Monday, November 28, 2005

It's All in the Wetware

From Recovering the Ancient Magic by Max Freedom Long p. 230:

"The physical brain is a better vehicle for thinking and remembering than is the vehicle of either a spirit unihipili or uhane — this, as proved repeatedly by the inferior memory or reason exhibited at seances."

We're all here for the wetware.. and maybe the bodies, too.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Three Kinds of Kahunas

Kahunas are the magic workers on the Hawaiian Islands. According to Max Freedom Long in Recovering the Ancient Magic there are three groups of kahunas.
1. Various kinds of mediums, few of which ever accomplish any results of value.
2. A group using the lesser magic. Better than psychologists in the West, but not all that great.
3. Those who can use the powers on the plane of realization (out of chakra seven, Sahasrara, in another terminology). These kahunas perform feats that are miracles to Western eyes.

Max Freedom Long's book can be accessed through my Amazon Associates link


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Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Giving Back the Apple from the Garden of Eden

I wonder what God was thinking when He put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Then He said don't eat its fruit. Then He let the tempter convince his creation to try the fruit.

I think that's what He really wanted us to do, but He was kind enough to give us the choice.

And what have we done with the knowledge? As far as I can tell most of humanity spends its time trying to give the knowledge back. Since this is a life force group, I'll use one brief example from that area to explain.

The life force is a powerful tool that can be used for healing disease. In their own ways people, such as Edgar Cayce and Mary Baker Eddy, used the life force to heal. Sometimes they were successful and sometimes not, but the failures are what we remember, what we are taught in school, and what practitioners of healing arts using the life force are prosecuted (and persecuted) for. As a culture it seems like we do not want to know about the life force and are always trying to deny the knowledge.

Other cultures have similar attitudes. In Zen there is prohibition against using magic. One story tells of two Zen monks standing on the bank of a river. One of the monks takes off his hat, throws it in the water, steps in the hat and floats across the water. The other monk says something like, "If I had known you were that kind of person, I would have killed you." The second monk was perfectly capable of doing the same thing; he just chose not to. The choice of Zen is to not use the magic that comes from the life force, at least not in this way.

For now, I'll leave it to you to come up with reasons why.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Rupert Sheldrake and the Sense of Being Stared At

If you haven't read about Rupert Sheldrake's set of experiments on staring, you should. Here's a link to his site:
http://www.sheldrake.org/

I recently saw another attack on his experiments in Richard Shermer's column in the Scientific American. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00022BBF-C300-1353-830083414B7FFE9F

Many people are quick to point out that the experiments have been replicated many times -- just as scientific protocol demands. Objections have been taken into account and changes made in the experimental design, still with positive results. Here's one example,
http://dailygrail.com/node/2143

(You will notice in Sheldrake's response that he says he does not endorse the idea of a "universal life force." As you know, I think there is one. It does not change the quality of his evidence.)

What I haven't seen (I've probably missed it) is a discussion of the not-too-recent, failed attempts by skeptics to replicate the experiment, which was cited by Shermer. In that experiment they found a case where the results appeared no better than random. I don't find this too hard to believe. From that they concluded that the effect did not exist. I have two thoughts on this:

1. The trivial one is that non-replication is not the same as refutation. They got the result they wanted and quit.

2. The non-trivial one is that the skeptics assumed that every starer is equal and that finding one person who was not effective at staring is the same as proving no one can stare effectively. If you know about behaviorist training, imagine what the results would be if you intended to train a rat to press a bar when a light came on and the light was burned out. Failure... but success was within reach if only you replaced the light bulb.

Here's the real joke, in the skeptical replication experiment, the first sender got weak positive results and they replaced her for the second set of trials where they found no effect. Dim bulbs, all.

Defense of the status quo is a good thing. New ideas do need to prove themselves. I'll have more to say about how ideas come to be accepted later.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Martyrs and the 72 Virgins

A brief thought for all those who seek shortcuts to the pleasures of heaven. The Koran's promise of 72 virgins for martyrs of Islam may be true. What the leaders fail to tell the faithful is that, being heaven, the virgins remain virgins...forever.

For a more scholarly take on the issue you might look at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,2763,631357,00.html

If you get bored, at least skip to the bottom three paragraphs. The thought of martyrs getting 72 raisins is amusing.