The god helmet, scam or legit?

[grokit]

"We have assholes in every race" I think it was George Carlin who said that.

In every religion too!

 

[arf777]

I think most of us will agree that you can't label a religion as bad by the actions of some, specially if those people committing the crimes are clearly violating the principles of it.

I also agree with @arf777 that there are no true atheistic people, but atheism based political governments (Marxist) killed more people in the last century than religious ones .

And the phrase I quoted that offended you about the eternity of the soul, was quoted from a Jewish writer's book. And let's not forget that Karl Marx was of Jewish descent. Why do I say This? Because I positively quoted a Jewish writer, but I'm not in denial that another Jewish writer inspired a lot of people to commit genocide, and to show you that no matter what race you are, "We have assholes in every race" I think it was George Carlin who said that.

Why would I care about the religion of the speaker? Ignorance is ignorance, no matter who speaks it. Meyer Kahani was as evil as any other religious lunatic, ditto for Netanyahu and his cronies. And half the organization of Jews for extermination was done by a handful of other Jews - in German they were known as Judenrat. We also had a strong scientific and atheistic tradition at the same time, but that has not dominated politics.

But you want to see what I consider a Jew to be proud of, read Spinoza, or read about the 1st great Abrahamic atheist, a 1st Century CE rabbi named Elisha ben Abuyah, but more widely known as Aher (the Other)- that's what you get for being the 1st atheist in a theistic tradition, they replace your name with a label for a couple thousand years. But we started being proud of him in the 18th century, and i was taught he was one of the greatest rabbis who ever lived.
Or Hillel - when famously challenged to explain the entire Torah while his interlocutor stood on one leg, he replied with the Golden Rule (1st instance in the West) - nothing about eternal truths, god, or the soul, just "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you [everyone remembers that part]; the rest is only commentary [usually left out]." Another quote that was either Hillel or a contemporary (it's contested)- "It is better to never have read the Torah at all than to have read it and taken it literally". Not that plenty of Jews haven't ignored that one.

Marx didn't have much at all to do with either Mao or Stalin, any more than true democracy or Smithian capitalism had anything to do with the US constitution. Sorrel, the syndicalist, had a far greater practical influence on the USSR and Mao's China. Russia and China were both feudal states instituting totalitarian state capitalism (much closer to Sorrel's perception of Europe as a whole than Marx's); you want to see something much more like Marx in action, look at the Lenin / Trotsky era in the pre-Stalin USSR (violent but progressive- wife beating was a capital crime, for instance, which got a lot of people killed), or at France '68. Or the Israeli kibbutzim.

Mao was a classic fascist, in that he would use any discourse to support his power position. But like Russia, there WAS no proletariat there to rise up, and that is what political Marxism is about - the rising of the capitalist working class. You need capitalism first. Both Russia and China were feudal peasant revolutions with the trappings of Marxist discourse (and Mao not even that many of the trappings other than lots of use of the word "collective", including for things that were not collective at all). Both Stalin and Mao killed anyone who disagreed with them, including the REAL Marxists (the Trotskyist purges, not to mention the murder of Trotsky, far more Marxist than Stalin).

Lastly, i strongly dispute the assertion that atheistic institutions have exceeded the religious death toll, even in the 20th century. The so-called Indian Wars (the final US elimination of the strong native nations) lasted well into the 20th Century; Nazism was a religious, not atheistic or secular, movement; the huge religious elements to both the early 20th Century European Empires, as well as the religious elements of the violent movements that threw them out; all of the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the majority of the violent death in Africa since the '60s, including the growing number of African nations looking at making homosexuality a capital offense; all of the post-British Indian sub-continent violence.

BUT - I am not one of *THOSE* atheists, a la Dawkins, who thinks history would have been better sans religion. I firmly believe that without religious thought, we might still be living in trees. See especially the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, implying religious social organization pre-dated, and may have caused, agriculture. And also the core role of religious thought in the development of science - the mathemitization of empirical science would never have happened without the mathematical religious approaches of the kabbalah, Sufism and neo-Platonism.

My issue is those religious institutions and thought-infections that are no longer adaptive, like the assertion of eternal verities when we now can access solid empirical data instead, the a priori assumption of a soul in the face of biological and neurological science (though if empirical support for one is found, than I'm cool with it- it wan't be a priori), the Christian assumption that religions entail a deity and are about what you BELIEVE rather than what you DO (mostly it is Xtianity and Islam that are about faith; and a few aren't about deities at all, like Buddhism, philosophical Taoism, and Judaism a la some of the kabbalistic tradition). That is what first drew me to Buddhism - a religion-like thought system that (mostly) rejects the a priori, is open to new empirical information, and needs no deities or souls, just cause and effect (that is, karma).

 

[djonkoman]

In fact you did. The assertion of eternal religious truth has led to more death and destruction than just about any other concept in human history. My own family is less than 1/10 the size it was before 1936 - European Jewry, as well as European Gypsies and gays, just to name a few, were genocided less than 80 years ago because the Nazis thought they had special access to "eternal religious truth". Only 60 people left on Earth with my last name, more than 500 before the War. Even worse for my mother's family - over 5,000 went into the camps, exactly ONE came out. When that has happened to you and yours, feel free to be truly offended.

Most people just ignore that part, but Nazism was a religious neoPagan cult, quite similar to some forms of early Christianity.

And that's just this century. Even the current Pope recognizes (some of) the death and damage these assertions of universal absolute truth have caused. The Native American death numbers now widely accepted - and in large part due to religious arrogance- are even more staggering. Nearly 100 million in less than a century.

I would remind you there is no atheist, or even agnostic, version of "Kill them all and let god sort them out". Only people claiming to have 'eternal truth' pull that.

I don't think religion itself is the problem in this case, I think it's how humans behave in groups. religion creates closeness/a bond between the believers, but that means at the same time a distancing from the people outside this group, amplifying the regular problems of groups of people.

but exactly the same could come out of other groupbinding/distancing things, like ethnicity, or culture, or wich sportsteam you support. religion is just a strong example of it. you just need one or a few lunatics who are able to manipulate, aplying this effect to do harm onto outsiders, and you get the familiar warcrime stories.

 

[Enchantre]

My issue is those religious institutions and thought-infections that are no longer adaptive, like the assertion of eternal verities when we now can access solid empirical data instead, the a priori assumption of a soul in the face of biological and neurological science (though if empirical support for one is found, than I'm cool with it- it wan't be a priori), the Christian assumption that religions entail a deity and are about what you BELIEVE rather than what you DO (mostly it is Xtianity and Islam that are about faith; and a few aren't about deities at all, like Buddhism, philosophical Taoism, and Judaism a la some of the kabbalistic tradition). That is what first drew me to Buddhism - a religion-like thought system that (mostly) rejects the a priori, is open to new empirical information, and needs no deities or souls, just cause and effect (that is, karma).

I've plucked this out for one main reason - you have used a priori correctly. wow. you are the second person I've ever met (though, not yet in person) who has used this latin term correctly. Do you happen to drive a Prius?

Second... wow, that is a helluva long sentence. Correctly structured, too.

Third, yes, that is also why I've wandered through several religions/creeds, and am more comfy with the basic Buddhist take on things.

 

[mestizo]

Why would I care about the religion of the speaker? Ignorance is ignorance, no matter who speaks it. Meyer Kahani was as evil as any other religious lunatic, ditto for Netanyahu and his cronies. And half the organization of Jews for extermination was done by a handful of other Jews - in German they were known as Judenrat. We also had a strong scientific and atheistic tradition at the same time, but that has not dominated politics.

But you want to see what I consider a Jew to be proud of, read Spinoza, or read about the 1st great Abrahamic atheist, a 1st Century CE rabbi named Elisha ben Abuyah, but more widely known as Aher (the Other)- that's what you get for being the 1st atheist in a theistic tradition, they replace your name with a label for a couple thousand years. But we started being proud of him in the 18th century, and i was taught he was one of the greatest rabbis who ever lived.
Or Hillel - when famously challenged to explain the entire Torah while his interlocutor stood on one leg, he replied with the Golden Rule (1st instance in the West) - nothing about eternal truths, god, or the soul, just "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you [everyone remembers that part]; the rest is only commentary [usually left out]." Another quote that was either Hillel or a contemporary (it's contested)- "It is better to never have read the Torah at all than to have read it and taken it literally". Not that plenty of Jews haven't ignored that one.

Marx didn't have much at all to do with either Mao or Stalin, any more than true democracy or Smithian capitalism had anything to do with the US constitution. Sorrel, the syndicalist, had a far greater practical influence on the USSR and Mao's China. Russia and China were both feudal states instituting totalitarian state capitalism (much closer to Sorrel's perception of Europe as a whole than Marx's); you want to see something much more like Marx in action, look at the Lenin / Trotsky era in the pre-Stalin USSR (violent but progressive- wife beating was a capital crime, for instance, which got a lot of people killed), or at France '68. Or the Israeli kibbutzim.

Mao was a classic fascist, in that he would use any discourse to support his power position. But like Russia, there WAS no proletariat there to rise up, and that is what political Marxism is about - the rising of the capitalist working class. You need capitalism first. Both Russia and China were feudal peasant revolutions with the trappings of Marxist discourse (and Mao not even that many of the trappings other than lots of use of the word "collective", including for things that were not collective at all). Both Stalin and Mao killed anyone who disagreed with them, including the REAL Marxists (the Trotskyist purges, not to mention the murder of Trotsky, far more Marxist than Stalin).

Lastly, i strongly dispute the assertion that atheistic institutions have exceeded the religious death toll, even in the 20th century. The so-called Indian Wars (the final US elimination of the strong native nations) lasted well into the 20th Century; Nazism was a religious, not atheistic or secular, movement; the huge religious elements to both the early 20th Century European Empires, as well as the religious elements of the violent movements that threw them out; all of the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia; the majority of the violent death in Africa since the '60s, including the growing number of African nations looking at making homosexuality a capital offense; all of the post-British Indian sub-continent violence.

BUT - I am not one of *THOSE* atheists, a la Dawkins, who thinks history would have been better sans religion. I firmly believe that without religious thought, we might still be living in trees. See especially the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, implying religious social organization pre-dated, and may have caused, agriculture. And also the core role of religious thought in the development of science - the mathemitization of empirical science would never have happened without the mathematical religious approaches of the kabbalah, Sufism and neo-Platonism.

My issue is those religious institutions and thought-infections that are no longer adaptive, like the assertion of eternal verities when we now can access solid empirical data instead, the a priori assumption of a soul in the face of biological and neurological science (though if empirical support for one is found, than I'm cool with it- it wan't be a priori), the Christian assumption that religions entail a deity and are about what you BELIEVE rather than what you DO (mostly it is Xtianity and Islam that are about faith; and a few aren't about deities at all, like Buddhism, philosophical Taoism, and Judaism a la some of the kabbalistic tradition). That is what first drew me to Buddhism - a religion-like thought system that (mostly) rejects the a priori, is open to new empirical information, and needs no deities or souls, just cause and effect (that is, karma).

You mention karma and the laws of cause and effect.
Let me ask you, do statistics support the laws of karma? Or let me phrase it a different way, can karma be proven by the scientific method? Something you appealed to in a previous post.

 

[grokit]

To me the question is under what circumstances is karma enforced instantly,
and when does it take generations or even millenia to wheel around?

 

[arf777]

You mention karma and the laws of cause and effect.
Let me ask you, do statistics support the laws of karma? Or let me phrase it a different way, can karma be proven by the scientific method? Something you appealed to in a previous post.

I'm using karma in the strict buddhist technical sense. It literally means 'cause and effect'- no moral or reincarnation implied. That's all. So yeah, science does support it ,as science is about cause and effect.

 

[mestizo]

I'm using karma in the strict buddhist technical sense. It literally means 'cause and effect'- no moral or reincarnation implied. That's all. So yeah, science does support it ,as science is about cause and effect.

So what was science conclusion? That karma doesn't make any sense?
Did the people that inflicted so much pain and suffering on your family members paid for it? Did karma take care of that?

Edit: Can the scientific method prove future lives as karma teaches?
"Karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in some schools of Asian religions.[5] In these schools, karma in the present affects one’s future in the current life, as well as the nature and quality of future lives - or, one’s saṃsāra."

 

[mestizo]

To me the question is under what circumstances is karma enforced instantly,
and when does it take generations or even millenia to wheel around?

If it takes more than one generation, how can we prove that, why are the future generations paying for their ancestors sins? doesn't sound like karma to me if others have to pay for it.

 

[grokit]

Perhaps take a peek through a different existential lens;
consider the transmigration of souls rather than generations of a bloodline.

 

[Zookeeper]

That video was just a bunch of propaganda to promote the idea that intelligent patterns dont comprise the universe and that everything is trial and error and beating the odds. Next month Morgan Freeman will be making us feel stupid for not having USB ports installed between our toes and have us voting yes on the federal reproduction licensing and permit bill of 2014.

Yup. Magnets make you feel different so life after death doesnt exist. These whole presentations exist soley to attempt to legitimize that statement to help support an agenda bigger than any stoner forum is willing to discuss. Oh well, just as much as I feel certain drugs prove the existence of the soul, hordes more contest it shows the obvious opposite to be 'true'.

 

[crawdad]

to me it shows how easily our perspectives can be altered with something very much abundant in our universe, both macro and micro. what if the magnetic field of our earth was stronger than it is? would all of us be tweaked a bit more in a different direction than we are now? i think perhaps. does the existence of these perspectives result in one being more true than another? i think not.

 

[Jeremy Driscoll]

Well what about orgonite?

 

[arf777]

So what was science conclusion? That karma doesn't make any sense?
Did the people that inflicted so much pain and suffering on your family members paid for it? Did karma take care of that?

Edit: Can the scientific method prove future lives as karma teaches?
"Karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in some schools of Asian religions.[5] In these schools, karma in the present affects one’s future in the current life, as well as the nature and quality of future lives - or, one’s saṃsāra."

You are making a distinction without a difference. The less populist versions of both Theravada and Mahayana define karma as cause and effect, period. With the moral part thrown in, you're talking Hindu karma and some very early Buddhist stuff, not the philosophical Buddhist traditions of the past 18-20 centuries. Karma is still understood in Pure Land Buddhism that way, the one form of Mahayana Buddhism that does not include the philosophical/reflective tradition, but is an adaptation of some Buddhist doctrine to pre-existent Central Asian and Chinese practice.

And I do not think most of the people whop murdered and tortured my family ever paid a price, or ever will. I had an aunt who was one of Mengele's experiments, she died of 17 cancers, and Mengele did not get caught or punished. And most of the victimizers are now dead. Though my mom did get to attend Eichmann's trial and execution, she has always said it gave her no satisfaction. Nearly 5000 of her family were still dead, he just added another death to the pile. Significantly, none of my family is pro-death penalty, no matter what the crime.

I am not quoting from a generalist on religion on Buddhism here, but from member of my dissertation committee and major Buddhist scholar (and former Karma Kagyu monk) Roger Corless. See any of his lifetime of work on the Pure Land and Madhyama Mahayana traditions, especially his "The Vision of Buddhism", one of the standard introductions to what he sometimes called 'the heavy side of Buddhism'.

This does get confusing, because the same Sanskrit words have very different meanings in Hindu Classical Sanskrit (Vedas, Upanishads, etc) than in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) and Pali (the languages of the Mahayana sutras and shastras and the Theravavda Dhammapada, respectively). And the same issue arises when people look at early Christianity, which originally took all of its terminology from Judaism (more confusing, really, since a Christian form of Hebrew never developed)

For example, in Classical Hindu Sanskrit, dharma means personal destiny and/or path, sort of like some uses of 'tao' in Chinese, though it can ask have the implication of 'personal honor'. In both Pali and BHS, dhamma/dharma means the teaching of the Buddha and the other Buddhist masters. In Pali, karma had a bit more of the Hindu meaning until the development of the Abhidarma school; in Mahayana, Pure Land and a couple of Tibetan lineages held on to the moral meaning, but most of the intellectual tradition of Mahayana simply dropped it. Like starting in the 2nd Century CE with the writings of Nagarjuna, considered by many (myself included) the founder of Mahayana Buddhism (and probable author of numerous Mahayana sutras attributed to Avalokitesvara). The moral aspect shifted significantly from past-life cause and effect to moral analysis of the connections right here and now.

A famous modern example is Thich Nhat Hanh's argument that the behaviors of the West and of the upper classes in his own homeland of Vietnam are directly responsive for the massive child and adolescent sex trade there - "This is like this because that is like that", not "This is like this because in a past life you did something you don't even remember". I have even heard an official Tibetan tulku (incarnate bodhisattva) say he didn't believe in reincarnation at all, including his own identity as a supposedly re-incarnate bodhisattva. He claimed that was all a metaphor to try to get the idea of inter-being across to what was, for most of Buddhist history, an illiterate and uneducated populace who lived in cultures where reincarnation was already an established concept.

That being said, I do fear that when I die I'll just come back here. Main reason I haven't killed myself. No science behind it, just abject terror that "death is not a way out of it".

 

[Caligula]

Next month Morgan Freeman will be making us feel stupid for not...voting yes on the federal reproduction licensing and permit bill of 2014.

Oh god, please tell me this is a real thing!

Well what about orgonite?

 

[MindFork]

A famous modern example is Thich Nhat Hanh's argument that the behaviors of the West and of the upper classes in his own homeland of Vietnam are directly responsive for the massive child and adolescent sex trade there - "This is like this because that is like that", not "This is like this because in a past life you did something you don't even remember". I have even heard an official Tibetan tulku (incarnate bodhisattva) say he didn't believe in reincarnation at all, including his own identity as a supposedly re-incarnate bodhisattva. He claimed that was all a metaphor to try to get the idea of inter-being across to what was, for most of Buddhist history, an illiterate and uneducated populace who lived in cultures where reincarnation was already an established concept.

That being said, I do fear that when I die I'll just come back here. Main reason I haven't killed myself. No science behind it, just abject terror that "death is not a way out of it".

I definitely agree on the "here and now" forms of cause and effect. The "laws of karma" in the moral / reincarnation sense would rely on a "karmic review board" (ie afterlife judgment) who would have the responsibility of making one's next life punishing enough that they "learn their lesson" (that they can't REMEMBER) but not so unbearable that they are broken by said punishment (for their unremembered crimes). All of that smacks of theocratic BS to me.

As for reincarnation, one thing that if pursued with scientific rigor might actually provide some empirical evidence of reincarnation is the fact that we have child prodigies in areas such as music, math, science, etc. Many of these children are born to very ordinary parents, and some of them have very ordinary siblings. Yet for reasons that nobody cannot be easily explained, they seem to have been born with abilities that usually take decades of study and practice. The will to follow-up on this evidence is largely missing, probably due to a lack of grants being given for such research.

There are also accounts of people with very detailed past-life memories who visited places they remember from a past-life and found artifacts that they remember hiding there. I don't have references to that handy, but there were some books written about that in the 80s.

As to your fears of being recycled after bodily death, based on my own out of body experiences, I think it is a very valid concern.

 

[Jeremy Driscoll]

As to your fears of being recycled after bodily death, based on my own out of body experiences, I think it is a very valid concern.

Could you elaborate.? Like based on your own OBE do you feel that it is just a trick of the mind and therefore there is not enough evidence to support that the soul can live without the body and death?

Oh god, please tell me this is a real thing!

What do you mean serious? You mean am I serious? Or the person in the video?

 

[Caligula]

The person in the video. Although, I suppose if you make enough money doing it and don't feel bad about taking advantage of people...

 

[Jeremy Driscoll]

There is so much confusion these days, I do not know what is real or a scam anymore.

 

[grokit]

There is so much confusion these days, I do not know what is real or a scam anymore.

I can barely even tell with vaporizers, much less the more existential questions.

 

[MindFork]

Could you elaborate.? Like based on your own OBE do you feel that it is just a trick of the mind and therefore there is not enough evidence to support that the soul can live without the body and death?

I will go into this in brief even though this is fully in the realm of subjective experience.

Based on a handful of fully-conscious OBEs, my experience is that there is a non-physical realm that shares space with our physical world, and we can access that realm in the out of body state.

As far as I can tell, it is occupied by "people" who are aligned in various factions. The maxim "as above, so below" rings very true in this regard.

The beings who live in that realm have their own agendas, some selfish, some altruistic, but it is not a "heaven" by any means, simply a realm that has fewer (or different) boundaries than the physical realm.

Further, there appears to be a "containment structure" around the planet in that realm that prevents easy departure from here, and due to my interactions with beings who were guarding this structure, it seems that there is an agenda to keep people here. (I won't speculate as to WHY that is right now.)

These experiences showed me that the "next world" is right here, but that it is simply a matter of which senses we are using as to which realm we perceive. The physical senses perceive the physical realm, the non-physical senses perceive this more subtle realm.

These OBEs occurred during periods of total sobriety, so if they were simply delusions created by chemicals, they were endogenous chemicals.

 

[arf777]

I will go into this in brief even though this is fully in the realm of subjective experience.

Based on a handful of fully-conscious OBEs, my experience is that there is a non-physical realm that shares space with our physical world, and we can access that realm in the out of body state.

As far as I can tell, it is occupied by "people" who are aligned in various factions. The maxim "as above, so below" rings very true in this regard.

The beings who live in that realm have their own agendas, some selfish, some altruistic, but it is not a "heaven" by any means, simply a realm that has fewer (or different) boundaries than the physical realm.

Further, there appears to be a "containment structure" around the planet in that realm that prevents easy departure from here, and due to my interactions with beings who were guarding this structure, it seems that there is an agenda to keep people here. (I won't speculate as to WHY that is right now.)

These experiences showed me that the "next world" is right here, but that it is simply a matter of which senses we are using as to which realm we perceive. The physical senses perceive the physical realm, the non-physical senses perceive this more subtle realm.

These OBEs occurred during periods of total sobriety, so if they were simply delusions created by chemicals, they were endogenous chemicals.

I have had a variety of OBEs, both while drugged and not. But have you seen the research on hypnogogic or hypnopompic states? The hallucinations in such states are extremely consistent from person to person and even cross-culturally, and almost always involve multiple human-like figures. The science 0n that is pretty established. I even know a Thelemite meditation that induces such an experience almost every time like clockwork (an advanced form of Thoth meditation).

However, it certainly has not explained 100% of cases, like OEBs where the subject was apparently wide awake and not in a trance. And I admit I have definitely seen shit I have not been able to explain, even with extensive documentary and empirical research. Like the time I burned some Abramelin oil and decided to play a CD copy of a wax cylinder recording of Aleister Crowley performing his Gnostic mass. Faces began appearing int he smoke from the Abramelin oil, exactly as centuries of occult texts and artwork indicated would happen. Freaked my ex-wife out so badly (she saw the faces, too) she stopped the ritual, smudged the house twice and threw out the oil. But hey, science would be boring if there wasn't a ton of shit left to explain.

I'll say it again- science is a method, which can be applied to almost all subject matter (as long as testable hypotheses can be generated). And a good scientist knows all sorts of things may be true they think are not (like objective bases for spiritual phenomena or past life memory, something I have also appeared to experience) while all sorts of things they ARE sure are true could be proven any day not to be (like last year's creation of stable trisodium chloride and sodium trichloride, immediately disproving a whole list of 'established facts' about chemistry, including the 'law' that bonding cannot happen with more electrons than are there are spaces available in the outermost electron shell; also supposed to have dramatically undercut the noble gas law, but my chem isn't good enough to analyze that for myself).

 

[zymos]

I was going to start a companion thread titled "god- scam or legit?" ,till I reminded myself that I spend way too much time arguing on the Internet as it is.

 

[MindFork]

I have had a variety of OBEs, both while drugged and not. But have you seen the research on hypnogogic or hypnopompic states? The hallucinations in such states are extremely consistent from person to person and even cross-culturally, and almost always involve multiple human-like figures. The science 0n that is pretty established. I even know a Thelemite meditation that induces such an experience almost every time like clockwork (an advanced form of Thoth meditation).

However, it certainly has not explained 100% of cases, like OEBs where the subject was apparently wide awake and not in a trance. And I admit I have definitely seen shit I have not been able to explain, even with extensive documentary and empirical research. Like the time I burned some Abramelin oil and decided to play a CD copy of a wax cylinder recording of Aleister Crowley performing his Gnostic mass. Faces began appearing int he smoke from the Abramelin oil, exactly as centuries of occult texts and artwork indicated would happen. Freaked my ex-wife out so badly (she saw the faces, too) she stopped the ritual, smudged the house twice and threw out the oil. But hey, science would be boring if there wasn't a ton of shit left to explain.

I'll say it again- science is a method, which can be applied to almost all subject matter (as long as testable hypotheses can be generated). And a good scientist knows all sorts of things may be true they think are not (like objective bases for spiritual phenomena or past life memory, something I have also appeared to experience) while all sorts of things they ARE sure are true could be proven any day not to be (like last year's creation of stable trisodium chloride and sodium trichloride, immediately disproving a whole list of 'established facts' about chemistry, including the 'law' that bonding cannot happen with more electrons than are there are spaces available in the outermost electron shell; also supposed to have dramatically undercut the noble gas law, but my chem isn't good enough to analyze that for myself).

Yes, that is definitely interesting research, especially with regards to the similarities. To me, the fact that there is almost a "human-like presence" is a nice bit of evidence that there are "people" in a non-physical reality that co-exists with our own.

Your Crowley / Abramelin Oil experience is also indicative of that as well. That may be difficult to duplicate in laboratory conditions, and could be dismissed by some as the phenomenon of pareidolia. Sometimes, subjective experiences are all we have to go on, and that will continue to be the case until a scientific method of viewing the non-physical world is developed. (Or released from a black-project if it does already exist)

p.s. Your ex-wife probably did the right thing. There are some seriously parasitic beings in that realm (in my experience) and from what I have read about Crowley, he was happy to entertain any / all of them.

 

[arf777]

Yes, that is definitely interesting research, especially with regards to the similarities. To me, the fact that there is almost a "human-like presence" is a nice bit of evidence that there are "people" in a non-physical reality that co-exists with our own.

Your Crowley / Abramelin Oil experience is also indicative of that as well. That may be difficult to duplicate in laboratory conditions, and could be dismissed by some as the phenomenon of pareidolia. Sometimes, subjective experiences are all we have to go on, and that will continue to be the case until a scientific method of viewing the non-physical world is developed. (Or released from a black-project if it does already exist)

p.s. Your ex-wife probably did the right thing. There are some seriously parasitic beings in that realm (in my experience) and from what I have read about Crowley, he was happy to entertain any / all of them.

Yeah, she was right. I am a skeptic, but that includes the assumption that I am probably wrong about all sorts of shit, and I certainly do not think we know even 1% of the kind of life that may be out there, on other planets or in different quantum states. And Crowley was a little sloppy, though absolutely brilliant at creating and formalizing meditation technique and ritual.

One of the long-standing rumors in the occult community is that he successfully summoned a quasi-seraphic entity called Choronzon at Boleskine House, never put the thing back, and that it wasn't until Jimmy Page bought the house and did a binding that weirdness around the place stopped. My Scottish nanny, who was from near there, claimed that the sightings of a creature in Loch Ness were from Crowley's releasing of Choronzon (Boleskine House is near Loch Ness). Of course, Crowley was quite a skeptic himself. He famously said both "The aim of religion, the method of science" and "The creature in the circle is the same as the creature in my mind" (paraphrasing that one).

I actually did work at the former Rhine Institute, now Rhine Research Center- main reason I went to Duke for grad school. They have developed some truly excellent surveys and interview techniques for attempting to objectify subjective experiences and screen out mental illness and hallucinations. The problem when you do that kind of research is you get 100 lunatics for every 1 legitimate subject, and that's if you're lucky. For instance, I was basically stalked by a dude I met there who claimed a demon had been physically removed from a growth on his shoulder (though of course he could produce no physical evidence, and his scar looked juts like my own spinal surgery scars, not an excise of a growth of any kind). He had become convinced I could somehow "help" him because of my knowledge of the classical kabbalah and my apprenticeship to one of Sun Bear's students.

And I fully admit to having encountered shit that I cannot explain. I grew up not far from a famous haunted house, supposedly haunted by Aaron Burr's niece (and all of a mile front he hill where he killed Hamilton). Like a lot of neighborhood kids, I saw all sorts of vague shapes when walking by the back yard of the place. Started avoiding it like the plague.