"Other dimensions"

[daniel]

Scientific paradigms tend to shape conceptual paradigms in many other fields. The underlying paradigms of 19th century disciplines ranging from economics to anthropology were transformed by the evolutionary theory of Darwin and the gravitational theory of Newton. If we now know that particles can communicate instantly over infinite distances, that electrons are both wave and particle, that ten dimensions of space-time exist, that the observer changes what is observed, then those new paradigms will influence and reshape all of our disciplines eventually – and the sooner the better!
And isn’t it interesting, considers this new information, that shamans and mystics have spoken of many "other dimensions" since the beginning? That the Native Americans, for instance, describe Peyote as a "plant that sees in six dimensions"? Isn’t it at least theoretically possible that they know something?

[polyploidy]

I would like to share a though I've had about something similar...
I dont generally give much thought to Atlantis, I usually chalk it up to decorative writing by Plato that has been grossly misunderstood. After all there are no artifacts found and there is no way to place it geographically. One can only find literature and art describing it. However, after my first year to BM (2000), which by the way was with Mark and was my first meeting with him, I began to think about this lost civilization a little differently.
Perhaps Atlantis is a state of collective consciousness, like a condition in humanity that is always possible and sometimes even comes into being, a state like the one that gives rise to BM. And perhaps a prerequisite to this state is leave no trace, which would explain why Atlantis can not be traced to a specific geographic spot. If people of the future looked for an artifact of BM they would find nothing tying it to the Black Rock Desert, nothing but text and images that is because we leave no trace. And like Atlantis people of the future would find art and literature but it would be confusing as this stuff would be littered all over the world and not near this site. When you then apply descriptions of Atlantis, its advanced technology, it's reckless spirit and it's seeming chaos in a utopian society, it fits neatly into a description of BM. In fact, I find descriptions of BM to sound a whole lot like descriptions of Atlantis.
So my thoughts of late are that Atlantis may have existed, may always exist (in possibility) but may come into being only when the collective consciousness is there to make it so, as it has in our time at BM. So I now chose to say, I have dual citizenship: Black Rock City and Atlantis.
I cant help but add to this that we're approaching the age of aquarius and that the pleadies are nearing our orbit in their 28k year cycle (2012) and that all of this may just be bits of a larger whole.
Any thoughts?

[daniel]

Thanks for your thoughts on Atlantis. I had similar thoughts when I went and visited the Secoya Indians in the Amazon. They have a high spiritual culture, live completely symbiotically with nature, and "leave no trace." You can read my account of the trip on the website.

At this point I am pretty much "converted" to or at least somewhat overwhelmed by the esoteric ideas of Rudolf Steiner, who writes fabulously about Atlantean society in his book Cosmic Memory. He states that humanity was in a less fully physicalized state during the Atlantean era – the Earth was also less hard. The air was thicker and the water was like vapor. The Atlanteans had fantastic magical abliities and technologies using nature. They could pilot their flying machines with the power they extracted from a single seed for instance. However, they ultimately caused a huge catastrophe – meteor crash, pole reversal, etc. - by using their powers unwisely. The escapees from Atlantis became the Egyptian, Maya, Celts, etcetera. According to Steiner, this earlier, lost Atlantean period existed for hundreds of thousands of years.

I am also interested in the thesis of some radical Egyptologists who think that Egypt existed for 34 or 36,000 years (which is what their records say) and the Sphinx is at least that old. The historian John Anthony West thinks that he can prove this with the help of some geologists. Early Egyptian monuments are the best ones, suggesting that Egyptian culture did not evolve but declined - in other words it was actually a bequest from a higher civilization (Atlantean?) that disappeared.

[zaney_guy]

When Maria Sabina answered Wasson's question re. his daughter after his initial ceremony, was it luck that her answer was correct, or had she seen into that space at which we exist as intertwined energies, regardlesss of physical distances... we all possess some dedgree of "intuition", but to what extent are we tapping into the binding forces of life? When the ayahuscaeros tell us that the secrets of tryptamine potentiation by MAOIs were revealed by the plants themselves, why is this a challenge to our credulity, do people think they're lying?? I guess what i'm trying to say is that it seems evident that there ARE levels of existence that we don't perceive. Morals seem to fall into the catagory of some binding force of life for those that choose to listen, that sounds religious or didactic, it's not meant to be... but collective memory, understanding, whatever, seems to include all life, and if perhaps ingested compounds provide keys to these insights,how interesting.. your thoughts on atlantis are interesting, though they have just found physical objects (ruins?) of unprecedented size and organisation on the sea floor off the coast of Cuba, so perhaps Atlantis and a physical locality as well as a meta-collective. pfieffer, a colleague of Steiner used gas chromatography to define between organically grown, healthy plants, and impoverished or sick plants. what we eat, not only the recognised "psychoactives" but all forms of ingested matter must affect our health, awareness, intuitive capacity, etc...
hope i haven't gone off the track or missed the point too much..

[saskboy]

If you think the sooner the better, you should check out a book by David W Mann called A Simple theory of the Self. He builds a mathematical model of the self. I thought it was interesting. However, I read it reflexively. And prefer to go in the other direction.

I think that we have to do the opposite. The shamans do know. Their knowledge does not need to be validated by religion of rationalism - science.

Science has polluted our language to such a high degree that we don't notice it anymore. Ivan Illich has remarked the computer is the root metaphor of our age. (What am I doing now? Yes I know) We communicate information to each other rather than talking. We refer to families as dysfunctional rather than sad. Rewrite the opening lines to Anna Karenina in your head.

Uwe Porksen has made a study of scientific words that have corrupted everyday speech such as development, strategic plan, system. These words are mean everything to everbody and as a result are meaningless, but politicians and experts can use them to discredit knowledge that they don't agree with such as shamanism. "Unscientific"

We are trapped in the Cartesian nightmare (Illich's phrase again, I think) where space is defined as three dimensional rather than as a social creation. Important if you are an Indian in the jungle compared to an oil company executive staring at a map.

I think the point of going on these types of journey's is to break the stranglehold that science has on our imaginations. Create a new language. Discover/recover ways of seeing.

Kuhn said he prefered his critics to his admirers. Feyerabend could be considered of the former. If there ever was a philosopher who could defend and support knowledge of shamanism. it's him.
Check out this link.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/feyerabe.htm

More on Feyerabend later.

Sorry for the scattered thoughts as I am very tired, but I wanted to get this started and off my chest.

Over,

John

[ November 17, 2002, 10:07 AM: Message edited by: saskboy ]

[michael heany]

For a good paradigm-shifter, read "The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena" by Dean Radin.

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by daniel:
Scientific paradigms tend to shape conceptual paradigms in many other fields.While reading your account of the DPT "beings" in BOTH, it occurred to me that just as iboga has an iboga spirit and mushrooms a mushroom spirit, DPT would have a DPT spirit. To me it's not surprising that you would experience DPT – a product of the scientific paradigm – as "icy, annihilating," with a "sci-fi quality," and "unmammalian, futuristic, inhuman."

[daniel]

Thanks Dragonfly, MH, and saskboy for good posts.

Really there are several aspects to what we are talking about here. The first is "paradigm busting," recognizing the mainstream "rationalist" paradigm deserves scrapping. Second is trying to formulate and articulate a new paradigm whether through "The Conscious Universe," Feyereband, Walter Benjamin, etc. This new paradigm recognizes the truth in the occult/shamanic perspective and tries to understand it at a higher order of rationality.

Third, is what the hell do we do with this new information, as human beings trapped in a system that is suiciding itself? Because this is marginal territory, there is no possibility of some kind of institutional or university-like approach, which might help. (Just on the airplane, I had a kind of sci-fi vision of teams of ambitious psychonauts in comfortable pods sent out to systematically explore the imaginal realms. I suppose Tibetan Buddhists do this without drugs).

I just came from the Bioneers Conference in SF - amazing speakers and ideas. (www.bioneers.org). The event was emotionally overwhelming because it oscillated wildly between hope and no-hope. Hope, because geniuses like John Todd are figuring out how to create no-waste systems. He is building "living machines" out of plants, microorganisms, fish chosen because they love chemicals like chlorine and sewage and are able to detoxify and totally clean despoiled rivers and wetlands. Todd is building an eco-park in Burlington VT where the industries will all have a symbiotic relationship - a brewer's discarded yeast will provide food for mushroom growing, etcetera.

No hope, because our decimation of the planet is completely outracing nature's regenerative capacities. Paul Hawken, author of Natural Capitalism, was the eco movement's main spokesman for the idea of working with corporations and making them sustainable. He now believes that effort is impossible.

My feeling from thinking about tribal spirituality, is that the human relationship to the natural and supernatural world are welded together. Therefore, if our relation to the physical world changes, our relationship to the spiritual world will as well -- perhaps very quickly. The notion of true sustainability and humility towards nature has to be franchised somehow, marketed and multiplied like McDonald's hamburgers, or the experts say there may not be much hope of saving much of this planet - at least for human beings.

I with more scientists would stop tearing smaller and smaller bits of the world apart, and start thinking scientifically about whole systems and the entire web of relations in which we are meshed.

[jennygreentooth]

about the "beings" of DPT=

somewhat like Jung's perception that a woman's animus is actually a 'group' of men, whereas a man's anima is singular- i get the feeling that the devas of each particular psychoactive drug may not necessarily be one.

to me, peyote and many of its (mescaline-type) analogues, are a prime example. i have felt the spirit of this substance as a large gathering of childlike "loki-s". their laughter causes uncontrollable nausea and vomiting. other acquaintances of mine have mirroring experiences.

each substance seems to have its own spirit(s)...
but since i feel i'm getting off topic, i'll post the complete reflection in the entheogen forum.

[dragonfly]

Originally posted by daniel:
Really there are several aspects to what we are talking about here. The first is "paradigm busting," recognizing the mainstream "rationalist" paradigm deserves scrapping. Second is trying to formulate and articulate a new paradigm whether through "The Conscious Universe," Feyereband, Walter Benjamin, etc. This new paradigm recognizes the truth in the occult/shamanic perspective and tries to understand it at a higher order of rationality.Any effort to shift the paradigm needs intellectuals who work to comprehend and articulate "at a higher order of rationality." But to truly succeed, to win the hearts of the masses, the effort has to be simple enough to be grasped by ordinary people. And it can't be too bogged down with rationality, because humans aren't inherently rational.

It took a religious movement -- the rise of monotheism -- to de-sacralize our relationship with nature. It's going to take a religious movement to re-sacralize it.

Third, is what the hell do we do with this new information, as human beings trapped in a system that is suiciding itself? Because this is marginal territory, there is no possibility of some kind of institutional or university-like approach, which might help.I don't think it's necessarily true that there's "no possibility" of an institutional or university-like approach to creating change. Institutions like Naropa and Dr. Weil's Center for Integrative Medicine have done a great deal to change the way many people think -- to shift the paradigm, so to speak. As the ecological crisis worsens, I predict we'll see a rise of these sorts of "alternative" institutions putting forth new ways of thinking/acting/being. Whether this will happen in a timely enough manner to save us, I don't know.

I just came from the Bioneers Conference in SF - amazing speakers and ideas. (www.bioneers.org). The event was emotionally overwhelming because it oscillated wildly between hope and no-hope.I oscillate in like manner daily. The other night I was talking with friends in Austin who had just come from hearing the brilliant Derrick Jensen speak at a local bookstore. Jensen said he often felt hopeless and was sad about the world's direction, yet he remained happy. Some attendees had a hard time wrapping their brains around the concept of being sad about the world but happy at the same time. But I think that's exactly what we need to do if we're going to create change -- to be disturbed by things that are disturbing, of course, but to *choose* an attitude of hopefulness. Because people don't want to be part of a grim project.

My feeling from thinking about tribal spirituality, is that the human relationship to the natural and supernatural world are welded together. Therefore, if our relation to the physical world changes, our relationship to the spiritual world will as well -- perhaps very quickly.Yes. And vice versa, which relates to what I said at the outset.

The notion of true sustainability and humility towards nature has to be franchised somehow, marketed and multiplied like McDonald's hamburgers, or the experts say there may not be much hope of saving much of this planet - at least for human beings.You may be right. But I think that to advance the cause of sustainability, we're going to have to smash corporatized ways of thinking -- concepts such as "franchising" and "marketing" -- and replace them with more organic metaphors. Scattering the seeds of sustainability, perhaps?

[daniel]

Hey Ms Greenteeth,

Loved your post:

"somewhat like Jung's perception that a woman's animus is actually a 'group' of men, whereas a man's anima is singular- i get the feeling that the devas of each particular psychoactive drug may not necessarily be one.

to me, peyote and many of its (mescaline-type) analogues, are a prime example. i have felt the spirit of this substance as a large gathering of childlike "loki-s". their laughter causes uncontrollable nausea and vomiting. other acquaintances of mine have mirroring experiences."

First of all, you remind me with the Loki reference that I need to do some reading in Norse mythology, which seems to be coming up all the time these days. Second, I think you are completely on to something here. One can only speculate: Are those childlike clowns or elves or Lokis separate sentient entities in their own realm? Is the experience of seeing them in this way a kind of interface over an Otherness that would be otherwise incomprehensible to us?

Steiner writes (in Harmony of the Creative World) that if we were to remain conscious while falling asleep we would see gnomes surrounding us and entombing us, preventing us from seeing into the spiritual realms directly. This vision would terrify us. The dream is like a mask that closes off the reality of the spiritual world.

[John Hoopes]

The modern myth of Atlantis is due largely to the work of two individuals: Ignatius Donnelly, the author of Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882), and Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic. Donnelly's work had a direct influence on both Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, who found it appealing because both Theosophy and Anthroposophy sought a reconciliation of science with religion. Donnelly was presenting what, for 1882, were reported as the latest scientific findings, thus giving special weight to his interpretations. However, he was not a scientist or a scholar of ancient civilizations and his interpretations of the data were out-of-date even in his own time. As L. Sprague de Camp wrote in his excellent book Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature(1954), Donnelly "was a man 'with an extremely active mind, but posessing also that haste to form judgements and that lack of critical sense in testing them, which are often the result of self-education conducted by immense and unsystematic reading'". Donnelly gave inordinate credence to the archaeology of Augustus Le Plongeon, whose research at Chichén Itzá and Uxmal in the 1870s and 1880s was directed at proving that the ancient Maya were the oldest civilization on the planet (and the source of all knowledge, including that of ancient Egypt). He may also have been influenced by the illustrations of Jean-Frederic Waldeck, whose engravings of the Maya ruins of Palenque and other sites, while truly wonderful as visual images, falsely represented Maya structures and monuments as having Greco-Roman and Egyptian characteristics. Waldeck's images, which I like to consider as the first real pictures of "Atlantis" due to their fantastic nature, were used to illustrate Brasseur de Bourbourg's Monuments Anciens du Méxique(1866)--a source by an author who up until then had produced valuable scholarship on ancient Mesoamerica (including the discovery of the Ximénez translation of the Quiché Popol Vuh). Unfortunately, Waldeck's images fostered an entirely warped view of the Maya among a readership who should have given more credence to the work of John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the 1830s and 1840s.

Steiner, with whom you are enamored, may have allowed his enthusiasm for a synthesis of science and religion to override his better judgement and critical thinking with regard to issues such as Atlantis and Lemuria. Blavatsky, also, took Donnelly's extreme conclusions to even greater extremes. As for Edgar Cayce's readings on Atlantis, I think they can all be as easily dismissed as Miss Cleo, the Psychic Friends Network, and John Edward--with whom the great Harry Houdini would have had a field day.

If you are not to fall into the same traps, I strongly urge you to read Rodney Castleden's book Atlantis Destroyed(1998) before you formulate any serious conclusions about this lost continent. The myth of the "lost civilization" of the Ice Age has become to the New Age Left what the story of a six-day Biblical Creation has become to the Religious Right. I believe that both are equally incompatible with the available evidence, and adherents of the mythical Atlantis story wind up looking as silly as Creationists.

[John Hoopes]

If you are serious about applying informed, critical thinking to esoteric traditions, PLEASE visit, bookmark, and read the articles at the following website: From Esoteric Tradition to Pseudo-Science Today (http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/~muehleb9/). The racist, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist content of formative Theosophical documents, especially the writings of Helena Blavatsky, are truly disturbing and cannot be underestimated. It was this type of thinking that fed the Third Reich and brought about the Holocaust. We MUST say "Never again!"

[daniel]

First of all, don't lump Steiner in with Blavatsky. Second of all, we can't dismiss entire schools of art or systems of thinking because of certain shady aspects of the thinker or the system. Heidegger was a Nazi. The Beats were misogynist. Etc. Show me an untainted human being, I would like to know what one looks like.

From what you post, I don't think you have read or understood Steiner's thoughts on "Atlantis" or comprehended how he gathered his information. He would not have bothered to look for physical remnants, because his "Atlantis" existed when the Earth and Humanity were both in different forms. The Water was thinner and the air was thicker at that time, according to RS, and the earth was not quite as solidifed. Humanity had different kinds of bodies than we do now - which responded much more to our inner being and thoughts. Selfish people would have huge bodies, for example. We also existed in a naturally clairvoyant state, still able to commune with Gods and Archons who manifested themselves to us in the dream state, which was not as clearly delineated from the waking state as now.

Clearly what Steiner is talking about here is not something that is going to correspond to the findings of any archaeological dig. William Irwin Thompson in The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light associates Steiner's Akashic reading of Atlantis with a previous bacteriological state that was part of our earlier physical evolution. Interesting, but I think he is also being too "materialist" or literal, though too a much more subtle degree.

It is interesting that many cultures describe an Atlantean-like prehistorical "Golden Age," the Shambhala - Atzlan - Atlantis myth in various world-mythological iterations. Is it conceivably possible that such an unrecorded age existed in some way we can't, from our limited perspective, comprehend? I don't see why not.

more later...

[daniel]

to continue...

I think it is possible to posit that earlier civilizations were much more careful memorizers. In oral traditions, the chronicles and myths of the past had to be memorized perfectly in order to be passed down to the ancestors. Socrates was against writing because he recognized it would have a degenerative effect on the faculty of memory. Gurdjieff notes that his father was a local bard, able to sing the entire Gilgamesh legend as it was later discovered by archaeologists, word for word, completely unchanged after several thousand years. You can find other prodigious acts of memorization in every oral culture.

I just note this because it may give some credence - if you are willing to use intuition, which is all we have in these matters - to the notion that there was a "golden age," a "silver age," etcetera. And that basically, everything we know of as recorded history is in fact the "iron age," the Kali Yuga, the Age of Impure Residues, when all the impurities and taints of earth's evolution and human evolution had to come to the surface of the Earth in order to be flushed out in a purgative cataclysm, which is soon to come.

The myth or vision of Atlantis, as I understand it, is a kind of mirror-image opposite of what is happening now: According to the legend, the Atlanteans had tremendous psychic and magical abilities, but through hubris they lost control of their powers and caused a planetary catastrophe. In changed earthly circumstances, they were forced to descend deeper and deeper into materiality, out of fear of what they had done forgetting all of their earlier abilities. But this was also part of our evolution as conscious beings - only when fully incarnated in the hard physical realm could we gain the individual Ego, for Steiner one of the goals of the present phase or incarnation of the Earth.

Now, at the zenith of materialism, America is poised to repeat the Atlantean cataclysm through a release of material technology rather than psychic energies. In fact, I suspect it is meant to be, and inescapable.

Steiner wrote that various Atlantean sages and figures reincarnated at certain points in the modern era to perform particular tasks: Copernicus, for instance, was the High Priest of the Sun oracle in Atlantis, so he turned up in the Renaissance to place the same heliocentric knowledge on a completely materialistic footing. Perhaps The Beatles were the great bards of Atlantis - the film The Yellow Submarine seems like an Akashic footnote, and the Lord of the Rings might also be an intuitive channelling from the forgotten Atlantean chronicles. (if you go back up to Polyploidy's comment, it is also interesting to consider that the Atlantean Era might exist outside of chronological time as we usually define it. I think the Burning Man/Atlantis parallel is interesting, and I think there is something weirdly familiar-feeling about Burning Man - it feels as ancient as it feels new, like something we just temporarily forgot how to do).

[daniel]

By the way, all of this is a thought experiment. By that I mean, it is an exercise in mythic thought. What truth validity or use can it have?

I think the use is to allow us entirely different ways of comprehending the situation we are caught in - clearly, there is something deeply, systemically wrong with the forms of thought we are currently using, as they are destroying the earth and degrading humanity. My suspicion is that there will be a new Copernican revolution in thought very soon - I think psychedelics, "other dimensions," psychic phenomena, the holographic universe, the field theory will be part of this revolution. Steiner allows me to begin to imagine another side of thought, another form of inquiry - and I am not convinced that in his own strange way he did not practice a true "spiritual science."

It is interesting how effective his practical accomplishments have been - Waldorf Schools, anthroposophic medicine, biodynamic farming - and remain 75 years later. These successes seem to stem from the systemic logic of the totality of his thinking, which is far more holistic and affirming of human potential than modern "rationality." These long term successes also separate him from Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, etc.

[Doug]

My feeling from thinking about tribal spirituality, is that the human relationship to the natural and supernatural world are welded together. Therefore, if our relation to the physical world changes, our relationship to the spiritual world will as well -- perhaps very quickly. The notion of true sustainability and humility towards nature has to be franchised somehow, marketed and multiplied like McDonald's
hamburgers, or the experts say there may not be much hope of saving much of this planet - at least for human beings.

Ken Wilber's integrative attempt on a large scale consists of his 23 books syhnthesizing Eastern and Western thought and the collective effort at the Integral Institute .

http://www.integralinstitute.org/

The most important, in my mind, approach that KW brings to the table is to advocate use of the scientific method to the inner world in order to develop a consenual reality regarding the existence and composition of levels of consciousnous, beings, and entities. The Integral Institute has started with 400 folks who share KW's philosophic stance and who are all relative experts in the various disciplines in the material world.

This might not be the mass merchandizing model of MacDOnald's but it comes closest to creating a viable institution that might move us out of the realm of bickering and into consolidating an inner foundation upon which we might develop some viable communality.

Doug

[John Hoopes]

You are right about being cautious about lumping Steiner with Blavatsky. They went in two very different directions. You're also right that I have not given Steiner's writings on Atlantis adequate consideration. I still have a lot of homework to do! However, I know a lot more about ancient civilizations than I do about either Anthroposophy or Theosophy.

It is not at all surprising that most civilizations recall a "Golden" or "Heroic" age. Just as the Founding Fathers of the U.S. have become surrounded by mythology, so were the historic figures and places of the past. I am far more skeptical than you about the ability of humans to preserve oral histories.

Gurdjieff's story about his father is surely a fabrication. The language in which the Epic of Gilgamesh was originally recorded became extinct long before modern scholarship, and even authorities on Sumerian writing are not sure how it was spoken. The idea that the epic was preserved "completely unchanged" is totally absurd.

Think about some other examples of the alteration of oral histories. The Mayflower landed on the shores of Massachusetts only 380 years ago. How well has the story of the Pilgrims been preserved, even in the context of a modern, literate society? The best guess of when something like the Hebrew Exodus from Egypt took place was around 1200 BC. However, by the time the story was redacted some 300 years later, many of the details had been changed. The story of the life of Jesus has been preserved for almost 2000 years--also in the context of a literate culture (and in several different versions)--but scholars still have little confidence in the veracity of the accounts. In the New World, the Aztecs did a relatively poor job of preserving stories of the Toltecs or any of the cultures that came before them. I would challenge the notion that any human culture can preserve an oral tradition with any reasonable degree of accuracy for more than ten generations or so (roughly 300 years).

It is probably possible to preserve a story with some basic details for a thousand years, but anyone who has played the game "Telephone" will tell you that the likelihood that a story is repeated correctly across 30 generations is extremely unlikely. Think of how much language itself changes within that time. If someone were to sing the story of Beowulf (ca. 900 years old) to you "word for word" in the original, would you be able to even understand it without great difficulty? What about something even more recent, such as one of the Canterbury Tales (ca. 700 years old) or one of Shakespeare's plays (ca. 400 years old)? There is a widespread myth that Plato's account of "Atlantis" was 9000 years old. Rodney Castleden, in his excellent book Atlantis Destroyed, demonstrates that there was probably an error to the factor of ten introduced in the translation of numbers from the still-unreadable Linear A. The actual civilization on which Plato's story was based was probably the Minoan culture of Crete and Thera/Santorini, which suffered from a volcanic catastrophe in 1520 BC--only 900 years before the story was passed on to Solon by the Egyptians.

If Steiner had known this, he might have chosen to write differently of the Atlanteans. After all, he had tremendous respect for scientific ways of knowing, and probably would not have rejected the data from radiocarbon dating--which was invented after his time--as well as careful fieldwork (including many new discoveries at Thera in the 1960s and afterwards) and thoughtful historiography. The fact is, he lived during the infancy of archaeology. We know so much more now than we did then.

As far as the weirdly familiar feeling of Burning Man goes, José Faur addresses this in his book Homo Mysticus (1999) when he discusses Maimonides' concept of "traces" (pp. 132-137): "In a most effective and lucid metaphor the traces embedded in the imagination are compared to animals roaming through the mind. 'In my view this may be compared to a person who has had in his house thousands of different beasts, and all [the beasts] that were in that house exited except for a single one that had been together [with all the other beasts] in the house. When that person finds himself alone with that particular [beast], he presumes that it had some to the house now. This is not the case, but it is part of the horde [of beasts] that have not left.'" Faur also writes, "Traces do not originate only in the individual but also in the collective psyche of a people. They can linger from the remote past and affect the individual psyche and the collective ethos of a people... Freud, too, maintained that 'the primitive mind is, in the fullest sense of the word, imperishable.' Accordingly, 'Every historical man carries on, within himself, a great deal of prehistoric humanity." Burning Man may feel new, but it is actually the beast that has not left.

[Charlie]

Hi, I’m new here. That said, I agree with John Hoopes, with due respect to all the other intelligent, well-represented posts I’ve read here.
Namely, his phrase “informed, critical thinking.” This may seem at odds with Shamanism, but frankly speaking, the Western world will only respect what is rational, qualitative, well-documented.

It may be true what Dragonfly says—that humans are inherently irrational—but reason is a powerful argumentative tool, and well-founded, scientific documentation is the best source of convincing other scientists and laymen that Shamanism is an acceptable, reliable vehicle to other metaphysical dimensions, in the same way your car is an acceptable vehicle that will take you across town. As far as being grasped by ordinary people, that’s the function of rationality—making sense of things.

Once Shamanism becomes more established as a scientifically accepted practice in the West, individuals own forays into other dimensions will create a cultural dialogue and collective consciousness that will the push the envelope of what is now commonly considered rational. Cheers.

[John Hoopes]

By the way, my comments about Burning Man are in no way intended to disparage this remarkable event. Check out my own trip to Burning Man 2002 (http://www.ku.edu/~hoopes/bm2002) to see some of what I saw.

Daniel's remarks about Yellow Submarine reinforce the iconic elements of this film, especially references to the Atlantis and "lost civilization" mythos. After all, Pepperland is located far under the sea and the yellow sub itself first appears atop a pyramid whose form is based on the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, Mexico. For a excellent review of Yellow Submarine, be sure to read Robert Heironimus' new book Inside the Yellow Submarine: The Making of the Beatles' Animated Classic (2002). The author, also known as Dr. Bob, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Masonic symbolism of the reverse of the Great Seal. He published a shorter version of it as America's Secret Destiny: Spiritual Vision and the Founding of a Nation (1989). Any seekers who have not yet found Dr. Bob's Hieronymus & Company (http://21stcenturyradio.com/) website just aren't looking hard enough.

I would add to his list of inspired "texts" the 1970s work of the band Yes, whose album Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) has cover art by Roger Dean depicting a submarine landscape that features both the Castillo from Chichén Itzá, Yucatán and the monkey geoglyph from the Pampa de Nazca, Peru. The structure of the album, with sections titled "The Revealing Science of God", "The Rememberting", "The Ancient", and "Ritual" promised significant revelations. However, Rick Wakeman (who also did visionary musical performances of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth) later said "Tales from Topographic Oceans is like a woman's padded bra. The cover looks good... but when you peel off the padding there's not a lot there." For more on this album, click here (http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Concert/8459/tales.html). The comments on this album--one that I remember listening to in its double-album entirety when it was broadcast by the progressive rock station WKTK (Baltimore) on Thanksgiving Evening 1974--are similar to my own feelings about New Age metaphysics in general: "form over content".

[daniel]

Hey Doug, you write: "Ken Wilber's integrative attempt on a large scale consists of his 23 books syhnthesizing Eastern and Western thought and the collective effort at the Integral Institute."

I just can't get interested in Wilber, Can you? He is so flat somehow. I prefer my mysticism with weired warps and funhouse bends and Vaudevillean soft-shoe shuffles.

[daniel]

John,

Thanks for all the Yellow Sub footnotes.

As for Steiner, you don't seem able to understand the point I made before. Why don't you actually read some of Steiner's work on the subject - How to Know Higher Worlds and An Outline of Esoteric Science spring to mind.

Like Don Juan in Castaneda, he is talking about a different way of knowing, a kind of "second attention." If you dismiss outright the possibiltiy of such things, you will never understand any of this material - no matter how many books you read.

As for oral traditions, I thought Homer's works were preserved that way. Of course Gurdjieff's father sang a translated version of the saga.

[John Hoopes]

A slight correction, Yes' Tales of Topographic Oceans was played on WKTK on Thanksgiving 1973 (not 1974), shortly after its release. It was a particularly heady time. Erich Von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods had been published in English by Bantam Books as a mass-market paperback (the first with those big 3-D block letters), bringing it to the attention of a huge audience. Roger Dean's 1973 artwork was undoubtedly inspired by this. It's interesting how there seems to be a 30-year cycle in metaphysical interests. The 1960s saw a return to a lot of the mystical literature of the 1930s, which picked up on turn-of-the century millennial writings ca. 1900, which in turn returned to writings of the 1870s. Any chance this is related to the human life cycle? Trends in retro pop culture also seem to run in 25- to 30-year cycles (think of the success of Happy Days and Donna Summer's influence on trance).

[John Hoopes]

I almost forgot another heady event of 1973. Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan was originally published in hardback in 1972. It made a big splash and appeared in paperback the following year. I read all of Castaneda's stuff back then. It was a tremendous disappointment to learn he made most of it up.

[John Hoopes]

The cartoon on p. 84 of last week's (Nov. 18, 2002) The New Yorker magazine is a gem.

[daniel]

John,

All of your views used to be my views, until I had experiences that convinced me, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that I had been wrong.

You can also have such experiences.

Or you can spend the rest of your life adding footnotes to footnotes to footnotes.

[John Hoopes]

Daniel, I'm still looking forward to reading your book! However, having come of age in the 1970s, I've already done a fair amount of experimentation with mind-altering substances (including LSD, THC, mescaline, and what used to be known as MDMA before it became Ecstasy).

I'm still open to the idea that there are new generations of drugs, including DMT, that may stimulate parts of the brain in ways that actually reproduce mystical experiences. However, like the nun in Mark Salzman's brilliant novel Lying Awake (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375706062/qid=1037663200/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-1186855-6135321?v=glance&s=books), I am not interested in false revelations. I prefer to achieve enlightenment the hard way, which is why I've chosen the route of scholarship and lifelong study.

When it comes to drugs, I'm afraid my attitude is still one of "been there, done that". That's not to say that I am skeptical of the value of contemporary shamanism. To the contrary, I think shamans can be effective--especially the ones who have done their homework, are good performers, and offer their services as a gift.

There is also a lot to be said for the fantasy of lost civilizations. However, I prefer mine to be in the form of classic fantasy fiction. Among my favorites is A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0803282680/qid=1037663133/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-1186855-6135321?v=glance&s=books) (1919), a book that influenced generations of readers and created dreams that still haunt us today. In 1944-46, Merritt was considered one of the top science fiction and fantasy writers. Unfortunately, he was such a successful visionary that most readers have forgotten him, most of his original devices have become clichés, and what was fiction for him has again become "reality" for others.

As George Santayana said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Of course, he also said, "History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there." Go figure!

[daniel]

Charlie,

You note, "reason is a powerful argumentative tool," but I would ask, has our society really achieved reason or true rationality? I think the answer is clearly no. Gregory Bateson notes that we have "an ecology of bad ideas" that propogate like weeds. Those bad ideas are now unleashed like pestilences across the planet.

Your last statement is excellent: "Once Shamanism becomes more established as a scientifically accepted practice in the West, individuals own forays into other dimensions will create a cultural dialogue and collective consciousness that will the push the envelope of what is now commonly considered rational." That is one of the tasks at hand.

[Charlie]

John states “I prefer to achieve enlightenment the hard way, which is why I've chosen the route of scholarship and lifelong study.” He is confusing enlightenment with knowledge. As Zen masters have always said, you can read a thousand books on Zen, but you will not know a single thing about it until you sit down and practice zazen (meditation).

However, we do need scientific knowledge to legitimitize enlightenment (or shamanic) experiences to the western world. Perhaps instead of writing “reason is a powerful argumentative tool”, I should have wrote “Science is a powerful argumentative tool”. Science is defined as "Systematized knowledge derived from observation, study, and experimentation carried on in order to determine the nature or principles of what is being studied." Webster's Sigmund Freud legitimized psychology with case studies; obviously, the more cases collected, the more empirical evidence is gathered. From this data, archetypes and classifications can be drawn up. Perhaps if scientists studied shamanism in like manner, a “Hierarchy of Metaphysical Dimensions” could be drawn up.
The same work is now being applied to dreams, another highly subjective, interpretative subject.
Although this approach sounds dry, it doesn't make Shamanism (or dreams for that matter) any less interesting, or even revolutionary. It just brings us a step closer to understanding them, and being able to use or interpret this "data" in the most efficacious means.

[daniel]

Yes but look what Ouspensky realized in In Search of the Miraculous: You can't study these phenomena in the same dry laboratory way as you can other processes, because the laboratory here is in fact the "self," and the perceiving/emoting self in fact transforms through the experiment.

[Oedipud]

Hear, hear!

I completely agree with that assessment. If I can take it one step further....objectivity is in and of itself an invalid concept. In reality, it's non-existent, as a theory, it's workable.

To use an analogy, take Euclidean geometry. Draw a line cutting a plane (or how about a simple piece of paper) in half. Let's call that line Bob. Call the left half William, and the right half Tim. Now, if this supposed halving were true, where does Bob fit in? Bob isn't supposed to take up any space...there's no area that shouldn't be anything but William or Tim. But Bob, mocking, mocking Bob is there in plain sight for all to see.

As an idea, Bob works fine. In reality, Bob can't possibly exist. Nor can the 'finite' barrier between subject and observer.

For those who oppose the patriarchal overtones of my analogy, please feel free to substitute Bob with Barbara, William with Wanda, and Tim with Theresa.

[Osiris]

For John Hoopes:

Hi John.I'm glad to find an "orthodox" Archaeologist here.and I don't mean that in a bad way,just that we are on different sides of the history/Archaeology issues so far in this thread.This might be off topic.sorry.Being a big fan of Graham Hancock's "Fingerprints of the Gods".and with the recent live National Geographic special on FOX T.V.I have a hard time respecting Dr. Zahi Hawass' for his viscous attacks on Hancock and also Robert Bauval.

http://www.robertbauval.com/articles/scsequel1.html

Can you shed some light on why certain scholars who only seek to bring some different and fresh views and perspectives are so demonized by the mainstream "orthodox" circle?this attitude troubles me.the "Fingerprints" book was the most Paradigm shifting reading experience of my life to date.I will never look at the history of the planet the same.and it has sent me on a personal quest for truth as well.why can't both groups pool their idea's together and help each other find what we all seek.truth and understanding of mans past.Is that not what science and research are all about?I don't see how anyone(Mr.Hawass) can be helping the quest by becoming so set in established idea's as to prevent what I see as ligament and valid hypothicies.I am one who believes we don't know as much as we think we do.the "Tombs,and Tombs only"theory of the Great Pyramid seems quite narrow in it's scope.how can Mr.Hawass and others fail to take into account the Symbolical overtones of that Greatest of all monuments?among the other 20+ questions I have for you.

I don't seek to get into a mud slinging match with you.I'm very open to your Idea's.and if this is off-topic daniel,please direct me to a more appropriate location for a discussion on the "Mainstream" Vs. "alternative" world view/hisory.this topic is of great interest to me and John is a very interesting guy,for we both share the "been there,done that" relating to mind-altering substances.although I do still find the short duration of Salvia D. to be sufficient to cater to my needs relating to exploring inner/outer realms.

I look forward John to conversing more in the future (in a more appropriate thread of it's own if needed)

I'm new here,just trying feel the flow,Later

[John Hoopes]

Hi Osiris! Welcome to the machine! *

I don't know about being an "orthodox" archaeologist, but I do like to consider myself as a well-trained one. What I emphasize most with my students is the same slogan that has been on my rear bumper for at least the past ten years: QUESTION AUTHORITY. Any archaeologist who isn't constantly questioning what we know needs to be put out to pasture.

That said, when you say you "believe" in the Lost Civilization, is that someone saying they "believe" in the Creation (as in the six-day Genesis one)? I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that the Lost Civilization (whether it be Atlantis, Lemuria, Hyperborea, or the unnamed Ice Age civilization that supposedly built the Sphinx) is for the Spiritual Left what Biblical Creation is for the Religious Right. If we're talking belief instead of science, I'm afraid we won't get very far. I think we can all agree that Truth (with a capital "T") is a matter of who can shout the loudest. I haven't gotten very far in my discussions about evolution with Creationists, and I don't have high hopes for arguing with someone who believes Graham Hancock, Zecharia Sitchin, Robert Bauval, John Anthony West, David Hatcher Childress, Rand Flem-Ath, Colin Wilson, Shirley Andrews, Joseph Frank, Paul Allen, Ivar Zapp, George Erikson, Erich Von Daniken, or even Edgar Cayce. Even with all the potentially uplifting messages in The Celestine Prophesy, I still don't know why James Redfield felt compelled to say his ancient Manuscript was written in Peru at 600 BC. Writing wasn't going on there even in Inka times, some 1900 years later.

I suspect we may still be kindred spirits in seeking knowledge. I'm against the criminalization of Salvia divinorum and other natural medicines. (I actually think we'd all be better off if we start saying "medicines" instead of "drugs". That's what they are, after all. Can anyone imagine a "War on Medicines" or a campaign to "Just Say No to Medicines"?)

If there's another thread that's better for this, just let me know. The very first books I read about ancient civilizations were Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and Chariots of the Gods?. In the thirty years since then, I've read an awful lot more. What's most important to remember is that archaeologists don't work by proving this, that, or the other thing, but by eliminating explanations that are likely to wrong. In my opinion, explanations involving sunken continents and extraterrestrials fall into that category.

As far as Zahi Hawass goes, I really don't think that he or anyone else supports a "tombs only" theory for the Great Pyramid. Of course it was a symbol! However, I don't think there's any doubt that it WAS a tomb. Most modern "alternative history" speculation about the Great Pyramid stems from a 19th century text by Charles Piazzi Smyth (http://www.pinetreeweb.com/bp-piazzi-smyth.htm) entitled Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (1864). Anyone interested in speculative Great Pyramid scholarship should start by reading his work with a "question authority" attitude.

* A Pink Floyd reference.

[Osiris]

John,hello.sorry about the orthodox label.

you said:

"That said, when you say you "believe" in the Lost Civilization..."

Not totaly yet John.I have yet to find reasons for,as you say,"eliminating explanations that are likely to be wrong".I need more info,and I'll never be able to know what you know.this is unfortanent only for me.and I can't deny that.but I was more interested in what you see behind the scene's that could drive a highly regarded Archaeologist like Zahi Hawass to attack in such a way as to suggest that Robert Bauval is unworthy of any respect as a ligitament(sp) man of science.I don't think it's appropriate or needed to add into the mix all the classical examples of "crackpot" authors.This reply is specific to Bauval and Zahi and if Bauval is so "off the path",why is he facing such harsh demionization.he has credentials.he's not a back yard wanabee.remember I'm focusing on two people in my example.you can't put all of them in one barrel.

You said:

If we're talking belief instead of science, I'm afraid we won't get very far."

Right John,I agree.that's not my main question.If I had the chance to be in the shoe's of Zahi Hawass,Robert Bauval or you.I would be more open to different interpretations and theories.I'm not talking about UFO's or that kind of thing.I just finished Secret Chamber by Bauval,"which explored the deeper layers of the Giza quest and made the linkage between the ancient 'magical knowledge' and the Hermetic Tradition that carried it across the ages and into the mainstream of our modern western intellectual and esoteric tradition".

You said:

"Of course it was a symbol! However, I don't think there's any doubt that it WAS a tomb. "

But there is doubt,not just my doubt,but a lot of people way more educated than both of us in the area of mystical teachings.Your way more informed than me in Archaeology.and what you know and understand is some very complicated things.your a hard working Archaeologist.but you don't have as much understanding about Hermetic Tradition and other mystical teachings.I could be wrong.this is my main question.who decides what is relevant and why?how do you and others find it easy to "cast aside"different angles of thought you may not know much about.

If I were in your position,I would want to find out what these mystical teachings were all about.and see how they do apply or don't apply to many "temples" across the globe.I just wish I could know what you know.and you would really enjoy knowing a "understanding about Hermetic Tradition and other mystical teachings".

But as soon as you become "one of them".your labeled and rendered impotent.Why are certain idea's off limit in the mainstream established circles of research?there is an 'establiblshed" line mainstream Archaeology will not,or cannot cross without being outside the 'establiblshed box"of what is perceived as agreed apon fact.

I think the divisions created in these realms of study render us all losers of advanced needed learning.I can see it.But some don't want to or prevent a real analysis of all data to make a final decision.

I am one who see's the text book to only just begun to be read.and there are a lot of pages missing in this book.we all tend to forget about the vast amount of information that has been lost and destroyed over time.what is left of mystical teachings that we do know about.is relegated to the scrap heap.I see no reason to separate the two. everything is worthy of honest discussion.and then after fair deep analysis,the two ideas become one.because you can't separate them.you can't turn a symbol into a word.at the moment it is spoken,it is no longer a symbol.and you can encode thought's into structures.the similarities of mythology,and the high level of knowledge is a reflection of inner magic.the temples of early man,seem to reflect how deeply connected they were to something way more remote from what we peceive.you and I have know way of understanding what it feels like to not be "Americanized".To be living in a completely different state of mental and spiritual being.That element of the topic is and always should be noted and properly given credence to it's impact.

We have yet to understand the deeper mystical implications of many of the planets major monuments.why keep out the dedicated others who seek the same thing you and I both seek?

Who are we/you/I to say it's not relevant?

Thanks for your imput John,I found your homepage links and what a wealth of infomation.a great resource indeed.

*Pink Floyd* "Shine on you crazy Diamond"

[John Hoopes]

If you want to begin with Robert Bauval, that's fine with me. I haven't read all of his stuff by a long shot, but I think I've looked at enough to have a good sense of where he's coming from.

First off, it's important to note that Bauval is not an archaeologist, but a construction engineer. He was born in Egypt and has had a longstanding interest in Egyptology, but little formal training in the subject. I've always enjoyed the quote about Ignatius Donnelly that he was a man "with an extremely active mind, but posessing also that haste to form judgements and that lack of critical sense in testing them, which are often the result of self-education conducted by immense and unsystematic reading." The most important thing I learned as a doctoral student at Harvard was to question and criticize every piece of information I encountered--no matter how respected the source. In fact, most of my graduate school experience consisted of tearing down and examing everything I had learned in college. The "critical sense" of testing one's decisions is what makes true scholarship.

While Bauval is quick to criticize leading Egyptologists, he seems to have a double standard when it comes to criticizing "authorities" such as "Sleeping Prophet" Edgar Cayce. There was a huge flurry of research funded by the Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) in the late 1990s that was aimed at realizing Cayce's prophesy that an ancient library would be discovered at the Sphinx before Y2K. However, the date has come and gone and guess what--no library. Has this cast any doubt on the "authority" of Cayce's readings?

Bauval's first book was The Orion Mystery (1994). His co-author was Adrian Gilbert (http://www.adriangilbert.co.uk/), founder of Solos Press "a small publisher specializing in Christian Mysticism and the Hermetic tradition of Egypt" (according the blurb in the back of the book). Gilbert's other books include Sniper: The Skills, the Weapons, and the Experiences (1994), (with Maurice Cotterell) The Mayan Prophesies: Unlocking the Secrets of a Lost Civilization (1996), and Stalk and Kill: The Sniper Experience (1997). A recent preoccupation of Gilbert was "Opening the Stargate" on the summer solstice of 2000 (a millennial event with several paying customers).

Gilbert has also written quite a bit about The Hermetic Tradition (http://www.adriangilbert.co.uk/docus/articles/hermtrad.html). Given your own knowledge of this topic, I encourage you to evaluate his interpretations oon the basis of your own. He now has two new books out: The New Jerusalem (2002) and Magi: The Quest for a Secret Tradition (2002). I still haven't figured out the association between Stalk and Kill and esoteric knowledge, but it does seem a bit creepy! (By the way, Colin Wilson has also written about both Atlantis and serial killers.)

Bauval's second book was The Message of the Sphinx (1996), on which Graham Hancock (http://www.grahamhancock.com/) was the first author. Although Hancock is best known for Fingerprints of the Gods (1995), he was also the author of The Mars Mystery (1998), a sensational book that suggested there was an enormous Sphinx-like portrait of a human face next to a pyramid on the surface of the Red Planet. (Subsequent photographs of these features proved that he was writing about optical illusions, not Martian monuments).

If Bauval wants to be taken seriously, it's hard for me to understand why he chooses to work with authors who clearly have a sensationalistic bent. Message of the Sphinx clearly documents the authors' disappointment with Mark Lehner, a well-trained Egyptologist affiliated with the Oriental Museum at the University of Chicago and the Harvard Semitic Museum. In 1999, Mark was awarded the annual Book Award from the Society for American Archaeology for his book The Complete Pyramids: Solving the Ancient Mysteries (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0500050848/qid=1038121222/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-6219470-9500645?v=glance&s=books) (1997). Although he began his career with an open mind to stories of Atlantis and the "Lost Civilization", Mark--who has probably done more fieldwork on ancient Egypt than any other American scholar of his generation--has concluded that Cayce's prophecies and theories about extraterrestrials, Ice Age civilizations, can be eliminated as explanations that are highly unlikely. I have enormous respect for someone like Mark, who truly seems to have based his interpretations on research, hands-on fieldwork, and cold, hard facts. I am more skeptical of claims by Bauval, a non-archaeologist who has chosen as his co-authors professional writers with proven track records in sensationalistic writing.

By the way, Charlton Heston, president of the National Rifle Association, was the narrator for John Anthony West's film The Mystery of the Sphinx. I wonder if he was a fan of Gilbert's books about snipers...

[daniel]

In his book Imaginary Worlds, W. I. Thompson tries to elucidate "the change in attitude that is needed to move from a postmodernist sensibility in which myth is regarded as an absolute and authoritarian system of discourse to a planetary culture in which myth is regarded as isomorphic, but not identical, to scientific narratives." He uses his original difficulties with Rudolf Steiner as an example of how his own thinking shifted over time.
"Steiner described evolution on the planets and talked about the separation of the sun and moon from the earth and a stage of evolution on Saturn, but it was obvious from his descriptions that these places were dimensions and not simply planets out there in space, and, in fact, one could not think of dimensions and space in the normal way and make any sense of the way he explained things. …"

In the 1960s, Thompson was an instructor at MIT where the dominant perspective saw "mind was epiphenomenal to brain. What was real was stuff, and stuff was ‘out there.’ Out there was reality, and you had to adjust to it. … But out there was also the war in Vietnam and the ecological crisis, and so I began to think that we weren’t adapting to an independent reality but were creating a world out of our illusions, creating innumerable problems out of all our technological "solutions." If illusions could create a world, if the miseducation of engineers could generate planetary pollution, and if the technocrats as "the Best and the Brightest" could lead us toward annihilation in the defense of abstractions, then perhaps, I thought, it was time to consider that the generation of illusions had something to teach us about the creation of reality, or realities."

Thompson arguest that from the perspective of the "Creative science" of the 1980s (String Theory, the Gaia Hypothesis, etc), Steiner can be read differently: "There is no such thing as "matter" or "stuff"; matter is a cultural abstraction. There is no such thing as "out there," for that flat dimensionality is simply a conventional way of bracketing out complexity to empower a social consensus that has tacitly agreed not to perceive anything outside its frame. And so, if Steiner chooses to look at the evolution of the solar system and see ways in which the planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth, then he is not raving but is expanding our notions of cosmology. If he talks about the human body floating in the sea, and after the integration of the "I" still having a number of parts that were still on the plant level, he is talking about the human body as the evolution of the eukaryotic cell and the vestigial plant parts as the organelles, such as the mitochondria."

"The Steinerian vision is one that looks at the human as so completely embedded in the animal, vegetal, and mineral evolution of the solar system that it becomes nonsense to separate a fictive "matter" from mind, and a mere three dimensions from ten, or to talk confidently about "chance" when one does not perceive the pattern that connects three dimensions to ten. Here, Cabbalistic mysticism, rather than being nonsense, becomes tensense. It becomes a biology, a bios logos that brings events together in a much more extensive narrative of life. All of the seemingly mystical perceptions of Steiner have a biological relevance that fits a new kind of science, and a new kind of culture."

Thompson carefully argues against the literalization of the psychic or the material perspective - I didn't quite get this from other books of his I have read. Both forms of misreading are limitations placed on us by our current mindset.

[sidecross]

Originally posted by John Hoopes:
I almost forgot another heady event of 1973. Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan was originally published in hardback in 1972. It made a big splash and appeared in paperback the following year. I read all of Castaneda's stuff back then. It was a tremendous disappointment to learn he made most of it up.I could care less if it was made up or not. I have heard that remark made by many, and it looses sight that much of what has made good art and science does come from the imagination.

[John Hoopes]

Ah, but isn't there is a difference between what is presented as imaginary and what is presented as real? No one has ever pretended that Star Wars was true mythology of events that took place long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. There is a big difference between the fantasy girl of your dreams and the living, breathing reality looking at you in the face. I kid you not, reality is always far more intense than any imaginary fantasy. That's the difference between Castaneda's fiction and what really happens.

[John Hoopes]

By the way, to return to some of the earliest topics in this thread, there is little support for the assertions of individuals like John Anthony West and Robert Bauval that the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx are significantly older than the 3rd century BC ages assigned by scientific archaeologists. We've drifted away from discussions of Atlantis, which I think is emblematic of the divergence of myth and reality. The 19th century pursuit of a "lost key"--such as one might find in a "lost civilization"--is dealt with especially well in Peter Washington's book Madame Blavatsky's Baboon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0805210245/). (The baboon in question was a stuffed and fully dressed specimen in HPB's parlor that held a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species.)

[ December 08, 2002, 05:15 PM: Message edited by: John Hoopes ]

[sidecross]

Originally posted by John Hoopes:
Ah, but isn't there is a difference between what is presented as imaginary and what is presented as real? No one has ever pretended that Star Wars was true mythology of events that took place long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. There is a big difference between the fantasy girl of your dreams and the living, breathing reality looking at you in the face. I kid you not, reality is always far more intense than any imaginary fantasy. That's the difference between Castaneda's fiction and what really happens.Not to me.

Einstein said, "imagination is more important than knowledge", and I do agree. Imagination and what you define as real are not mutaually exclusive to me.

[daniel]

jh: " there is little support for the assertions of individuals like John Anthony West and Robert Bauval that the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx are significantly older than the 3rd century BC ages assigned by scientific archaeologists. "

My understanding is that West is trying to raise the funds to bring geologists with him to test his theory that the Sphinx is over 30,000 years old. His hypothesis is that the Sphinx suffers from water damage from a time when it was submerged.

One problem with alternative theories is they don't get the same kind of funding as establishment ones.

[John Hoopes]

No, alternative theories such as West's don't get the same kind of funding. Rather than having to undergo the severe peer-review process characteristics of applications to the National Science Foundation, they receive funding from organizations such as the Associate for Research and Enlightenment to support the "proof" of Edgar Cayce's prophecies.

West has already brought geologists with him, including Robert Schoch. Portions of the geological formation on which the Sphinx was built may have suffered ancient erosion, but this is very different from the implications of a complex civilization with monumental sculpture dating to more than 10,000 years ago. This is about as likely to have existed as mermaids or unicorns.

If we are to dispense with modern archaeological knowledge, then why not also pitch theories about microorganisms causing disease, heavy metals causing birth defects, or the crazy notion that "radioactive" substances actually emit something harmful? I've certainly never seen an ozone hole, so how do we know it even exists?

Naturally, I'm being facetious. However, if environmental science can tell us something "real" about the health (or illness) of the planet and the pharmacological science of Alexander Shulgin can tell us something "real" about the effects of tryptamines on the brain, then why reject archaeological science and the "real" knowledge it has generated about the ancient past? If ALL science is suspect, then perhaps all the fuss about biodiversity loss and global warming really IS due to hyperactive imaginations. We can also pitch all those silly, empirically-based notions we have about which mushrooms are toxic and which are safe to ingest. If you go into cardiac arrest, shall we call a shaman or 911?

Believe me, archaeologists are really NOT part of some anti-Hermetic, reptilian, blood-drinking conspiracy to conceal the reality of "lost" Ice Age civilizations. Science itself is not bad or blind, and sometimes knowledge really is more important than imagination.

[Anita]

Don't know much about pyramids and their age,don't much care how old they are either.I do however have a sneeking suspicion that much,if not all of our precious so called scientific knowledge is pretty incomplete if not outright wrong.
Your question about 911 versus a shaman is to me a nobrainer,Call a shaman!Personally I would much rather have a person familiar with manipulation of energy than the barbarians at the medcenter working on me.
Of course this is probably due to the fact that I believe part of our problem as a species is our morbid fear of death{moving on}.

[John Hoopes]

It's an interesting perspective. If our species could just get over this morbid fear of death, then perhaps the rainforest, biodiversity, water quality, clean air, ecology thing could be seen for what it really is--a matter of aesthetics.

[michael heany]

It seems that one is destined to fall into error. Either you hold entirely to the current orthodoxy, which by its nature as an orthodoxy is rigid and, within each of the many disciplines, limited to solving problems within a certain unquestioned framework; or you latch onto a heresy, which questions one or more of the foundations, either of a particular discipline (such as ideas here discussed relating to archeology) or a deeper foundation that underlies all the disciplines (psychic phenomena is not supposed to happen in any scientific discipline).

What happens when you place your faith in orthodoxy? You become an impediment to those heresies still out there which will transform either one particular discipline or else the entire enterprise.

What happens when you embrace a heresy (you can't simply embrace them all)? You take a risk, because it may be a false alarm; and many are.

In either case, it seems to me a kind of faith is involved, and an equal amount of investment (and hence danger, of a sort) goes into make a leap as in refusing to take any.

[Anita]

aestetics?While beauty is certainly a requirement for a psychologically healthy environment,my own concern is with the uncivilized behaviour of our species.I think one of the largest contributing factors for our inability to communicate with the others{Think anything outside of humanity}IS our fear of death.We will do anything to live for just a little bit longer,continually living in deep denial of our physical death.
As this denial has grown stronger in our collective consciousness,we as a result have also completely lost touch with the interconnectedness of the living planet.We are but one organ in the larger whole.We are no more{and no less}sacred than anything else out there.
By the way,I translate shaman into professor.There are those who specialize in healing of the human body,but there are lots of other disciplines as well.
After much reading on this and that I always came back to square one,no wiser about the things that touch my life directly.So I asked myself,What has worked for humanity?Seems to me the people who were able to live in and be nurtured by their immediate environment were aboriginal peoples everywhere.Some to a larger degree than others.
The one thing that runs through these folks lives as I understand it,is the absolute knowledge that we are all brothers{and sisters}
The honoring of the spirit of anything that gives its life so that one may continue living.And the knowledge that oneself will one day{maybe in a minute} be called on to feed some other relative{birds of prey,microbes,insects,whomever}
Now we deny our little brothers their rightful food by first putting our carcasses in a box and then to top it off we pump the meat full of poison.Not exactly a fair trade now is it?
No damned wonder our species is in BIG trouble!
I think we have gotten so far off track that the only way to make sense of anything is to think in a whole new{old?}way.Our numbers are growing at not just an alarming rate,It is literally out of control,and guess what?Our children and grandchildren are the ones that will have to pay.Talk about the sins of the fathers.......
The ONLY glimmer of hope I see is in the vague threads I glimpse in my seeing.The ghostdance?
Tales of creation?This is beyond language,but its shadow can be found in that which make ones soul sing.We are magical beings in a magical universe.
I believe there are those among us who will be called upon to sing into being a space we as a species can continue to evolve in once our house of cards collapse.This knowledge is being born as I am sure it has been born again and again and again.
These are the days of prophecy,whether you look at nostradamus{ahhrgh}or the science section in the daily paper{more ahhrgh}OR,just look outside ones own front door.
Too many humans,not enough of the others.

[sidecross]

" In either case, it seems to me a kind of faith is involved, and an equal amount of investment (and hence danger, of a sort) goes into make a leap as in refusing to take any."

Your post and especially the last part, reminds me of the koan: "you can't spit it out you can't swallow it."

I don't think we will ever capture in language an enlightened view. As Dennis McKenna has said, "the bigger the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

[John Hoopes]

Too many humans? How many is too many? Here in Kansas, I don't have to go far before I'm on a landscape where there is not another person in sight. If I drive for a few hours and then walk for a few more, I can easily find a spot where I could be totally alone for as long as I like. Believe me, there is a LOT of empty space out here! (Sunrises and sunsets, both of which I see practically every day, are beautiful. The nighttime sky is truly breathtaking.) However, I often find myself longing for the press of human flesh that one finds in Durbar Square, Kathmandu or Grand Central Station, NYC. The magic of the PATH escalators under the WTC at rush hour was positively exhilarating!

I suspect that, even 100,000 years ago, our Neanderthal ancestors were bitching about there being too many people for the number of warm caves that were available. A million years before that, our Homo erectus ancestors were complaining about the shortage of good stone for handaxes. Two million years earlier, bands of Australopithecines were eyeing each other suspiciously over the limited number of elephant carcasses to pick at. The environmental "crisis" is nothing new. Humans have felt the crunch of limited resources ever since they first began to walk upright, and our species has ALWAYS been in big trouble!

This is why I said--albeit somewhat facetiously--that it's mainly a matter of aesthetics. Some of the most beautiful gardens I've seen contained only smooth rocks and pebbles.

As for days of prophecy, I'm not so sure that's something new, either. Johannes Kelpius, one of the first Rosicrucians on American soil, established a community on the Wissahickon Creek near Philadelphia in order to prepare for the imminent Second Coming and the new Millennium--believed to be only a year away. That was in 1694.

[daniel]

I wanted to reply to some of Dr. Hoope's thoughts earlier.

In all the professional discourses, those who are part of the Ivy League establishment are always quick to assure us, as JH does:

"The most important thing I learned as a doctoral student at Harvard was to question and criticize every piece of information I encountered--no matter how respected the source. In fact, most of my graduate school experience consisted of tearing down and examing everything I had learned in college. The "critical sense" of testing one's decisions is what makes true scholarship."

However, my perspective is that when one looks at the situation of our contemporary sciences, especially the social sciences, one finds that extraordinary ideological barriers have remained in place, despite all of the smug assurances of the successful professionals in the various fields.

For me, the most extraordinary example of this is economics. For the most part, from what I can glean, modern economists have simply not bothered to take the environment seriously. They have preferred not to note that the global economic system is built upon the "natural capital" of the physical environment, which is now seriously, perhaps fatally, eroded. Then there is the blindered faith in "free markets."

Let's look at medicine. Here we have the allopathic approach that disease is caused by germs - knock out the bacteria and you stop the disease. The alternative perspective is that disease is a manifestation of the entire organism which assaults its weakest point. Certainly, antibiotics were successful for a time, but we are now learning that we didn't take the whole system of the biosphere into account, and runaway use of antibiotics is leading to super-resistant bacteria.

Now physical anthropology. Here, just a half year ago, a fossilized descendant of humanity was found that changes the time scale of human development by a million years. Woops!

Now of course, we have psychiatry, where psychedelics were the revealing "wonder drugs" that were teaching us so much about the mind in the 1950s and '60s until the government intervened. Suddenly, not only were they illegal, but they turned out to have no value whatsoever, and everything we had been learning was completely scrubbed from the cultural memory banks. Just hand out the Prozac and forget about the deep underlying causes of the incredible amounts of neurosis and depression generated by this culture. According to the Ivy League establishment, it is now proven that most mental illness is genetically based - forget the fact that the kind of rampant mental illness we see here is unheard of in tribal societies.

So excuse me if I don't find our Ivy League establishment's record to be very strong. I see a huge amount of ideological baggage and protection of vested interests in almost every discipline that I know enough to think about on my own. When it comes to Ancient Egypt, I have not done the leg work to make my own decisions. Perhaps I will one of these days. But considering the perspective in almost every discipline, my guess is our narrow knowledge system has bungled this one as well. I will say, however, when I look at pictures of the Sphinx, it sure looks like water damage to me.

I also think Julius Evola was onto something when he noted there is some kind of blockade that makes it impossible for us moderns to comprehend civilizations before 300 BC. This is a kind of cut-off. Before that, the civilizations preserved enough of the system of ancient esoteric initiation to make it impossible for a materialist secularized Westerner to understand the inner logic of their daily life. Older civilzations maintained that the central point of human existence was the connection of the vertical dimension of direct connection to higher beings. We only know the horizontal dimension of the human realm.

[daniel]

I wanted to reply to some of Dr. Hoope's thoughts earlier.

In all the professional discourses, those who are part of the Ivy League establishment are always quick to assure us, as JH does:

"The most important thing I learned as a doctoral student at Harvard was to question and criticize every piece of information I encountered--no matter how respected the source. In fact, most of my graduate school experience consisted of tearing down and examing everything I had learned in college. The "critical sense" of testing one's decisions is what makes true scholarship."

However, my perspective is that when one looks at the situation of our contemporary sciences, especially the social sciences, one finds that extraordinary ideological barriers have remained in place, despite all of the smug assurances of the successful professionals in the various fields.

For me, the most extraordinary example of this is economics. For the most part, from what I can glean, modern economists have simply not bothered to take the environment seriously. They have preferred not to note that the global economic system is built upon the "natural capital" of the physical environment, which is now seriously, perhaps fatally, eroded. Then there is the blindered faith in "free markets."

Let's look at medicine. Here we have the allopathic approach that disease is caused by germs - knock out the bacteria and you stop the disease. The alternative perspective is that disease is a manifestation of the entire organism which assaults its weakest point. Certainly, antibiotics were successful for a time, but we are now learning that we didn't take the whole system of the biosphere into account, and runaway use of antibiotics is leading to super-resistant bacteria.

Now physical anthropology. Here, just a half year ago, a fossilized descendant of humanity was found that changes the time scale of human development by a million years. Woops!

Now of course, we have psychiatry, where psychedelics were the revealing "wonder drugs" that were teaching us so much about the mind in the 1950s and '60s until the government intervened. Suddenly, not only were they illegal, but they turned out to have no value whatsoever, and everything we had been learning was completely scrubbed from the cultural memory banks. Just hand out the Prozac and forget about the deep underlying causes of the incredible amounts of neurosis and depression generated by this culture. According to the Ivy League establishment, it is now proven that most mental illness is genetically based - forget the fact that the kind of rampant mental illness we see here is unheard of in tribal societies.

So excuse me if I don't find our Ivy League establishment's record to be very strong. I see a huge amount of ideological baggage and protection of vested interests in almost every discipline that I know enough to think about on my own. When it comes to Ancient Egypt, I have not done the leg work to make my own decisions. Perhaps I will one of these days. But considering the perspective in almost every discipline, my guess is our narrow knowledge system has bungled this one as well. I will say, however, when I look at pictures of the Sphinx, it sure looks like water damage to me.

I also think Julius Evola was onto something when he noted there is some kind of blockade that makes it impossible for us moderns to comprehend civilizations before 300 BC. This is a kind of cut-off. Before that, the civilizations preserved enough of the system of ancient esoteric initiation to make it impossible for a materialist secularized Westerner to understand the inner logic of their daily life. Older civilzations maintained that the central point of human existence was the connection of the vertical dimension of direct connection to higher beings. We only know the horizontal dimension of the human realm.

[Argon Steele]

Wow, this has been one of the best threads in the forum, got to get my two cents in. Again, thanks to John for being our resident, "level-head."

"other dimensions," seems like the real tension is this thread is between western science and everything else. As much as everyone of us depends on science a thousand times a day, it seems most of us in this dialog put our attention on those areas outside of scientifically verifiable reality.

something is missing in our culture that is driving us. For me the definition of God has always been the unknown. Now more people in the world today believe is some smaller definition of God, - the monotheistic God, the Buddha, Krisna, David Icke, etc. But those "belief systems" are all, at some level, absurd also, that's why we all come down on the side evolutionists vs the creationists.

Science is a spiritual path of discovery, just a very slow one. Evolution is how God works, and it is much more amazing, challenging, and interesting than the clearly symbolic language of the bible (or for that matter sci-fi alien DNA breeding stories, which seem to be more about human ego than anything else).

But science is very slow and it is certainly possible to skip ahead, with the help perhaps of our chemical friends, and end up deep in the heart of the unknown. When we come back we only have "personal" truths and end up alienated freaks, unable to agree with the rest of the world on the importance of this mundane reality. Well the personal journey is all part of it.

Species of ants will come into a new territory, eat everything in sight, and they the whole colony will die off because there is no more food. I'm not sure humans are that different. Perhaps the only real philosophy is, "slow down." God has made a perfect world here, which we seem destined to turn into a desert planet. I guess that is only a "question of aesthetics."

I'm sure God cares only exactly as much as we do.

[John Hoopes]

Thanks, Daniel. I have a lot of respect for your experience and intellect and enjoy the debate. There's no need to distance me with the "Dr. Hoopes" thing or Ivy League references. I'm just John and excuse me, but I see you've had some Ivy League education yourself. I'm just as much of a seeker as anyone else here, with no special claims for superior knowledge or access to truth.

While there is a great deal of inertia in some areas of academia, the fact is that perspectives are changing all the time. (I think Michael Taussig will back me up on this.) One of the best examples is Mark Lehner's research on the Sphinx and the Pyramids. He started out as a "believer" with funding from the Association for Research and Enlightenment to get training to investigate Egyptian mysteries with an "open mind". When he decided that established theories made more sense than Edgar Cayce's prophecies, some of his Hermetically inclined associates treated him like a traitor. Which side was being closed-minded in that case? Just because The Complete Pyramids (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0500050848/102-2836967-0561704?vi=glance) has won an award from the Society for American Archaeology shouldn't mean it's not a reliable, authoritative, and most-likely-to-be-correct appraisal.

The overuse of antibiotics is a problem, but don't forget that penicillin was only discovered in 1943 and came into use during wartime. I could be wrong about the medical exstablishment opening up to alternative therapies, but I do think it deserves credit for giving them some consideration now. Medicine has changed a LOT in the past generation. As for medical illness in "tribal" societies, there is a vast diversity in the way diagnoses are made. That doesn't mean the illnesses aren't there, or that industrialized societies don't have different contexts that precipitate genetic predispositions for such illnesses. Furthermore, people who are so disabled that they can't care for themselves in many societies just die.

As far as comprehending ancient civilizations goes, I think Julus Evola was just plain wrong. I doubt that he ever read much real archaeological interpretation, but I'm open to further education. I've spent the past couple of decades dealing with cultures that predate 300 BC and I'm not ready to admit that I'm "cognitively challenged" just because I've never had an esoteric initiation. There is plenty of hard, material evidence that both the horizontal and vertical dimensions have always been important. (I think I touched on this in an earlier post.)

John

[John Hoopes]

By the way, you may want to think twice about stereotyping "Ivy League" ways of thinking. William S. Burroughs (http://www.hyperreal.org/wsb/), the granddaddy of yagé psychonauts, had a B.A. from Harvard. R. Gordon Wasson (http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/wasson_r_gordon.shtml), who introduced America to psilocybin through a spread in Life magazine in 1957 (and whose archives (http://www.huh.harvard.edu/libraries/wasson/FINDAID1.html) are housed at the Harvard University Herbaria) was also a Harvard alumnus. Richard Evans Schultes (http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/schultes_richard.shtml), arguably the greatest scientific specialist in entheogenic ethnobotany that ever lived, spent virtually his whole career at Harvard. (His graduate student Wade Davis, author of Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807842109/qid=1039658748/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/002-4373121-8537641) and Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0767904028/ref=pd_sim_books_3/002-4373121-8537641?v=glance&s=books), was there at the same time I was.) Of course, the most famous Harvard profs in the entheogenic field were Timothy Leary (http://www.leary.com/) and Ram Dass (http://www.ramdass.org/) (then Richard Alpert). (They got pretty far there before they got fired.) Another Harvard Ph.D. is my colleage David Friedel, co-author of Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0688140696/qid=1039659692/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-4373121-8537641?v=glance&s=books), who has also been making waves in the interpretation of ancient civilizations. Those are just a few of the folks wno were able to break whatever constrictions Harvard may have placed on their consciousnesses. It's not a perfect institution by a long shot, but I'll stand by its record anytime.

Anthropologist Michael Harner (http://www.shamanism.org/fssinfo/harnerbio.html), author of Hallucinogens and Shamanism (http://www.shamanism.org/products/bk102.html) and founder of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (http://www.shamanism.org/), taught at two Ivy League institutions (Columbia and Yale).

C'mon, Daniel, tell me you're not pleased to have snagged the endorsement of an Ivy League professor (of anthropology) for the back cover of your book.

[ December 11, 2002, 05:35 PM: Message edited by: John Hoopes ]

[Anita]

I am looking for info on battles with demons?in myth and folktales.I know there is one in the Veda?My memory is vague on this stuff.Any idea of where to start?
Any help appreciated.
In peace
Anita

[John Hoopes]

This is your brain on music.

Researchers find brain center of music appreciation (http://www.cnn.com/2002/HEALTH/12/13/music.brain.ap/index.html)

(A project at Dartmouth, by the way.)

[ December 16, 2002, 05:45 PM: Message edited by: John Hoopes ]

[Cliff]

Hi,

I just sent an email to Daniel and then discovered this great forum. As I told him, I'm very much enjoying his book! Great work. I'm a book author too. Given everyone's general interests, I think you might enjoy some of the content at my Reality Carnival:

http://RealityCarnival.Com

such as the content about psychedelics as catalysts for spiritual transformation. New content appears every day.

Also, I'm publishing an essay titled "Neoreality and the Quest for Transcendence," and would be happy to share it with you. You can read the advance copy here:

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/neotrans.html

In general, I'm very interested in (and write books on) parallel universes, science & religion, higher dimensions, and altered realities, and I'm very happy to have found this excellent Pinchbeck forum! Thank you very much, Daniel, for this forum and for the super book.

Regards, Cliff
(Dr. Cliff Pickover)
http://www.pickover.com

Instructions for contacting me are here:
http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/contact.html

[sidecross]

Cliff

Thank you for sharing your essay. I hope others have a chance to read it too, and find the time to think about its implications. I also book marked your web site.

There is nothing like cracking open another head.

[sidecross]

John Hoopes brings a good point to the discussion concerning the baggage any of us bring with us. Whether it be Harvard or not, the psychedelic experience starts each of us off on equal footing in that what has preceded the prescribed proper dose is of little importance.

The psychedelic experience may be one of the most democratic of experiences in that a near 60 year old retired union auto mechanic with a high school education, such as myself, and an acclaimed Ivy League grad, start at the same place.

[skeaya]

Maybe what we are doing right here, right now, on the Internet will enable a revolution in consciousness based on alternative ideas about the natures of reality and existence, a revolution that will not require fitting the square peg of shamanism, for instance, into the round hole of scientific proof.

The Internet seems to be enabling people not only to communicate whatever ideas they might have, without having to fit into constraints of editorial or philosophical or political requirements imposed by mainstream media and research grants -- but actually to have their communications read and even listened to, and to be able to link up with others of like minds. It seems too good, it can't last forever. It is wise to take advantage of it while we can.

We don't want to modify esoteric thought to adhere to the restrictions of scientific proof. You would not want Native Americans to have to desecrate sacred landscape by building houses of worship in order to PROVE a place is sacred to them -- would you?

[Woodpecker]

Anita writes: "aestetics?While beauty is certainly a requirement for a psychologically healthy environment,my own concern is with the uncivilized behaviour of our species.I think one of the largest contributing factors for our inability to communicate with the others{Think anything outside of humanity}IS our fear of death.We will do anything to live for just a little bit longer,continually living in deep denial of our physical death."

A few comments to add to Anita's wise words. One of the insights or delusions I had in the rainforest was this: if we humans preserve some of the rainforest, it has to be because we want to for our own sakes, because the animals and plants themselves are more concerned with the whole flow of existence through and beyond life and death. The plants, especially, are not addicted to life. ("Higher" animals are more like us to the degree that they do care more about the physical survival of the body.)

Walt Whitman, a great American shaman, wrote, "Perhaps death is luckier than we suppose."

And maybe mass beachings of pilot whales are messages to us that we should relax about death.

Still, I feel like there's also some wisdom in the opposite point of view, that we should listen to our biological drive to live and to expand. It's what any species does when it can. It's our deep animal nature. Our deep nature nature. Perhaps our task is to live with this paradox.

Whitman again: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself."

The human project has been expanding, developing, rerouting natural resources for quite some time now. Where's it going? Who knows. Is it a hell of a ride? Yes, it is. Whatever activism we may become involved in, it's important, it seems to me, to observe what's going on, and talk about it, as people have been doing on this board.

John Lennon: "I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go 'round. I really love to watch them roll."

I don't want to die any time soon, myself. I'm too curious about how this is all developing. I think I can stand it.

Jorge Luis Borges has a short story in which the kamis, the nature spirits, get together on Mount Fuji to decide the fate of humans. They run down the list of our offenses: nuclear weapons, toxic waste, species extinctions, brutality. "Let's eliminate them," the kamis say.

But one of them stands up and says, "OK, that's all true, but listen to this--something else they created." And he reads them a haiku.

"That's truly good," the others agree. "These people are not all bad. Let's hold off on destroying them for a while."

And thus the human race was saved by a haiku.

An addendum to John Hoopes's note about ecological crises being nothing new: the ecological crises we have now are mainly the results of our successes in confronting the ecological crises of the past. In ancient times, when we lived closer to nature, our brothers the wolves and jaguars and gators and anacondas tended to eat us when they could. We solved that environmental crisis by killing them off; now the crisis is that we miss having them around. In the past, people often froze to death in the winter. Now we burn fossil fuels. In the past, it was much more common to starve to death. I know, it's still common in Africa. Well, we began to stockpile food and resources, planting the seeds of social inequality and capitalism. You get the idea.

To bring this message around to the subject of the strand, the Secoyas traditionally believe that the forest contains (I first read this in a book written in Spanish and published in Quito by the anthropologist William Vickers) something like tunnels to other worlds. If you drink yage with them long enough you might perceive them, if you can take it. There's apparently a dimension where the wild pigs live, under their chieftain. When the yage drinkers wanted to hunt peccaries, they would try to go there (not easy) and negotiate with their chieftain. When they came out of the trance, they'd say, "Everyone get your spears ready; there's going to be a herd of wild pigs running through the village at 9:00." And that's what would happen. So the old people say.

And there seem to be many dimensions populated by jaguars.

Rick Strassman's book The Spirit Molecule discusses DMT's uncanny ability to move the user's psyche into quasi-Sci-Fi worlds. Maybe each drug is like a webpage with links to very particular "spaces."

Cliff, someone sent me a link to your "ESP experiment." Very nice. And welcome to this site.

Gotta run. Consciousness equals energy times the speed of light squared. Nathan.

[StSimon]

This topic is so big and I'm such a latecomer to it that I don't know quite where to begin...

Is anyone out there familiar with the Incunabula (http://deoxy.org/inc.htm) mythos? A contemporary urban legend, mostly internet propagated, of dimensional travel through cybernetically enhanced tantic intercourse that operates by riding the collapse of the wave into particle as it enters a parallel universe.

Unfortunately, most commentary and forum discussions about it that I have been seen degenerate into arguing about the "credibility" or "legitamacy" of the documents. Who cares? The information contained therein, and the ability to seamlessly blend the lines between fantasy and reality, place it in the literary world of H.P. Lovecraft.

I consider the works of Casteneda to be in a similar fashion. Who cares if don Juan is "real" or not, that in no way changes the power of the material.

This seems a common trick of telling in imparting this kind of information: look at the teachings of Jesus, mostly in parable form, why should we consider the source any different. Who cares if some man actually named Jesus existed and did all the things in the New Testament, does that in any way lessen the wisdom it contains?

From an actor's standpoint, I agree emphatically with the idea that verbal traditions can persist for thousands of years virtually unchanged, when written wisdom perishes quickly. I have an amazing faculty for memorizing lines quickly and exactly - and not just mine but everyones' lines. And I feel that my capacity for this is not even close to being used to its fullest. Remember Alex Haley. A tidbit that stands out from high school history class is travelling theatre troupes during the depression performing Shakespeare up and down the Appalachians, and the illeterate mountain folk turning out in droves to see the shows and reciting line for line along with the actors.

There is a book out right now, can't remember the name, that deals with just this subject. How with all the media we currently posses, the historical record is in tremendous jeopardy. Everything written being preserved digitally, and how fragile it all really is. Interviews and storys of musuem caretakers and those on the frontlines of the battle to preserve the past.

I find much to wonder about dolphins. I am convinced they are at least as intelligent as us, if not more, and have a very inticate language themselves. Combined with a physiology unchanged for much longer than that of mankind. The legends and oral traditions of dolphins tempt me to become a scientist just to pursue the possibilities.

[Woodpecker]

Skeaya says: "Maybe what we are doing right here, right now, on the Internet will enable a revolution in consciousness based on alternative ideas about the natures of reality and existence, a revolution that will not require fitting the square peg of shamanism, for instance, into the round hole of scientific proof."

I'd like the two perspectives to work in conjunction, talk to each other in mutual respect.

It's up to us to prove the validity of shamanism, if we can and if we wish to do so.

The following phrase was floating around some school I attended: "Scientists convince with logic. Poets convince with fascination."

Our soul-stuff is longing for the experiences it dimly remembers from past times: rituals, the dances at the heart of creation, ecstatic communication with all the beings. Thus we get dissatisfied with the outward forms of civilization as we know it.

Jim Harrison said in an interview once, "Am I supposed to believe that Ronald Reagan is as interesting as Crazy Horse?"

I thought of Robinson Jeffers while reading Anita's post, earlier. Jeffers was a poet who lived close to nature in California. He wrote a poem about wanting his body to be left out for vultures to feed on, when he died. He liked the thought of them using his flesh to help them fly, and of something of him flying within them. In another poem, he wrote, "A little too abstract, a little too wise. It's time to kiss the earth again."

John, your colleague David Friedel's book "Maya Cosmos: 3000 Years on the Shaman's Path" is rigorously scientific and rigorously shamanic, both logical and fascinating.

"Breaking Open The Head" has those qualities too, especially if we admit that one scientific way to investigate shamanism would be to go into it deeply enough to get a good look at it.

Logic and mysticism are like our two eyes: each one is good on its own, and working together, they give the brain even a bit more.

[ December 28, 2002, 01:24 AM: Message edited by: Woodpecker ]

[daniel]

StSimon writes above about dolphins being potentially more intelligent than humans. I haven´t had any dolphin encounters, sadly, but enjoyed the book Angels, Dolphins, and ETs. The author (can´t recall his name) suggests that dolphins might have a technology, using sonar to craft objects in the sea (such as sand dollars) into external memory storage devices. It might be crackpot but it appealed to me.

I am in the Domican Repub this week on vacation and thinking gloomy thoughts mostly about globalization and modern history. Pre-colonialism, the island was home to 400,000 happy, prosperous (in that they had more than they needed of everything) Taino Indians, now hosts nearly 16 million impoverished Haitain and Dominicans, no indians left at all, the natural resources quickly depleted (forests gone, coral reefs going).

The number of cultivated species the colonialists took from the tainos was incredible: Tobacco, cassava, sweet potato, etc. Once again, it is clear that this deep understanding and negotiation with the plant world is the expression of the cultural genius of Indian groups.

I agree with woodpecker that I am in no hurry to die. The next phase is going to be extremely interesting. I feel intermittently completely confident that humanity is not in charge in any way - that there is a ¨noosphere¨ where the linear time we experience does not exist in the same way, and from this higher dimensional perspective, history has already happened - and resolved itself in the best possible way. The Gaian mind is directing this process (see Dennis McKenna´s yage vision described in my book).

I also sometimes suspect that, deep down, everybody knows what is going on with the species now - that some moment of decision is nearing, and that people are making choices, checking in with the possibility of expanded and nonmaterialist consciousness, or checking out of human evolution by numbing and nullifying themselves and accepting the limited materialist conception. And even these individual soul decisions may have already been decided long ago.

Or maybe I have just been getting too much sun.

[John Hoopes]

While Daniel's enjoying his vacation in the Dominican Republic, I've been hanging out with family in the Piedmont of western North Carolina. I'm constantly amazed at how various threads of our perception cross, meld, and form new connections. The allusion to Shakespeare in Appalachia resonates with oral (and musical) traditions of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which still preserve stories and tunes from before the Revolutionary War. I especially liked the reference to Walt Whitman as a shaman, since I just gave a copy of Leaves of Grass as a Christmas present to a 17-year-old nephew who has been reading G.I. Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. (With some guidance, he's going to be a remarkable young man!) My own holiday reading has been Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations. I'm keeping my mind as open as I can, and wish all of you a safe and happy entry into 2003.

[ December 30, 2002, 04:40 PM: Message edited by: John Hoopes ]

[Joshua30]

I wanted to give a recommondation of a book that deals with the great Pyramid called "Giza Power". The Author, Chritopher Dunn, has a great theory about what the Pyramid was used for. You can check out his website at. www.gizapower.com (http://www.gizapower.com)

I am not related to this website - I simply found it through my research. I have spoken to Chris Dunn on a few occations and he really is a remarkable, intelligent man and I belive his theories should be taken seriously. I tend to side towards the view that Egypt declined rather than rose in power and than was wiped out. I believe that they were the ancestors of another great civilization (Atlantis) that ruled the earth long ago. It is entirely possible and plausible that other advanced sociaties have lived on earth and were wiped out by natural occurances, i.e. Pole-Shift, Asteroids.

Thanks
Joshua

[Buzz]

Joshua 33,
I'm currently reading a book that you may be interested in called "Mound Builders: Edgar Cayces Forgotten Record of Ancient America". I've seen some of this info before, but there are new DNA tests which do seem to place some seemingly unrelated peoples around the world where Cayce places them. Info also, though largely unproven at this point, that Lemurians and Atlantians came to North, South and Central America long before most experts would like them to be here. I have not received it in the mail yet, but have also ordered a book by geologist Robert Schooch, the guy who proved that the Sphinz is several thousand years older than once believed. It's titled, "Voyages of the Pyramid Builders". Schooch (sounds like "Shock", not sure if I'm spelling it right) believes that a great part of Asia, sunk under the water at the end of the ice age,and may be the cradle of mankind. He believes that they sailed to the Americas in ancient times.

[steve]

Schock’s thesis is pretty interesting, but I don’t think you can call it proof. Basically, from what I remember, he is a geologist who says that the weathering around the base of the Sphinx is water erosion, not air, and then noting that the water table in the area has not been high enough for that since something like 10,000 years ago, he concludes the thing must be that old. I think this kind of accords with the orientation to Orion that Bauval (is that his name?) seems to find in the Giza layout. That is, it aligns to Orion of 10,000 years ago. I read this stuff years ago so my memory my not be right. One guy I would take with a grain of salt though is Graham Hancock. He tends to dismiss “orthodox archaeologists” for ignoring certain evidence that is contrary to their paradigm, a fair enough criticism to be sure, but then goes on to do the same thing in far more grotesque fashion than any one he criticizes, for instance by ignoring the vast amount of material, ceramics, gravesites, etc, which have been the basis for putting the ‘orthodox’ paradigm together in the first place. A bit of throwing out the baby with the bath water I’d say. Incidentally, about the sailing to America in ancient times, I seem to remember seeing a documentary showing that the ancient Egyptians had access to tobacco and coca; that it shows up in traces in their mummies, and that this could pretty much be explained only by trips to the Americas. I haven’t heard the counter-argument though, and I suppose there probably is one.

[Jon Hanson]

John Hoope:
I would love to hear a review about “fingerprints of the gods”

Everyone (who might care):
What fascinates me are studies of explicit ways of knowing (epistemology)
and the expression of what is known (metaphysic). Science being one of the many possible ways of knowing and scientific world view being an organized
structure of that which is known via the scientific methods.
What interests me further is the context of “ideal” performance of science.
That is: the social and material realities within which science is done.
I really see them as two distinct issues.
What is legitimate science method?
What conditions allow legitimate science to be done?
What conditions distort legitimate endeavor of science?
Other than ideal conditions for unconditioned science research, there seems to
be a slipper slope from “rational” and “testable” knowledge down to the “loose and
flabby” thinking of free-association via complex experience in a complex existence.
I believe that is why “new age” has a stigma to it. There was real contradiction between
diverse experience and few standardized/rigorous methods to hash out the reasons
for contradiction. Notice if did not say “standardized and rigorous method to test the
validity and repeatability of unique experience.” I’m referring to methods of dialog here.
The people who emotional subscribed to a scientific world view and the people who
had incompatible world descriptions (be they borrowed or personally experienced)
have had a hard time talking.

How is the structure of the scientific world view stretched beyond the scientific data that
is yielded from the scientific method? This question is about the “story telling”
or “narratives” that go into placing tested hypothesis together to form theories.
As I understand, scientific theories are more “wishy-washy” than scientific hypotheses.
More room to wiggle, politic, opinionated, and bias.

Scientific theories are also where the “paradigm shift” occurs in the individuals and/or
communities who incorporate scientific thinking/feeling into their lives.

To summarize:
My interest is dialog, thus is my recommended method (up for target practice):

1) All parties in the discussion should talk about how they know what they know?
2) Once everyone involved is in common understanding of how they know,
talk about what they know. This includes reports from others and personal experience.
3) Check each bit of knowledge against the consensus ways of knowing.
Are things valid? if not, what does that mean? Where is the inconsistency?
Is it in the process of cognition, investigation, what?

Better yet, once people find out which understandings they commonly share
lets exchange information and assign a degree of accuracy to the various pieces.
That is the interesting part.

I love the quote by the author of “against empire”
“the rich only want one thing: everything. They always have. People who realize
that are smart than people who know everything else but that.”

Such a statement is an example of what I call a paradigm structure. Very basic to understanding modern society and how dominate modern culture is structured. Yet the
majority, of voting Americans at least, do not grasp that knowledge.
Regarding the ancient civilization stuff,
I’m a big fan that there is so much more back there in history
than modernity has the tools for discovering. Not that the
effort is a waste. But really, are the vested interests more
influential than the ideal process of scientific investigation?
Are the discarded or intentionally ignored datum more abundant
and meaningful than the constructed theories with power-holder backing?
My sense is that the practice of theory making is a flawed
and “social divisive” in this day and age. At least the way science
is touted is. So is religion. So is every social institution actually.
My personal belief is that when any group centralized, be
it material resources, intellectual rights, behaviors of any type,
the central pot becomes a lure that will attract the most heinous
of character traits to it. Obviously, there are exceptions and degrees.

That’s all,
Thanks.
Jon

[Jon Hanson]

Huh, huh! I’m smart than you!
Typos fuck my life up. This is the quote:

“the rich only want one thing: everything. They always have. People who realize
that are smarter than people who know everything else but that.”

[daniel]

HI Jon,

My own feeling is that we are moving forward - slowly, quickly, in traumatic fits and starts - to a new paradigm that will incorporate science and mysticism, physics and metaphysics. As Arguelles says, we need to "make science as sacred as the reality it investigates."

Books I have read that seem especially helpful in this regard:

Michael Talbot, "The Holographic Universe"
James Gleick, "Chaos"
Lynn McTaggart, "The Field"
William Irwin Thompson, "Coming into Being"
and "Imaginary Landscapes"
Jose Arguelles, "Earth Ascending" and "The Mayan Factor"
Jeremy Narby, "The Cosmic Serpent"
Carl Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections"

And now I am finishing Fred Silva's excellent, astonishing, important book on the crop circles, "Secrets in the Field."

Basically, it seems to me that contemporary science cannot deal with the profundity of its own insights, for instance the notion that the observed and the observer are linked, so there is really no subject or object, there is a process processing, or a world worlding.

Physicist Mark Cummings has tried to put Arguelles conception of time on a more scientific footing. Here are quotes from him that will appear in my hopefully upcoming article on Arguelles:

"Einstein said that time is the fourth dimension, but he never followed through on it. If you look at physics equations, time is still approached as something linear and one-dimensional," says Cummings, who is currently working at Harvard, setting up a new insitute to study alternative worldviews. He argues that time must be recognized as a higher dimensional organizing structure that is not linear, and is inseparable from consciousness. "In physics terms, what Arguelles is saying is that you cannot map a higher dimensional structure using lower dimensional geometry without introducing distortion. That distortion leads to a distorted civilization."

[Halfglass]

Daniel: Have you read Amit Goswami's "The Self Aware Universe"? It is a fascinating read. The gist, if it can be given in a few words, is that there is no such thing as a classical body unless we are willing to admit a vicious quantum/classical dichotomy in physics. The idea that--in the paradoxes we find in physics, the double slit experiment with light or Schrodinger's cat--what we are looking for is what is looking. And that these experiments are incomplete without the observer. Meaning it is the observer that collapses the wave function of say , two correlated photons in an experiment, forcing it to take on a certain polarization. He gets deeper and talks about some mind-stretching stuff like; is the moon really there when we aren't looking at it? That, it may not be, untill an observer collapses the wave function. He concludes "Human beings can discover new contexts because of our nonlocal consciousness that enables us to jump out of the system...Creativity is fudamentally a nonlocal mode of cognition." I am reminded of Mckenna when he said something to the idea that awareness arises from the quantum with the simple argument that one site change on a molecule changed a chemical from something completely unnoticed by the psyche, to a powerful mind alterer. Anyway, Goswami has a good book here. His follow-up "The Physics of The Soul" I found too convoluted and he goes off too much into Hinduism for me. (Some writers do that you know? Their next book takes a turn which isn't where you wanted them to go....That happened to me with Robert Monroe--nothing in his two follow-up books related to anything I've discovered in years of successful out-of-body experiences.)

[ February 19, 2003, 11:35 AM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[sidecross]

This article was in today's NYT, and I thought some of us might find it of interest.

The Real Scientific Hero of 1953

March 4, 2003
By STEVEN STROGATZ

ITHACA, N.Y.

Last week newspapers and magazines devoted tens of
thousands of words to the 50th anniversary of the discovery
of the chemical structure of DNA. While James D. Watson and
Francis Crick certainly deserved a good party, there was no
mention of another scientific feat that also turned 50 this
year - one whose ramifications may ultimately turn out to
be as profound as those of the double helix.

In 1953, Enrico Fermi and two of his colleagues at Los
Alamos Scientific Laboratory, John Pasta and Stanislaw
Ulam, invented the concept of a "computer experiment."
Suddenly the computer became a telescope for the mind, a
way of exploring inaccessible processes like the collision
of black holes or the frenzied dance of subatomic particles
- phenomena that are too large or too fast to be visualized
by traditional experiments, and too complex to be handled
by pencil-and-paper mathematics. The computer experiment
offered a third way of doing science. Over the past 50
years, it has helped scientists to see the invisible and
imagine the inconceivable.

Fermi and his colleagues introduced this revolutionary
approach to better understand entropy, the tendency of all
systems to decay to states of ever greater disorder. To
observe the predicted descent into chaos in unprecedented
detail, Fermi and his team created a virtual world, a
simulation taking place inside the circuits of an
electronic behemoth known as Maniac, the most powerful
supercomputer of its era. Their test problem involved a
deliberately simplified model of a vibrating atomic
lattice, consisting of 64 identical particles (representing
atoms) linked end to end by springs (representing the
chemical bonds between them).

This structure was akin to a guitar string, but with an
unfamiliar feature: normally, a guitar string behaves
"linearly" - pull it to the side and it pulls back, pull it
twice as far and it pulls back twice as hard. Force and
response are proportional. In the 300 years since Isaac
Newton invented calculus, mathematicians and physicists had
mastered the analysis of systems like that, where causes
are strictly proportional to effects, and the whole is
exactly equal to the sum of the parts.

But that's not how the bonds between real atoms behave.
Twice the stretch does not produce exactly twice the force.
Fermi suspected that this nonlinear character of chemical
bonds might be the key to the inevitable increase of
entropy. Unfortunately, it also made the mathematics
impenetrable. A nonlinear system like this couldn't be
analyzed by breaking it into pieces. Indeed, that's the
hallmark of a nonlinear system: the parts don't add up to
the whole. Understanding a system like this defied all
known methods. It was a mathematical monster.

Undaunted, Fermi and his collaborators plucked their
virtual string and let Maniac grind away, calculating
hundreds of simultaneous interactions, updating all the
forces and positions, marching the virtual string forward
in time in a series of slow-motion snapshots. They expected
to see its shape degenerate into a random vibration, the
musical counterpart of which would be a meaningless hiss,
like static on the radio.

What the computer revealed was astonishing. Instead of a
hiss, the string played an eerie tune, almost like music
from an alien civilization. Starting from a pure tone, it
progressively added a series of overtones, replacing one
with another, gradually changing the timbre. Then it
suddenly reversed direction, deleting overtones in the
opposite sequence, before finally returning almost
precisely to the original tone. Even creepier, it repeated
this strange melody again and again, indefinitely, but
always with subtle variations on the theme.

Fermi loved this result - he referred to it affectionately
as a "little discovery." He had never guessed that
nonlinear systems could harbor such a penchant for order.

In the 50 years since this pioneering study, scientists and
engineers have learned to harness nonlinear systems, making
use of their capacity for self-organization. Lasers, now
used everywhere from eye surgery to checkout scanners, rely
on trillions of atoms emitting light waves in unison.
Superconductors transmit electrical current without
resistance, the byproduct of billions of pairs of electrons
marching in lock step. The resulting technology has spawned
the world's most sensitive detectors, used by doctors to
pinpoint diseased tissues in the brains of epileptics
without the need for invasive surgery, and by geologists to
locate oil buried deep underground.

But perhaps the most important lesson of Fermi's study is
how feeble even the best minds are at grasping the dynamics
of large, nonlinear systems. Faced with a thicket of
interlocking feedback loops, where everything affects
everything else, our familiar ways of thinking fall apart.
To solve the most important problems of our time, we're
going to have to change the way we do science.

For example, cancer will not be cured by biologists working
alone. Its solution will require a melding of both great
discoveries of 1953. Many cancers, perhaps most of them,
involve the derangement of biochemical networks that
choreograph the activity of thousands of genes and
proteins. As Fermi and his colleagues taught us, a complex
system like this can't be understood merely by cataloging
its parts and the rules governing their interactions. The
nonlinear logic of cancer will be fathomed only through the
collaborative efforts of molecular biologists - the heirs
to Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick - and mathematicians who
specialize in complex systems - the heirs to Fermi, Pasta
and Ulam.

Can such an alliance take place? Well, it can if scientists
embrace the example set by an unstoppable 86-year-old who,
following his co-discovery of the double helix, became
increasingly interested in computer simulations of complex
systems in the brain.

Happy anniversary, Dr. Crick. And a toast to the memory of
Enrico Fermi.

Steven Strogatz, professor of applied mathematics at
Cornell, is author of "Sync: The Emerging Science of
Spontaneous Order."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/04/opinion/04STRO.html?ex=1047797148&ei=1&en=fb3e87e665947d46

[totaldragonslayer]

hey croossside

nice post :D :D :D

[Agent Smith]

i just wanted to see something else up here besides that bloated thread that's been there for months...

...anyone up for a discussion of dreams?

[skasm]

Dreams yes. I've asked people I know about this but they don't seem to have similar experiences. I'm not as much interested in dream interpretation but rather what dreams indicate about consciousness.

The dreams that stay with me usually are the ones that seem almost other worldy and not ones about anxieties like being in school again or something. I'll remember any range of dreams the following morning but the supernatural dreams stay with me. They can even be ones that I had days ago or years ago. I often find myself going about my day reading, talking to someone, taking a walk, etc and an instance from one of these dreams will suddenly pop into my head. It is a similar sensation to deja vu but obviously different. From those instances that come into my head I can rememeber other details and feelings associated with the dream.
These types of dreams fascinate me of course but I am blown away when they present themselves uninitiated and as though they were tangible experiences.

I've wanted to learn more about this but when looking for information or books on dreams and consciousness I come across a whole lot of "stuff" that does not interest me. I'd be curious to hear if other people have these experiences or what they they think about the mechanisms behind them.

[Agent Smith]

well if anything could allow you to enter into 'another dimension' i believe it's concentrated intelligent dreamwork... check out information about dream yoga... the lucidity institute's website has some good info on that...

...as of late i have been very into Chang Tzu (i believe that's the spelling) the whole 'butterfly dream'... 'am i Chang Tzu dreaming i am a butterfly, or am i a butterfly dreaming that i am chang tzu?'...

[Flo]

I found that last part about Burning Man really interesting. It reminded me of something my mum's friend said to me.

She doesn't believe in past lives but she believes in the memory of the body or DNA. Her belief is based on a friend of hers going for dental work, this friend is allergic to anaesthetic so was hypnotised instead. While under he began gibbering away in a language that sounded similar to French. The hypnotist found this quite fascinating and recorded it to play back to patient afterwards. But this didn't sound like any kind of french they knew so it was taken to a friend working in linguistics lab at uni and they identified it as a 17th century Parisian dialect. This conicides rather spookily with the man's family tree which shows his ancestors living in Paris at this time.

This I find really interesting. This friend of my mum is quite a story teller so whether the tale is true or not is debatable. But its the idea that I find fascinating. Like Plato and his belief that all knowledge acquisition is an act of remembrence, perhaps knowledge of our ancestors is innate, imprinted on our minds.

JOhhny Cash's daughter remarked after visiting Scotland the home of their ancestors, that she felt her father everywhere, perhaps there is more than that going on, she may have been feeling more than just the spiritual presence of her father, but her collected family spirit, a connection with the land.

The tribal element that seems so absent in our culture is probably so engrained in our souls that at any event that involoves such basic elements as music, fire, dance etc will reawaken those memories.

[durga]

I'd like to read this book

David Friedel's book "Maya Cosmos: 3000 Years on the Shaman's Path it was mentioned on a previous post-no luck finding it, just looked on amzon. Any suggesions

[Buzz]

durga,
Did a search for "Maya Cosmos" at Amazon, and found it. Paperback, only one copy left about 16 and half dollars.

[daniel]

anyone have experiences of guardian spirits or "guardian angels" appearing in dreams again and again over a course of years? There are these two women who are so often in my dreams, often running a hat store or a clothing boutique. Lately I have been remembering less dreams, and have had less encounters with them.

[kris ifans]

I was in Italy for a month a year ago, in a town called Todi, and there they remember fondly a crazy poet monk called Jacopone. Well, I had four or five intense dreams about him while there, and he cropped up as a prsence in other more minor dreams. The dreams revolved mostly around my having conversations with his melancholy spirit, and were sometimes quite scary. Freaked me out a bit, I wandered around the town and he seemed to have taken over my imagination :rolleyes:

I also have dreams where W. B. Yeats gives me poems, but I can never remember them when I wake!

[jezebelle]

In my dreams, a woman with long dark hair sits at a dutch-door-opening in a large building with very large/tall windows. Beyond is a forest, I can see through the windows, but it is inaccessable to me; I'd have to pass through the dutch-door-opening.

Twenty-five years ago, in a dream I was on the roof of my house inspecting two large winged cats. Lounging around, I was so fascinated to inspect, how the wings connected to their body. Pulling and stretching, lifting the wings to see how the feathers turned to fur, amazing. What is significant to me is the dual theme, it appears often for me. Like 2 white bodies either side as we fly.

But as of late, not much remembered dreaming; renewal time only, as opposed to traveling, too.

[ogopogo]

My impression is that those contacted through one's unconscious under hypnosis may not necessarily be benevolent spirits. There are earth-bound sprits and "spirit guides" who latch onto those under hypnosis and try to invade their unconscious. This realm, as Steiner and Swedenborg may have said, is rife with demons and their attempts at deception. For a fascinating account of how such spirits revealed themselves to be anything but spirit guides, I recommend Joe Fisher's "Hungry Ghosts."

The books was reprinted as "The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts: A Riveting Investigation Into Channeling and Spirit Guides." The author wrote 3 books on reincarnation, one of which was forewoded by the Dalai Lama himself. He committed suicidee shortly after writing this book, citing emotional problems and torment engineered by these spirits. I just got this and am reading it now; it's "unputdownable," as Colin Wilson writes.

Here's Aamazon's link and reviews of the book:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931044023/002-3268248-0927265?%5Fencoding=UTF8&coliid=I2NI4PLOFA2S4L&colid=2TFN9ZCU8KFO

http://members.optusnet.com.au/~waldis/hungry_ghosts.htm

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/blackchip/hungry_ghosts.htm

Now, the intriguing question then is this: If what Joe Fisher says is true, then exactly who are these supposed mediums and channelers in contact with? Is it possible that someone like John Edwards is not in fact in contact with the departed beloved but with a demon who's intimately knowledgeable about the dead? This is very troubling -- indeed, it dovetails with the argument put forth by fundamentalist Christians who warn about contacting the dead and other occult practices.

[daniel]

ogopogo,

I am completely with you on hypnosis. Steiner would have been against it, as he was against any attempt to interfere with the conscious will.

Reading a bunch of books on abductions by or about different hypnotherapists, it becomes clear that they are calling different narratives into being - both through spoken cues, emotional cues, and even transpersonal or telepathic cues. I believe the hypnotherapy work is an atavistic reversion to the "magic structure" of consciousness described by Gebser, based on the "vegetative intertwining" of all mind and all living things.

The hypnotherapists are making tulpas, thought forms, and then reinforcing them over subsequent sessions. They are working, consciously or not, as black magicians, and the practice should be stopped.

[Agent Smith]

daniel-could you explain, in a little more detail why you believe that hypnotherapy should be stopped? or if i am misreading what you have written, which particular practices in hypnotherapy should be stopped?

personally i am skeptical of all 'spirit' messages. in nearly all spirit lore, one is admonished to take what any entity has to say to you with a grain of salt. in my early teens i was being harrassed by beings claiming to be enochian spirits. (since that's what i was reading, and working with at the time.) i heckled them, and mostly ignored them though. being a teenager in the usa was strange enough at the time, they weren't really helpful. similarly i haven't met too many 'shaman' who get profoundly useful information from their 'helpers', most come off as psychotics, ranting about whatever. (there is a looooong tradtion of shaman keeping their mouths shut around the uninitiated. 'those who talk don't know, those who know don't talk.') most channeled information would deffinitly fall under this category from my experience. even the people i trust tend to dismiss, and ignore 95% of the things that come to chat with them.

as for hypnosis, i am wondering what specifically it is that you feel is dangerous. i know occultists who feel that all magic was basically primitive Neuro-Linguistic Programing...(heh, of course i know shamans who feel that NLP is just primitive shamanism) much of what is done in classic occultism is very similar to hypnotic processess anyway... is diliberately creating your own 'tulpas' with intention inherently dangerous in your opinion? curiouser, and couriouser...

...as for 'evil spirits'/hungery ghosts, i tend to view them as subtle energetic viral fragments... they are seeking to become whole, and looking for whatever is going to feed them. if they cannot find what they are looking for in one host, they will incubate, and spread to the next carrier... kind of like chi memes...

[ogopogo]

I guesss the problem is no one really understands hypnosis and the unconscious. Hypnosis was practiced in ancient Egypt and Greece and was supposedly rediscovered in the 18th century. But clinical opinions differ on what it really is. It's an altered state obviously but who or what are you really accessing? Is it your unconscious? The consciousness of other spirits? Or perhaps your unconsious that is aware of your past lives (or the lives of others)? Or the spirits that are aware of your current life and past lives.

[kris ifans]

I think its a state of high suggestibility induced by the hypnotist, and maintained by him/her by using particular vocal styles language and symbols. I also agree with Daniel, it is creating thought forms...the hypnotist works with the subject and together they work up these little images and scenes and "spirits." This is very dangerous, and I agree, shouldn't be allowed.

Ritual magic is a different thing though, in that the magician works conciously in building a thought form, usually alone or with "colleagues", and with a specific purpose in mind. It is more controlled, and precautions are taken.

[IMAZOO]

In May, my girl and I are planning a pilgrimage to Huautla de Jimenz to walk the streets of Maria Sabina's hometown.
Has anyone in here made the trip?
Any suggestions on where to stay and how to connect with the medicine people?

[Lowlight]

hey ogopogo, i just read some of your stuff above, do you reckon that all beings that can be contacted are out to get us as it were, or do you think there are beings with whom we can form meaningful and healthy relationships with? i will check that book you put a link to, its sounds interesting,

lowlight

[ogopogo]

There have been some debates about what really is coming through the unconscious, at least as far as channeling and mediumship are concerned. Could it be due to multiple personalities, telepathy, the Jungian collective unconscious, or the imagination of the sitter, combined with the suggestions provided by the unwitting, interlocuting hypnotherapist?

Ian Stevenson thinks that perhaps in the unconscious, one can resort to “supertelepathy” and tap into the latent memories of others, whether living or dead. On the other hand, multiple personality theorists believe that thoughts in the unconscious tend to “group together” and can easily become “personified.”

Nonetheless, psychiatrists, Jung and Adam Crabtree, believed that there probably exists genuine communicators in the background; it just seems that the communicators don’t seem to be who they claim to be and display distinct characteristics of what’s described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead as “Pretas” – beings characterized by tiny mouths and gigantic bellies who could never transcend their materialistic wants. The Book says that one will be tested by these hungry ghosts after death, that if you’re attracted to their yellow lights, you’ll fall into their realm and experience unbearable misery from hunger and thirst.

So we have several possibilities here. I believe that at least half of all phenomenon of channeling is spurious and staged by the medium, his hypnotist or both. This leaves those genuine cases where you are communicating with a being coming through the unconscious: is he who he claims to be (i.e., the dead individual) or some impostor? If he’s an impostor, what is he? A hungry ghost?

Now, the puzzling question is, how could the spirits be aware of such intimate details of one’s life? Here, Fisher quotes Swedenborg in Arcana Calestia: “[w]hen spirits begin to speak with man they conjoin themselves with his thoughts and affections … they put on all things of his memory, thus all things which the man has learned and imbibed from infancy the spirits suppose these things to be their own.”

Lt. Col. Arthur Powell, who apparently has something to do with the Theosophy movement, wrote in his book (“The Astral Body”) that it’s “impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood … ‘since the RESOURCES of the astral plane can be used to delude persons on the physical plane to such an extent that no reliance can be placed even on what seems the most convincing proof.’”

Now these “resources” are presumably telepathy, access to memories or perhaps the Akashic Record. If such beings make use of these resources, it’s entirely possible that they could mimic the thoughts, habits and mannerisms of any specific individual, fooling us with impunity.

I believe Gary Schwartz was told about this. Schwartz is the psychologist who wrote “The Afterlife Experiments.” He interviewed several mediums (e.g., John Edward) and scored their answers using statistics and concluded that they may indeed be in touch with the dead. Schwartz is aware that there might be other possibilities (the Jungian unconscious, the counterfeit demons cited in the Bible) but, citing Occam’s Razor, concludes that the spirits are probably who they claim to be they are.

Other mediums partly agree with the counterfeit hypothesis but say that they have the power to “shield” themselves from such spirits. For example, “Mary Ann,” who appeared in Coast to Coast with George Noury, said that almost all spirits that comes through Ouiji Boards are unsavory earthbound spirits. She engages in “ghost busting” and urges such earthbound spirits to leave through the light which she creates. She claims, however, that mediums such as James Van Praagh are in touch with the spirits that have moved on, that only ghostbusters like herself are in touch with the earthbound spirits that need to be prodded to move on.

Indeed, this might be true: commercial mediums who contact the dead (such as Edward and Van Praagh) do not have to put themselves in a trance. Such mediums seem to bypass the unconscious whereas those who claim to channel “spirit guides” or “ascended masters” (e.g., Seth, Bashar, Ramtha, Mufa, Lazaris, etc.) need to be hypnotized (by others or themselves) to varying degrees.

But do they, really? The Bible categorically condemns all contact with the dead. But someone like Swami Bhakta Vishita and modern mediums, while cautioning against the mischievous and rogue spirits who impersonate other spirits, leave open the possibility that genuine contact is possible.

[ May 01, 2004, 05:25 PM: Message edited by: ogopogo ]

[Lowlight]

thats interesting about the ouija boards, as it is not my experience at all with such devices. i never use mediums or such like so i cannot speak from experience on such matters other than what i have seen on the tv, but ouija or rather oracle boards is something i feel i can talk about as i have used a board to contact a specific entity on a near weekly basis for nearly four years now. my experience with is has never been bad or troublesome and nor have i ever felt threatened. i have learned a great deal and been told numerous predictions which have come to pass with a hit rate of over 80%, and seeing that i dont think these beings are all knowing thats not to bad at all! This may be down to my particular oracle being essentailly some kind of higher self (as it has suggested) rather than a completely seperate entity or the spirit of one who has died because i dont actually need a board to speak with the oracle. But i do feel these boards could easily channel terrible things, so respect and the right approach are highly important in such matters. Anyone else with ouija/oracle experience?

[ogopogo]

Dude, it’s odd that I seem to have ready comments for your questions. But check out this book. Stoker Hunt, “Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game.”

http://www.amazon.com/ex ec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060923504/qid=1083468485/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/002-3268248-0927265?v=glance&s=books&n=507846/. (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060923504/qid=1083468485/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/002-3268248-0927265?v=glance&s=books&n=507846/.)

I haven’t read it but the book is mentioned in “Hungry Ghosts” and Joe Fisher is adamant that the most “devious trickster imaginable” comes through this “trans-dimensional distraction.” Seth, the channeled voice accessed by Jane Roberts, first came through a Ouija board.

Now Fisher has an ally in “Mary Ann,” the Cleveland ghostbuster who shoos away earthbound spirits for a living. Mary Ann said during Coast to Coast last Thursday that such spirits latch onto human beings for years, often making initial contact through Ouija boards in childhood. She mentions that being accompanied by such a ghost could cause physiological (not to mention psychological) problems: headaches, constant fatigue, sinus problems, etc. Check out her Web site: http://www.maryannghostbuster.com/. Unfortunately, her web site isn’t as informative as the presentation she gave.

As to whether Ouiji or angel boards could channel some kind of “higher self.” I guess it is possible but highly-developed spirits are said to make their contact through “vibrations” (dreams, etc.) and not through mediums and Ouiji boards. I would be very concerned if such spirits caused emotional dependence, for their objective seems to be to experience physical sensation -- the disincarnate voices broke up two marriages and urged Fisher and others to have sexual encounters with their medium.

[ May 01, 2004, 05:31 PM: Message edited by: ogopogo ]

[Lowlight]

man thats another book i am going to have to buy, im gonna be bankrupt! its curious about the headache/sinus thing becuase i have never had that until a few weeks ago but it has been quite persistant since then. not a headache as such but some kind of surge of mild pain in the sinus areas from time to time. I dont think this is to do with the oracle though as i have done that for years and it only happened after i smoked some strong skunk and so it is prob the smoke irritating the sinus's (i hope) as well as stress from work.
Ouija is so strange man, its like people dont want to or refuse to believe in such things and yet all i have to do i hold out my hand and i can feel it move around of its own accord, guided from outside as it were, this is what i meant by not needing a board. I have never heard discarnate voices tho, that would be strange. anyway the paranormal seems so close to me that i cannot quite grasp why people cannot open their eyes to it. i think it will take mass understanding about cutting edge science like M- theory to reintroduce notions of the mystical into the West. Science has made the West so blind and cold that now it can only be science which can respiritualise the West as any other movement will be labelled 'loony' etc. science is the only thing trusted so it will have to speak for us.

[Buzz]

I cannot recall the name of the book, but Max Freedom Long wrote about the native Hawaiian religion, Kahuna or something like that. Wandering disincarnate souls are used by sorcerers. They attach them to living people and drain them of energy, eventually causing the death of the intended victim.

[ogopogo]

One of the specific warnings against Ouija boards is to avoid using them alone or when your immune system has weakened. Supposedly, you’re more susceptible to being possessed in such a state!

I am not sure about the mechanics of Ouija boards so I can’t be sure how your unconscious is influenced by the demonic. But it seems to act in parallel with automatism, i.e., guided handwriting. Supposedly, Helen Schucman wrote her Course in Micracles (ACIM) that way, when her writing was guided by a being identifying itself as Jesus. Ralph Waldo Emerson also claimed that some of his essays were written via automatism.

So is it possible to know what is being conveyed by man’s subconscious? It seems that one can never be sure what on earth is coming through. So how can you trust what’s being revealed under hypnosis or in trance states? I’ve always found it hard to believe extravagant tales of reincarnation and past lives.

Daniel mentioned “tulpas” as possible artifacts of hypnotherapy. There seems to be a growing acceptance among paranormal researchers that phenomenon such as UFOs, lake monsters, angels, leprechauns, et al are in fact tulpas -- i.e., thought forms created by either the collective subconscious of the human species or even the personal unconscious. There is a fascinating tale of how a French journalist learned to create tulpas – see Alexandra David-Neel’s “Magic and Mystery in Tibet.” Through intense visualization and concentration, she created a fat Buddhist monk which began to assume a physical form and was observed by other people. She was able to “will” such a being into existence but this tulpa eventually became more autonomous, appearing at will and causing mischief. “Killing” this tulpa by reabsorbing this thought creature into her mind required an intense concentrated effort of 6 months. Now, doesn’t this remind you of the beings that shamans often create or summon while taking ayahuasca?

http://www.davisanddavis.org/harvey/tulpa.html

Also, in Toronto, a group of researchers created an artificial ghost called Philip. Once again, this ghost was an imaginary one and came into being through the mental concentration and visualization of a group of people. While Philip never actually materialized, the ghost made its presence known by responding to questions via raps on the table and performing other feats such as moving the table.

http://www.pararesearchers.org/Ghosts/Article_Five/article_five.html

If such things are possible, then UFOs, etc. are probably projections of the subconscious. They may actually have become physical entities but originated from the collective imagination of the human mind, similar to how every culture created its own legends of the dragon and hairy, manlike creatures.

[ May 03, 2004, 07:12 PM: Message edited by: ogopogo ]

[Lowlight]

this is an interesting thing you are talking about here. if such things are the creation of mind then to what extent are we ourselves the creation of consciousness? i tend to dislike the idea of a reductionalist interpretation of what you are saying above (that hummans are 'real' and create the 'unreal' etc) as so little is actually know about reality ontologically. But if we are talking about mind creating mind or illusion then that is something i am more comfortable with, but then obviously we as consciousness could also be the creation of a higher consciouness. This ties in with something of Daniel's i read a while back (i think it was an interview with him on the dailygrail website) where he talked of seeing that the created order is nothing but the sustained meditations of a number of higher/superbeings. If your reading this daniel would it be possible for you to tells more about this experience as i find this intensely interesting and there was only a brief mention in the interview i read.

[daniel]

I think you are referring to Steiner's comment that the universe is the concretized clairvoyance of the Gods. My own nn-DMT trips, my own mappings onto hyperspace, gave me the intuitive impression that those overwhelming entities I encountered there were the ones maintaining this reality through their active meditations - but then of course that is just one iteration or angle or fractal or puzzle piece of the entirety.

I also agree with you that rather than seeing UFOS, artificial ghosts, as projections of the subconscious, we could see a more complex process taking place. The imagination itself is as McKenna put it, a kind of holographic lens that allows us to peer out into infinite fractal realms. It may be that the artificial ghost allowed these consciousnesses to gather in this way so it could "self-organize" into awareness. What we think we bring into manifestation may be bringing itself into manifestation using our consciousness as a convenient medium. ... it gets difficult to discuss this as it goes beyond dualisms. Crowley had a nice description of how the higher-dimension of thought-entities pass through our dimension in one of his novels.

[Agent Smith]

and yet another...

BUMP!