the end of the experience is also a feature that's common to many supra-physical experiences. Be it contemporary men-in-black who lecture experiencers that they did not actually see a UFO, to the various historical devils that have tried to persuade the righteous to abandon monotheism, these dark beings seem to know just when to show up--immediately after the transcendent encounter. Never before, never during--but immediately after. Perhaps they are not so much evil as they are necessary. Perhaps our physical world must have this dichotomy to function in any useful way.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Rick Stack on Coast To Coast, April 5, 2012
What to say? What else, except to say that it's about time that a "Sethie" was invited to the "official" forum of the para-normal--though Jane Roberts herself declined, I think, to appear on the Long John Nebel show, a distant precursor to the above.
Mr. Stack did a maestro job of the impossible--summarizing, in one hundred words or less, the "Sethian" philosophy to a somewhat skeptical George Noory, who was tripped up by Seth's notions of good and evil--as are many others, including myself.... It's just that I've been exposed to them for so long that they no longer shock me.
The good / evil dichotomy is such a fundamental of our reality that I really wonder whether it's useful to tell people that "there's no such thing as evil." Better, as Seth said, to be good, if you believe that there is an evil.
I'm hoping that a few people were intrigued enough by the Coast episode to check out the Seth stuff. It's not for everyone. But it deserves more exposure.
The material has radically transformed me, and can others. Early on, Seth told Jane that they would write many books and "change the world" with them. This world could use a new coat of paint about now.
Mr. Stack did a maestro job of the impossible--summarizing, in one hundred words or less, the "Sethian" philosophy to a somewhat skeptical George Noory, who was tripped up by Seth's notions of good and evil--as are many others, including myself.... It's just that I've been exposed to them for so long that they no longer shock me.
The good / evil dichotomy is such a fundamental of our reality that I really wonder whether it's useful to tell people that "there's no such thing as evil." Better, as Seth said, to be good, if you believe that there is an evil.
I'm hoping that a few people were intrigued enough by the Coast episode to check out the Seth stuff. It's not for everyone. But it deserves more exposure.
The material has radically transformed me, and can others. Early on, Seth told Jane that they would write many books and "change the world" with them. This world could use a new coat of paint about now.
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