TRTZ no 57 Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943

Inventor, Writer, Engineer and Futurist

Starting with Some News

1st May:  Paul Harborne of Sedgeley, West midlands spent over £50, 000 restoring a car.

The result?  A fully functioning Ectomobile, complete with scrolling LED display saying ‘Ghostbusters – we’re back’.  Harborne has put a great deal of effort into every detail, hooking up an iPod in order to play the sirens and hoping to include outfits for the experience so that fans can hire the car and go out for their own busting adventures.

 

The 1959 Cadillac was an abandoned wreck before Harborne got hold of it, ‘It’s extremely rare and very hard to restore… It’s certainly been a challenge – 50-year-old Cadillacs are hard work!’ he said.  He’s also hopeful that there will be a third film in which case his car might get its own part, however, given Bill Murray’s rumoured disinterest in any script ideas put forward by Dan Aykroyd, it’s a question of ‘if’ rather than ‘when’ on that one.

 

International News

30th April:  Theerasak Saksritawee was taking a careful snapshot of a jumping spider as it lounged on a leaf at the Baan Suan Rojana resort in the eastern district of Muak Lek, when the unsuspecting spider was photobombed by a praying Mantis.

He stated that “One moment it was all clear – then this thing appears in front of me.”

 

5th May:  ‘Dominic Deville’ of Lucerne, Switzerland, is providing an unusual service for birthday boys and girls, for a fee, he will don his best evil clown outfit and stalk your children until their big day when he will approach them upfront and throw a pie in their faces.  The service includes text messages, phone calls and letters warning the child of their impending pie-related doom.

Sound a little much?  Dominic ensures worriers that ‘It’s all in fun, and if at any point the kids get scared or their parents are concerned, we stop right there,’ plus most of the children he has stalked ‘absolutely love being scared senseless’ by his appearance.

Deville came up with the service after his favourite horror franchises inspired him and his clown mask could certainly be likened to Stephen King’s ‘It’.

Perhaps to mark 2012’s Star Wars Day, company ‘Wicked Lasers’ have released their ‘LaserSaber’, claiming to be the most realistic Lightsabre replica ever made and which you can purchase for $400.  It features the brightest laser that it’s possible to own (Legally!) though sadly this means that it’s technically ‘not a toy’ as a laser this intense must be handled with care as it is quite dangerous.  Try telling that to a true Star Wars fan.

Watch the video of the gorgeous bit of tech in action…

 

8th May:  Albuquerque, New Mexico is the proposed site for a ‘scientific ghost town’.  It will act as a sort of testing ground for a wide variety of automated technology, but will house no human residents.

It will be modeled after Rock Hill in South Carolina and will go as far as having functioning plumbing and household appliances, despite the fact nobody will be there to use them.

While the project may cost up to a billion pounds, it will also create 350 permanent jobs and 3,500 indirect jobs in the process of its design, development, construction and ongoing operation.  The project will mean that researches will be able to test new technology without disturbing everyday life, while ensuring a realistic setting.

10th May:  The Mayan Calendar has been ever in the public consciousness this year as some believe it predicts the end of the world, but archaeologists in Guatemala have just reported an amazing discovery that could change that theory.

The discovery consists of a small building adorned with surprisingly well preserved paintings, one of a Mayan king and others of Mayan Calendars which extend far beyond 2012.

The calendar in question precedes the oldest Mayan Calendar so far discovered – being the one in the Dresden Codex – by several hundred years.  It consists of a table filled with huge numbers which relate to how long it takes Mars and Venus to cross the sky and return again.  This calendar spans 7,000 years.  The building itself has been known of since 1915, but it has only now been excavated professionally.

Cimolais, Italy now has a reluctant Mayor.  Fabio Borsatti stood in at the last minute because he was concerned that his good friend Gino Bertolo would not get enough votes if he stood unopposed.  His entire family voted for Bertolo and he had not imagined that he might win, but he received 58% of the vote and states that “I find myself a mayor who didn’t want to be a mayor.”  His ‘rival’ was not remotely bitter about the surprise win, saying “I wasn’t upset… Something apparently unusual happened but it is nothing to joke about.”  Borsatti has no plans to resign despite his unwanted election and plans to focus on promoting tourism to the area.

Thanks Catherine…

And from Fee we have …

A Nebraska man has changed his name to Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph Gold. Why? Because it’s ‘cooler’ than his birth name.
Tyler Gold, 23, of York, Neb., appeared in district court. In his filing, he wrote he wanted the name change because it’s ‘cooler’ and more appealing than his birth name, the York News-Times reported.
“Also, as an entrepreneur, name recognition is important and the new name is more recognizable,” Gold told the Times. Judge Alan Gless asked Gold if he was avoiding debt collectors or law enforcement, but he told the judge no and that his request was innocent, the Christian Science Monitor reported. His request was approved, and Gold is now legally Tyrannosaurus Rex Joseph Gold

10 weird and unusual phobias

A phobia is an intense and irrational fear of a specific situation, object, person or activity. While we are generally familiar with common phobias such as acrophobia (fear of heights) and claustrophobia (fear of small spaces), some phobias are less well known. Here are 10 of the most bizarre phobias.

Optophobia: Fear of opening one’s eyes

If ever an award was given for Most Inconvenient Phobia, it would have to go to optophobia – the fear of opening one’s eyes! Although the act of opening our eyes is something that few of us ever give thought to, for optophobics this simple, daily act can be a nightmare. Luckily, if you are reading this list, you most likely aren’t suffering from this condition!

Chorophobia: Fear of dancing

If nightclubs, weddings and small children in tutus fill you with an overwhelming sense of dread, you could be suffering from chorophobia – the fear of dancing. Regardless of dance ability and whether or not you are required to hit the dancefloor, any situation or event that relates to dancing can be a source of fear for chorophobics.

Geliophobia: Fear of laughter

Many studies suggest that laughter is great for our health; helping to build social bonds, improve mental health and look after the heart. However, for those suffering from geliophobia, the act of laughing, or being around those who laugh, can actually cause overwhelming fear and anxiety. Suggested reasons for geliophobia are anxiety about laughing in inappropriate situations or of being laughed at by others.

Arachibutyrophobia: Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth

It may not be a debilitating or life-altering condition, yet no list of weird phobias would be complete without the inclusion of arachibutyrephobia – the inexplicable fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. While peanut butter is clearly not obligatory for a healthy and satisfactory life, arachibutyrophobics could miss out on the speculated health benefits of peanut butter, including its abilities to lower cholesterol and help ward off heart disease.

Heliphobia: Fear of sunlight

A rare but unfortunate condition, heliphobia refers to the fear of sunlight. Not only does going out in the sun instigate severe feelings of anxiety and panic in sufferers, but heliophobics may also experience fear of bright lights. Most often the fear or condition is associated with an anxiety about the perceived dangers of the sun; however, unless you happen to be a vampire, avoiding the sun entirely is likely to be an impossible and unnecessary task. It can also be dangerous for your wellbeing, as sunlight is good for regulating the mood and protecting bone health.

Deipnophobia: Fear of dinner conversations

While many people suffer from a general form of social anxiety, deipnophobia takes a rather more specific twist and is restricted to a fear of carrying on a conversation while eating. Although this can cause discomfort and awkwardness for dinner party guests, it seems that deipnophics could be on to something, as remaining silent while eating can actually help benefit digestion.

Neophobia: Fear of new things

While many people are wary of change, neophobia is a phobia that refers to an intense and irrational fear of all new things and experiences. Neophobia can impact on happiness and wellbeing as sufferers miss out on many life-enhancing experiences. When applied to the diet it can also mean that sufferers miss out on various healthy foods and nutrients. Research has also shown that the stress of neophobia can shorten life expectancy.

Syngenesphobia: Fear of relatives

Many of us experience embarrassment or irritation with our families at times. However, those with syngenesphobia suffer from an excessive fear of their relatives. Unless there is a specific, explicable reason for these fears, it is worth seeking help to alleviate this phobia and help you bond with relatives as research shows that forming strong family ties can help to increase life span.

Ablutophobia: Fear of washing and bathing

Although many children are resistant to being washed, this condition is much less common in adults. However, for a rare few the thought of stepping under a shower is quite literally terrifying! The good news for ablutophobics is that skipping the occasional shower can help to preserve natural oils and good bacteria that protect your skin and help to prevent disease. However, making it a regular habit is unlikely to benefit either your health or social life.

Geniophobia: Fear of chins

Geniophobia is an overwhelming fear of chins. Yes, that innocuous body part attached to the lower part of your face! Further phobias of seemingly innocent body parts include genuphobia (fear of knees), chirophobia (fear of hands) and ishicascadiggaphobia (fear of elbows). As these phobias can make normal social interaction extremely difficult, treatment through therapy is highly recommended.

The camera just can’t be trusted…

The image above is not real. It’s a computer generated digital sculpture of Korean Actress Song Hye Kyo.

The piece was created by CG artist Max Edwin Wahyudi using Pixelogic Zbrush and Autodesk 3DS Max for animation modeling.

It’s a pretty remarkable piece and extremely life like when compared with other digital photographs of live people.

 

 

A man in Hampshire has painted a picture of a Ferrari 250 GTO on the garage door of his home to fool passers-by he owns the classic car.

Chris Smart spent about two weeks transforming his garage in Bishopstoke by painting the cult, red sports car.

Mr Smart, 32, said: “We’ve had a few kids stop and stare as they walk past. Originally one of my neighbours wasn’t too keen, but now she loves it.”

A real version of the car sold for about £20m ($31m) in February.

 Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla was perhaps one of the greatest inventors in history, largely overlooked and regularly stolen from, namely by Thomas Edison.

He was born on July 10th 1856 and died on January 7th 1943.

He was a genius, capable of speaking eight languages, possessing an eidetic memory and capable of picturing and designing complex devices without ever sketching a blueprint or taking a note.  He was also supposedly inspired to study electricity after he received an electric shock from his cat.

He was also notoriously eccentric and plagued by many neuroses, including an intense fear of dirt and germs, any round objects (He was specifically disgusted by pearl earrings) and he later developed an obsession with the number three.

Unfortunately, Obsessive-compulsive disorder was widely misunderstood at the time and he never received any nature of treatment.

He also often suffered from vivid hallucinations and struggled to differentiate between reality and these overwhelming ‘recurrent visual sensations, bright and geometric, which occasionally overwhelmed his sight, actually blotting out scenes in front of him.’

Additionally, towards the end of his life he grow very fond of the pigeons of Manhattan, taking care of sick and injured birds in his hotel room, including a bird he described as pure white with grey tipped wings that he claimed to ‘love as a man loves a woman, and she loved me’.

Well ahead of his time, he is directly responsible for:

  • First hydroelectric plant
  • The discovery of the resonant frequency of the earth.
  • The remote control
  • Neon Lighting
  • The electric motor.
  • Alternating current.
  • The Tesla Coil.
  • (Not the invention of, but certainly the research leading up to) X-Rays, he became aware of the damage done by them that was later identified by Rontgen.
  • The first radio transmitter.
  • Wardenclyffe Tower or the Tesla Tower, an early wireless telecommunications tower intended for commercial trans-Atlantic wireless telephony, broadcasting, and the demonstration of the transmission of power without interconnecting wires.  It was apparently not financially viable however, and later in 1917 it was destroyed by the US government for fear of it being hijacked for use by the Germans.
  • Wireless energy transfer and the Tesla effect.
  • Radar.
  • Bladeless turbines.

Amongst many other significant discoveries.  He is best known for Alternating Current, a discovery that was fraught with heated resistance from Thomas Edison who went as far as to steal pet dogs and electrocute them to death to prove AC was unsafe to power cities; despite is obvious advantages over Edison’s favoured Direct Current.  He also killed a horse using the same method.

‘Topsy’ a rebellious circus elephant was also electrocuted to death to prove AC was unsafe and filmed using Edison’s motion capture camera.

The video of the act is available to see under the name ‘Edison electrocutes elephant’.  It was deemed too cruel to hang her instead.

Subsequently, Edison is responsible for the switch from hanging to electrocution in prisons.

Edison allegedly also prevented the use of radar in the First World War after Tesla pitched the idea to the Navy and Edison said it had ‘no practical application’.  Tesla came up with the idea in 1917, long before Robert Watson-Watt.

Marconi was credited with the invention of radio, but Tesla won the legal battle and Marconi’s patents were overturned, unfortunately posthumously for Tesla.

Tesla also allegedly came up with many theoretical inventions that are still debated about to this day, including a type of particle gun that he claimed would be able to shoot planes from the sky which he called a death ray (Although it was initially called a ‘peace ray’ instead), a steam powered, conveniently portable earthquake machine, a force field, a saucer or cigar shaped craft powered run electro mechanically, and many a theory relating to ball lightning.

Tesla’s electro-mechanical oscillator or earthquake machine was invented in 1898 and it was surprisingly small, weighing a couple of pounds and only seven inches in length.

At this time, Tesla’s lab was in Houston Street, New York and the story goes that his device shook the building violently, resulting in the arrival of the police and Tesla resorting to destroying it with a hammer.

It worked by applying five pounds of air pressure against a pneumatic piston of some nature using steam.  This would result in very high temperatures and enormous generated pressure.

The reason this story is regarded as something of a myth is that attempts to replicate the ‘earthquake’ have been unsuccessful, vibrations being generated that were felt from a great distance but certainly not an earthquake.

Tesla reputedly creative ‘electric fireballs’ in a laboratory setting, writing of his findings in the 1904 journal Electrical World and Engineer as follows: “I have succeeded in determining the mode of their formation and producing them artificially…

It became apparent that the fireballs resulted from the interaction of two frequencies…. This condition acts as a trigger which may cause the total energy of the powerful longer wave to be discharged in a infinitesimally small interval of time… and is released into surrounding space with inconceivable violence. It is but a step, from the learning how a high frequency current can explosively discharge a lower frequency current, to using the principle to design a system in which these explosions can be produced by intent.”

The fireballs became more commonly known as the ball lightning phenomena, despite the differences between his described creation and the experiences of eyewitnesses to ball lightning.

Evidence of Tesla’s fireballs has never come about either, and attempts to emulate ball lightning have proved unsuccessful as well.

Most experiments succeed only in creating brief ‘fireballs’ inconsistent with the ones Tesla described.

As for ball lightning, it’s still a regularly reported though perhaps not fully understood phenomena.

Wardenclyffe Tower is sometimes quoted as being reputedly responsible for the rather odd Tunguska Event.

The Tunguska event (Or blast or explosion) was a massive explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River (Now Krasnoyarsk Krai) Russia, at 7:15am on June 30th in 1908.

The blast was believed to be 1000 times more powerful than that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb and it knocked over around 80 million trees covering 2150 square km.

The shock wave from the blast is estimated to have measured at least 5.0 on the Richter scale.

However, the notion of Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower having anything to do with the Tunguska Event is widely disregarded as there is very little evidence to support any such activity, plus the Tower was either totally or partially inoperable at the time the blast was said to have taken place.

Furthermore in relation to Tesla’s Death/Peace ray, it is pointed out by Brian Dunning that has little to do with Scalar Field Theory, though it is often quoted as differently.

‘Tesla did also claim to have completed a partial unified field theory that unified gravity with electromagnetism, which is something that scalar field theory also claims. Because of these similarities, Tesla’s name is often wrongly associated with scalar weapons and scalar field theory.’

The ray was also called Teleforce, and consisted of a uniquely designed large Van de Graaff generator another unique type of open-ended vacuum tube.  It would accelerate tungsten or mercury particles to about 48 times the speed of sound from the tube by electrostatic repulsion.

Tesla used the term ‘peace ray’ instead of the media proposed ‘death ray’ as he intended it to be used for defense purposes.

The method for producing great electrical force in the range of 60,000,000 volts (To propel the particles) could have been achieved by ‘Wardenclyffe type apparatus’.

After Tesla died, alone and in poverty, his papers were seized by the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover declaring the case ‘Top Secret’ because of ‘the nature of Tesla’s inventions and patents’.

Tesla’s family and the Yugoslav embassy fought with the American authorities to regain the items seized after his death because of the potential significance of some of his research to US defense.

Sava Kosanović (Tesla’s nephew) won possession of the materials and they can now be viewed at the Nikola Tesla Museum.

The morning after Teslas’ death, Kosanovic´ states that he by the time he arrived, Tesla’s body had already been removed, and that he suspected somebody had already gone through his uncle’s possessions.

Papers were allegedly missing, including a black notebook Kosanovic was certain Tesla kept.  He says that some of the pages of this notebook had been marked ‘Government.’

Despite Kosanovic winning the materials back again, there are still missing papers.  Whether or not these have anything to do with the FBI of course remains to be seen.

The following Tesla Videos may be of interest:-

 

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TRTZ no 56 UFO’s, Rendlesham

Tonight we’ll be taking a quick look at UFO’s, SETI and focus on the UK Rosewell – Rendlesham…

 

Some News

25th April: Ant Hadleigh a kite surfer from Cape York, discovered a golden orb spider battling a brown tree snake near a friend’s home in Freshwater.

What’s more, the spider won!

While the golden orb spider is the largest known web-weaving spider in Australia, the odds would usually still be against it when pitted against a snake.  The snake involved was about a metre and a half long and Hadleigh states that every attempt it made to bite back was easily evaded by the spider.

26th April:  Many residents of San Diego were saddened to learn that a yarn bombing project whereby the stop signs were transformed into flowers may have to come to an end as there are ‘just too many restrictions to overcome’.

City official Bill Harris contacted the man behind the project, known only as Bryan, and informed him that “Even with the great community spirit this effort has generated… there is just no way to retain the works where they now are.”

Bryan currently has a week or so to remove the ‘flowers’ or they will be removed by city employees.  Bryan hopes that if he lives them up there is a chance they will be left alone after all, stating that “In January, 2011, I put up five as a test run and they are still there, so I’m hoping it was just the city doing their due diligence. But I’d like to think that if you were a busy city worker and had a whole day’s work ahead of you, removing this might be too much trouble.”

27th April:  Florida resident Blanca Riveron was very worried to hear that she may have lung cancer after an x-ray in December of last year showed a worrying dark spot on her lung.

She’d always been stricken with respiratory problems, suffering through bouts of asthma and pneumonia far more regularly than most.  However, upon coming to a halt at a set of traffic lights, she was struck with a coughing fit during which she coughed up a fruit pip she had inhaled by accident 28 years ago!

It is very likely that this was her ‘spot’ and she will be attending a checkup to make sure, but friends and family have remarked how much better she already seems to be getting.  “She’s even been able to blow up a balloon for my son. She had never been able to do that,” said her daughter, Dayana Noda.

28th April:  Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been claiming to have been part of ‘Project Pegasus’ between the age of 7 and 12.  Project Pegasus, he claims, was a US government program that worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), apparently to test the effects of such travel on the bodies of children as well as adults, who also took part.

He says that children adapted better to the strains of time travel.  Most of the methods of time travel he speaks of he put down to Nikola Tesla, as papers discussing his theories on the subject were allegedly found in his New York apartment subsequent to his death in 1943.  “The machine consisted of two gray elliptical booms about eight feet tall, separated by about 10 feet, between which a shimmering curtain of what Tesla called ‘radiant energy’ was broadcast,” Basiago said. “Radiant energy is a form of energy that Tesla discovered that is latent and pervasive in the universe and has among its properties the capacity to bend time-space.”

He even says that he has photographic evidence of his travels, pointing out that he can be seen in a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, “I left the area around the dais and walked about 100 paces over to where I was photographed in the Josephine Cogg image of Lincoln at Gettysburg,” he explains.  Perhaps not surprisingly, many are skeptical of his claims.

24th April:  Ginger Morneau happened to have her camera handy in order to document a rather unusual showdown while walking along the Ogden Point Breakwater in Victoria, BC.  A Glaucous gull whose eyes were probably bigger than its stomach when it spotted a potential meal, was spotted struggling with a Giant Pacific Octopus in the shallow water of the Point.

Morneau snapped several pictures of the somewhat dramatic event, describing it all as ‘primal’ and speaking of how she had rather wanted to rescue the bird, which was definitely losing the fight.  It had at first appeared to have been feeding on something just under the surface, but on closer inspection it was unable to lift its head from the water despite flapping its wings to try and free itself.

The gull was soon pulled completely under the water and the octopus slunk off to enjoy its enormous catch.  Gulls are capable of eating an octopus, but there have been odd reports throughout history of the opposite happening too as in this instance.  This is the first time anybody has ever been able to capture it though.

UFO’s

Yes the exist!

Strictly speaking ANY flying object which cannot be identified is a UFO – an Unidentified Flying Object

However when the term UFO is used many will immediately think of aliens – extraterrestrials.

Now this is a HUGE topic so we’re going to focus upon one key story and look at what ‘evidence’ there is and what we can deduce from that evidence…

The report that we are referring to in the show is can be found here and was compiled by Catherine : Rendlesham : Notes

The Drake Equation

While working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. The Drake Equation, as it came to be known, was formulated in 1961 and is generally accepted by the scientific community.

 N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L

where,

  • N = The number of communicative civilizations
  • R* = The rate of formation of suitable stars (stars such as our Sun)
  • fp = The fraction of those stars with planets. (Current evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun.)
  • ne = The number of Earth-like worlds per planetary system
  • fl = The fraction of those Earth-like planets where life actually develops
  • fi = The fraction of life sites where intelligence develops
  • fc = The fraction of communicative planets (those on which electromagnetic communications technology develops)
  • L = The “lifetime” of communicating civilizations

Frank Drake’s own current solution to the Drake Equation estimates 10,000 communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Dr. Drake, who serves on the SETI League’s advisory board, has personally endorsed SETI’s planned all-sky survey.

 

Music on tonights show from Aardvark Records

Raising Days – Heart Stand Still

Raising Days – Earth

Raising Days – Craving

 

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TRTZ no 55 Chaos and Chaos Magic

Good Evening, and tonight’s show will be Chaos – well what’s the difference I hear you say?

Well – as well as being Chaotic in terms of production and chat-room management, we’ll be talking about CHAOS and CHAOS Magic!

But first some news …

UK

April 21st:  A sonar picture of an object following a boat 23 metres below the surface has reignited Loch Ness Monster theories everywhere after it was taken by Loch Ness boat skipper Marcus Atkinson.

Atkinson took the picture of the sonar anomaly using his mobile phone and consequently won first place in the ‘Best Nessie Sighting of the Year’ Awards by William Hill Bookmakers.

Loch Ness Monster fans have scrutinized the sonar image and believe it is not a case of misidentified fish, seals or debris.

Atkinson explains that, “The device takes a reading of the depth and what is below the boat every quarter of a second and gradually builds up a picture, so it covered a time of about five minutes.

The object got bigger and bigger and I thought “bloody hell” and took a picture with my mobile phone. There is nothing that big in the Loch. I was in shock as it looked like a big serpent, it’s amazing. You can’t fake a sonar image. I have never seen anything returned like this on the fish finder.”

However, Dr Simon Boxall from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton points out that it may have a mundane explanation after all.  “The image shows a bloom of algae and zooplankton that would exist on what would be a thermocline.

Zooplankton live off this algae and reflect sound signals from echo sounders and fish finders very well.  They will appear as a linear “blob” on the screen, just like this.”

But while Boxall seems to have potentially solved the mystery,

Atkinson has shown the image to other experienced skippers who haven’t seen anything like it before and, of course, Nessie hunters remain hopeful that this is finally the real deal.

 

April 23rd:  A recent story of a monster rat found in a basement in the US has been trumped by another enormous discovery on UK shores.

Brian Watson, a grandfather from Consett, County Durham discovered the giant rat near his home after the boyfriend of his granddaughter spotted it.  Unfortunately, Watson proceeded to beat it to death with a plank of wood, which he then attempted to use to lift the body from the garden, only to result in the plank breaking under the weight of the mammoth rodent.

Watson believes the rat might’ve been about to have a litter of babies and that this may be why it was so large and slow.  Some have suggested that the animal was actually a coypu and not a rat.

Watson has also been heavily criticized for killing the creature in the manner that he did, as many feel his reaction was excessively cruel and that it could’ve been rescued or simply moved from the area.

 

International

April 13th:  Dawa’a, an 18-year-old-girl from Cairo, Egypt, claims to have been touched by a tribe of a thousand Jinn after she wept tears of blood.  Appearing on Al Nahar Television to tell her story, she describes how Amr Al-Laithi, a Muslim scholar, recited verses from Qur’an as she fell unconscious and how when she woke up after 20 minutes of the ritual she could not remember anything of the preceding events and had an intense headache.

Amr Al-Laithi describes the jinn as having only an external influence on Dawa’a, and that she had not been possessed.  Some have expressed concern for the girl’s health, as crying blood could also be the symptom of infection or even cancer.

April 16th:  Jose Chinchilla and his fiancée Michele Callan of Toms River, New Jersey, claim that they plan to sue the landlord $2,250 (The total of their security deposit) after paranormal activity forced them out of the newly rented property only a week after moving in.

The couple says that they ‘hear eerie noises, that lights flicker, doors slam and a spectral presence tugs on their bed sheets.’  They decided to call Shore Paranormal Research Society to investigate their strange goings on.

The Team from the Society came to the conclusion that while they believe there is something paranormal going on, they do not believe it indicated a full-blown haunting.  The landlord has reacted by filing a counter suit; of the opinion that the couple was actually unhappy with the $1,500 a month rental fee and that they invented the ghost to escape their lease.

The case will go to court by the end of this month.

Earlier in the year, we reported the announcement made by Telecommunications giant Qualcomm in reference to the ‘Tricorder X-Prize Contest’ in which the company would offer a $US10 million prize to anyone able to make a functioning medical ‘tricorder’ similar to those used in all generations of Star Trek.

Dr. Peter Jansen, a PhD graduate of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, says that he has been working on such a device since 2007.

Though his prototypes are designed more for scientific research than medical alone, Jansen said it can so far measure ambient temperature, pressure or humidity, take electromagnetic measurements to test magnetic fields, and it make spatial measurements of distance, location, or motion.

Jansen states that the idea of making a tricorder has been with him since he was a child and that Star Trek was what inspired him to become a scientist in the first place.  His favourite version of the fictional device appears in Voyager, though his favourite series in all is the Next Generation.  Jansen has posted schematics and designs of his first and second prototypes, (Mark 1 and Mark 2) for anyone to see and build in the hope that others will try to create something similar.

He expects to have his latest version (Mark 4) produced for about $200.  Think you’d like to try?  Visit www.tricorderproject.org for all the details.

 

April 17th:  UFOScandinavia have helpfully released a compilation video of all the recent youtube footage of UFO’s in St Petersburg.  Any theories?

Danu Fox – Earth-Singing

Danu was a guest on our show a couple weeks ago when she told us of the forthcoming event.

On Sat 5 May at 3pm groups of singers and dowsers are gathering all along the lines to perform and measure the effects of a short ceremony with the intention of singing thank you and giving love and appreciation for our lands.

Inspired by the Songlines tradition of Australia, Danu Fox, singer, musician and founder of Earth Singers, a pioneering programme for stewarding land, has instigated this event and it is the first time anything like this has been done on a national scale across the UK.

If you’d like to join in please go to the Earth Singers Facebook page or email Danu: info@songbearmusic.co.uk. Enjoy!

 

Chaos & Chaos Magic

Chaos Magic – A Primer by Catherine

Chaos magick is difficult to explain in full.  It is also a relatively recent notion, its’ birth seeming to have occurred only in 1976.

A general description of Chaos Magic outlines the contradictory nature of belief and reality and the idea of there being no real set of rules by which to achieve something.

The gnosis state is the aim for a chaos magician, whatever type of trappings you choose to employ doesn’t really matter, ‘just as long as they inspire you.’

Chaos Magick as we currently know it was first formulated in West Yorkshire in the 1970s as a consequence of a meeting between Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin in Deptford in 1976.

In 1978 Carroll and Sherwin also founded the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) a chaos magic organisation.

The name of the organization is derived from the Greek gods of sex and death: eros and thanatos, apparently in accordance with the notion of these two methods being the positive and negative ways of achieving ‘magical consciousness’.

The group was criticized for its use of hierarchical and traditional ritual, things which should technically be rejected by most chaotes, many of whom believe the entire concept to be somewhat un-chaotic.

The group is also renowned for being, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, rather difficult to get into.

Chaos theory and magick primarily have their roots in theories outlined by Austin Osman Spare, artist and once a member of the A∴A∴, created in 1907 by Aleister Crowley and George Cecil Jones after they left the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

However, it is also important to note that they do not replicate his beliefs exactly.

While sources such as Wikipedia call him the father of chaos magick, other sources instead call him the grandfather of it, and instead believe Peter Carroll to be the ‘father’ of chaos magick.

Spare disapproved of religion and of science as well, relating religion to ‘chains’ and feeling both were restricting in their self-proclaimed ‘truths’.

One of Spare’s most significant contributions to the theories of chaos magick is probably the use of his sigils, that is, his notion of a ‘symbolic representation of the magician’s desired outcome’.

His ‘alphabet of desire’ was adapted by Carroll in his Liber Null & Psychonaut.

Spare’s use of sigils involved designing a symbol over which to obsess, something that would occupy the mind as he felt that the mind was a hindrance to magic.

Gnosis, therefore, is loosely defined as an overwhelming of the parts of the mind involved in rational function.

His other main contribution to the overall belief system of Chaos magick is the rejection of traditional magical systems and ritual in favor of achieving a Gnostic state.

Chaos magick is anarchic to some degree, hoping to negate the effects of religious structure and allow one to build a structure of their own to some degree – ie, whatever works for you.

It emphasises the importance of belief, summarising it as a form of magic in itself, though many self-proclaimed chaos magicians do not feel that belief is necessary to participate in that form of magic.

Reality is not important, then, as if a belief results in the desired outcome it is often accepted as truth or taken to heart.  Only subjective truths are available – nobody knows what is absolutely true, only beliefs are available.

Chaos magick is, at its heart, about freedom, but it is filled with opposites and paradoxes.

While the notion of belief is important and the freedom that comes with choosing any helpful belief is key to chaos theory, it is also temporary.

A chaote will believe something before changing that belief for the next one that becomes useful.

Therefore, a chaote both truly believes and does not technically ever really believe at all.  This approach was propagated by Carroll, Spare would have spoken differently.

This could also be called ‘paradigm shifting’, in that often opposing rites or rituals are used and entirely believed in their context at that time.

The saying ‘Nothing is True, and Everything is Permitted’ (A saying popularised by William Burroughs, though its’ origin was a line from a character in ‘Alamut’ by Vladimir Bartol.) plays into these principles, a self defeating statement that could be interpreted as meaning that there is no absolute objective truth to tell us what is entirely right or wrong, there are no rules.

Sigils are fundamental to chaos magic, a form by which magic can be personalised to some degree.

It begins with focusing on a wish or aim or writing a ‘statement of will’, such as ‘I will get an A on the paper I wrote’, then using the letters in the statement to form a symbol or design of some nature which must be achieved without intense focus.  It should ‘come to you’.

Carroll added to this process by suggesting removing the letters that repeat in the sentence to make it easier.

This done, gnosis must be achieved, to ensure total focus on the goal.

This can be achieved by one of several techniques which are as follows.

Inhibitory gnosis: similar to what we know as mediation, to achieve a trance-like state.  This involves self-hypnosis, regular breathing techniques, progressive muscle relaxation and absent thought-processes.  It could be achieved by fasting, not sleeping, sensory deprivation or even drugs.

Excitatory gnosis:  Perhaps almost the opposite of the first mentioned, involving a degree of intense arousal that could be achieved via flagellation, dance, song/ chanting, hyperventilating, sexual excitation, or, again, drugs.

Indifferent vacuity:  This third method was added later, and involves casting said spell almost as a sidenote so that there is little thought involved to suppress in the first place.

Of course, this implies that there are some rules involved in a kind of magic that prides itself on being ruleless to some degree, therefore these methods are viewed more as ways of inducing gnosis only as opposed to processes that’re valuable or significant by themselves.

Chaos itself is not a label used to specifically describe mayhem or disorder, but acts to chaotes as a description of something all-encompassing.

It is described by one researcher as “…what you love, but it’s also what you hate. Chaos is fire, and it’s water, and it’s those things whether that’s good or bad. This doesn’t just mean that it’s objective, in that it is beyond good and bad (although it is held to be) – but it also contains the subjective aspects also. It contains all opposites. As everything is of chaos, so everyone mirrors it.”

Many aspects of chaos magick have become incorporated in to the even more confusing paradigms of discordianism.

So that’s Catherine’s Introduction….

 So let’s take things a bit further…

DETERMINISM is the notion that every event or action is the inevitable result of preceding events and actions.

In many ways, the spiritual movement embrace this concept within the “Laws” of what is commonly known as “Karma”.

In science determinism suggests, at least in principle, hat every event, or action, can be predicted in advance or in retrospect. This is a view point which can be traced back to the Ancient Greeks and became part of modern science around 1500AD with the establishment of the idea that cause and effect completely govern all motion and structure on the material level.

The deterministic view of the universe suggests, therefore, that the universe unfolds in time like the workings of a machine and subject to predetermined ‘laws’.

Newtons Laws of Motion are perfect examples of deterministic thinking and it is an approach which still underpins much physical science. These ‘laws’ can be defined by measurement and expressed mathematically.

Now, one of the fundamental principles of experimental science is that no real measurement is infinitely precise but includes a degree of uncertainty in the value. The question ‘how long is a piece of string?’ is not so simple to answer – it depends upon how we measure it and what we are measuring…

In 1900 the physicist, Henri Poincare commented upon a special kind of behaviour in time found in certain physical systems. In essence he pointed out that there would be imprecision in all astronomical predictions made by Newtons equations and ‘laws’. Simply put Poincare challenged the assumptions made by his peers that such imprecision would become less significant the more accurate the   system of measurement…. in astronomical systems when the measurements became more precise the ‘shrinking of the initial conditions’ shrank from he final predictions in a corresponding way.

He summarised his arguments thusly :-

in ‘complex systems’  the only way to obtain precise predictions with any degree of accuracy would entail specifying the initial conditions with absolute infinite precision.

The extreme “sensitivity to initial  conditions” became known as ‘chaos’.

In 1963 the meteorologist wrote a basic computer program to predict weather patterns. In short he found that no matter how he altered the variables he could never quite recreate expected patterns from the initial conditions. By the late 1970′s he discovered that even the smallest discrepancy between initial conditions would always result in a huge discrepancy at earlier or later times – the hallmark of a chaotic system. The well known and oft quoted ‘Butterfly Effect’.

The discovery of chaos seems to imply that randomness lies at the core of any deterministic model of the universe. Also, although seemingly counter-intuitive, is that chaos may produce ordered systems on large scales.

It is against this scientific backdrop that Chaos Magic was born.

Simply put, if Magic (as a ritualistic act) is about ‘bringing about change in accordance with will’ the way we define that change and the actions we undertake to bring about that change will, necessarily, not have a simple cause and effect relationship.

Chaos Magicians are generally of the opinion, as far as general opinions can be stated, that belief is an active magical force. There is an emphasis on flexibility of belief an the ability to consciously choose ones beliefs – so, you do not have to have ‘belief’  in order to make magic work.

Austin Osman Spare stated that will formulates desire which promulgates belief.

In Peter Carolls works not only does he talk about magic being related to increasing the probability, not a certainty, of a specific outcome, but also the importance of the ‘gnostic state’.

This state, similar to the Buddhist notion of Samadhi, is achieved when a persons mind is focused on a single point, thought or goal.

Gnosis is said to be achievable through Inhibition or Excitation.

Inhibition would include deep meditation, trance, fasting,sensory deprivation.

Excitation would include sex, flagellation, dance, drumming, chanting, sensory overload, hyperventilation and the possible use of drugs.

Despite its ‘nod’ to Thelemic (Crowley) and Golden Dawn, OTO and A:A traditions at the core of Chaos Magic is the notion that the ‘magic is within you’ and that whatever ritual path you choose to take is more to do with choice of belief, tradition and opportunity.

I would go a step further, perhaps, in suggesting that ‘doing by not doing’ and ‘being by simply being’ is the state of gnosis ritual attempts to create. It is from this state of knowing that we can really understand what is meant by the phrase ‘to bring about change in accordance with will’.

In order to work with ‘will’ there is the need to question the nature of will – being detached from simple ‘desire’, ‘lust’ and ‘ego-need’.

There is an inbuilt responsibility to bring about ‘change’ through action and that any action, no matter how small will have some effect upon the environment in which the magician operates – mind, spirit, body, home, town, planet, solar system, cosmos. The dictum ‘as above so below’ recreated and restated within the context of Chaos Magic and non-deterministic philosophies.

You may act with belief and conviction but the true effect of that action can have consequences beyond any original intent. To attempt understand one’s own desires in the context of free-will, personal-will and cosmic-will is an interesting challenge.

To be both at once philosophical and naive is the challenge…. and now we’re back to thinking about the ‘Fool’, the ‘Cosmic Joker’ and our own, personal journey.

Alan

 

Music from tonights show : THE IS – available from Aardvark Records

 

 

 

 

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TRTZ 54 17th April 2012 – Metaphysics : Soul, Spirit, Being

 

 

So today is the 54th TRTZ and I’m 54 today – synchronicity or what!

I know, I know – 54 – when I only look like I’m in my 40′s (yeah right!) – but as they say ‘it’s not the age, it’s the mileage’ – and no, that doesn’t make me feel any better.

Tonight we’re taking a slightly different tack and dipping our metaphorical toes into the metaphysical in an attempt to see what we all mean by the words we easily use.

Words like ‘spirit’, ‘ghost’, ‘soul’ can imply a belief system, or at least some ideas about the nature of the cosmos – but what exactly?

This is the question for tonights debate and like all TRTZ shows the notes below reflect only part of the discussion that we will be having  on air so treat them as supporting information and provocations….

BUT FIRST…

Some news…

Villagers get fed-up.

The villagers of the Australian of the town of F*****G are fed up with people stealing their road-signs that they are looking to change it to Fugging or Fuking..

The final straw has been a growing number of calls by pranksters from abroad who ring up locals and ask in English “Is That F*****G” – before bursting into laughter and hanging up.

“The phone calls are really the final straw”, said local Mayor Franz Meindl, who confirmed that the villages street signs were regularly stolen even though they had been welded on steel posts set in concrete in the ground.

Drivers heading into the village often disturbed naked couples romping in front of the signs, and local entrepreneurs made the situation worse by flogging off Fucking postcards – Fucking Christmas cards and even more recently a Fucking beer.

Residents last voted on the subject in 1996 when it decided to keep the name despite problems caused by American servicemen from across the border in Germany that drove to the region just to be photographed in front of signs. They then sent the snaps back home to their girlfriends and wives.

If the name change goes ahead, they will be following in the footsteps of stadium bosses in Switzerland who were forced to change their name from Wankdorf because red-faced stars were too embarrassed to play there.

 Retirement Plan …

It may look like a tropical paradise, but Sotobanari Island is no holiday destination: there’s no natural water, dangerous currents swirl around and it’s lashed by typhoons.

However, the Japanese island has one resident who has made it his home for the last two decades: a pensioner who walks around in the buff despite the insects that come out to bite at night.

Masafumi Nagasaki, 76, has made this 1km-wide Japanese island his retirement home, living off rice cakes, which he boils in water, four or five times a day.

He throws on clothes once a week for a trip to a settlement an hour away by boat, where he collects 10,000 yen (£78) sent to him by his family to buy food and drinking water.

Teaching a young dog an old trick…

This is quite cute ….

 

 

Play_Dead_Baillie

 

Having your cake and eating it….

 

 

Like something straight out of a Roald Dahl book or Heston Blumenthal TV show, a London communications firm had its office lift lined with over 1,000 Jaffa Cakes in a bid to make their workplace just a little bit nicer.

Engine, a marketing firm based in London’s Great Portland Street, had the “edible elevator artwork” installed as part of an advertising campaign for McVitie’s Jaffa Cakes.

A team of artists and food technicians took a month to come with and install the 1,325 Jaffa Cake project, which lined the walls of the lift, last week.

 

Spider-Mouse

 

A hamster who swallowed a toy magnet and became stuck to the metal bars of his cage is now recovering following the bizarre incident.

Pet hamster ‘Smurf’ had to be prised off the bars by owner Kate Meech, who came home to find the hanging helplessly off the cage.

 On a more serious note …..

An Argentinian mother has spoken of her shock after her stillborn baby was found alive in a morgue.

Analia Bouter’s fifth child was born at 26 weeks – around three months premature – in Argentina’s northern Chaco province.

Doctors told her the baby had died, but when she and her husband visited the morgue 12 hours later, they realised their daughter was breathing.

Some local stuff from my Breakfast Show this morning (see www.alanjonesradio.com)

17th April 1986 Netherlands signs Peace Treaty with The Isle of Scillies ending the 335 Year War!

The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years’ War  was a war between the Netherlands and the  and the Isles of Scilly is said to have been extended by the lack of a peace treaty for 335 years without a single shot being fired, which would make it one of the world’s longest wars and the war with the fewest casualties.

Despite the uncertain validity of the declaration of war, peace was finally declared in 1986.

The origins of the war can be found in the Civil War , fought between the Royalists and the Parlaimentarians   from 1642 to 1652.

Oliver Cromwall had fought the Royalists to the edges of the Kingdom of England and this meant that the Dutchy of Cornwall  was the last Royalist stronghold.

In 1648, Cromwell pushed on until mainland Cornwall was in the hands of the Parliamentarians.

The Royalist Navy was forced to retreat to the Scillies which were under the ownership of Royalist John Grenville.

The Dutch Navy was suffering heavy losses from the Royalist fleet based in Scilly.

On 30 March 1651,  Admiral Maarteen Harpertszoon Tromp arrived in Scilly to demand reparation from the Royalist fleet for the Dutch ships and goods taken by them.

According to Whitelocke’s Memorials (cited in Bowley, 2001), a letter of 17 April 1651 explains: “Tromp came to Pendennis and related that he had been to Scilly to demand reparation for the Dutch ships and goods taken by them; and receiving no satisfactory answer, he had, according to his Commission, declared war on them”.

As most of England was now in Parliamentarian hands, war was declared specifically upon the Isles of Scilly.

In June 1651, soon after the declaration of war, the Parliamentarian forces under Admiral Robert Blake forced the Royalist fleet to surrender. The Netherlands fleet, no longer under threat, left without firing a shot. Due to the obscurity of one nation’s declaration of war against a small part of another, the Dutch did not officially declare peace.

In 1985, Roy Duncan, historian and Chairman of the Isles of Scilly Council, wrote to the Dutch Embassy in London to dispose of the myth that the islands were still at war. Embassy staff found the myth to be accurate and Duncan invited the Dutch ambassador Rein Huydecoper to visit the islands and sign a peace treat.

Peace was declared on 17 April 1986, 335 years after the “war” began. The Ambassador joked that it must have been harrowing to the Scillonians “to know we could have attacked at any moment.”

 

And finally… builders bum outlawed!

A US man has been sentenced to three days in prison after turning up to court wearing low-slung baggy jeans.

It has long been acknowledged that trousers which only reach the mid-thigh are guilty of a range of style crimes, however Alabama Judge John Bush ruled that the 20-year-old’s jeans were so low that they were actually in contempt of court.

 

Metaphysical Meanderings..

 

In his book, The Science of Mind (1926), Earnest Holmes gave  the following definitions:-

SPIRIT –That part of man which enables him to be self-conscious. That which he really is. We do not see the spirit of man any more than we see the Spirit of God. We see what man does; but we do not see the doer.

LOGOS (Christ) –The Word of God manifest in and through man. In a liberal sense the Christ means the Entire Manifestation of God and is, therefore, the Second Person of the Trinity. Christ is a Universal Idea, and each one “Puts on The Christ” to the degree that he surrenders a limited sense of Life to the Divine Realization.

SONSHIP.–We are all Sons of God and all partake of the Divine Nature.

MICROCOSM.–The individual world as distinguished from the Universal.

EMMANUEL.-GOD-WITH-US.–Means that Christ is in every one.

PERSONALITY.–The external evidence of individualized being.

INDIVIDUALITY.–Each one is a separate identity in Mind and no two are alike. Each is an Individualized Center of God-Consciousness. Our personality is the use that we make of our Divine Individuality.

CONSCIOUS-STATE.–The conscious-state is the self-knowing mind of man. It is the only thing that distinguishes him from brute creation. Without a conscious-state of mind man would not be at all; or, at least, he would not know that he is. The conscious mind should be carefully guarded, as it is the real man.

MENTAL.–Means that man is mentally conscious.

SPIRITUAL.–Means that man is a Spiritual Being.

Now I could have chosen almost any spiritual metaphysical text to start this debate, but Holmes’ thoughts provide us with adequate food for thought.

The issue, for me, with any form of philosophical argument is that whilst it may seek to explain experience it can seem detached from what we want to accept as reality.

Take any one of Xeno’s Paradoxes about movement for example. In an attempt to argue from an ‘absurd’ point of view the impossibility of movement Xeno presented a series of philosophical thoughts or propositions.

Oversimplifying some of the arguments Xeno simply claimed that since the distance between two points can be made up of an infinite number of steps it was never possible to actually arrive at a desired destination.

OK, breaking it down a bit..

If I’m travelling from A to B then the first step I take must be equal to a fraction of the distance between the two points. It is possible then to imagine that each step can be made up of two smaller fractions – ie we can travel half a step. If we can travel half a step, then we must be travelling a quarter of a step, and an eight of  a step, and then a hundredth of a step – ad infinitum.

So since there are infinite number of smaller steps that can be taken it we will never fully arrive at point B – we will only always be moving towards it.

Of course the moment someone stands up and walks between point A and point B they show the reality of the possibility of travel between the two points and make a nonsense of the argument. However BOTH realities are possible – one is the reality of the empirical, practical and observable, the other is the reality of the logical, possible and philosophical.

Such mental gymnastics are great for the oiling of the minds cogs in order to enter into meaningful debate. The fact that one reality is practical and the intellectual can, to some, produce an emotional reaction which causes the impractical to be dismissed. Such individuals hence remove themselves from the arena of debate.

During last weeks TRTZ I was noticing some interesting conversations on the two different chat rooms we were on. Some people were engaged in considering the discussion and the points being made in the show but most were not.

This is OK since in both cases the peripheral debates had  been sparked by comments made in the show.

On the one chat room we had people asking very important questions about the nature of evidence and the fact that having ‘evidence’ results in the need for interpretation and that this where things can get ‘messy’.

The other chat room was involving itself in a debate about God, Spirit and Science and the reality (or absurdity) of each.

In many ways these discussions mirror the different ways we can respond to Xeno’s paradoxes or any discussion which attempts to set practical, objective reality against subjective, personal realities.

Consider the following :-

Religions are systems of beliefs that attempt to explain the human spiritual experience.

All religions arise from the illusion of separation, because that is the nature of human experience in the physical form.

We experience ourselves as separate beings, separate from each other, separate from “God”, and from the physical Universe.

It is impossible from this viewpoint of separation to perceive the true nature of who we really are, of matter and energy, and of the life force in everything that we have labeled “God”.

So to unpick this and try to get a little deeper into what has been written let’s take a step at a time …

Religions are systems of beliefs

I think there would be little disagreement with this statement since we can readily recognise the existence of differing religions each with their own system of beliefs, canons of faith and approaches to worship.

that attempt to explain the human spiritual experience

OK, here we could have some interesting debates. It presupposes there is something called a ‘spiritual experience’ which is distinct from personal experience. Some would argue that that which we call spiritual experience is simply part and parcel of the way our brains can and do work.

I am personally in no-doubt of there being a qualitative difference between some of my personal experiences. Some have the quality of being shared by others (we could call this objective experience or rationality); some have the quality of being internal and the result of me conversing with me; some are dream like and some are, for want of a better term, transcendent – they appear to be experiences of things outside of self and outside of rationality.

We experience ourselves as separate beings, separate from each other, separate from “God”, and from the physical Universe

Whilst many would agree that there is a sense of being separate, an individual, and indeed as spectators of the physical universe, it does not mean that there has to be a “God” from which we are detached.

The concept of “God” is not easy to tie down…

From the simplistic notion of a human-like being who is all powerful, all knowing and ever present yet still acting as some kind of supernatural parent to the idea that there is an ‘intelligence’ behind the Universe we find definitions of God as being all at once personal, cultural and historical.

An awareness of  being a distinct part of the Universe of Cosmos does not need to automatically presuppose the existence of a divine being let alone a divine creator. Arguments from personal incredulity about the implausibility of natural processes ‘creating’ the universe to statements which suppose that because we can’t go beyond the scientists current idea of what happened BEFORE the moment of creation of the universe do little to prove the existence of a God.

Science has a pretty good set of ideas about what happened at the moment of creation of the Universe and, indeed, argue that the process of a universes destruction underpin the processes required to drive creation. A kind of end in the beginning and beginning in the end – which, I know, sounds very mystical.

Whilst arguments from personal incredulity are not valid philosophically, there nevertheless is the personal experience many have of the existence of personal truth of God. Should it be stated here that quite simply personal experience and personal beliefs are not necessarily universal absolutes or truths?

In my culture it was common for children to be told of a bearded, red coated fatman who delivered presents to good children every year. My experience at that time was that this was a personal truth. So entrenched was my belief in this character that I adapted my behaviour according to expectations.

When asked to prove his existence I could readily point to his effects on my word. First there were no presents under the tree, then there were.

Other people confirmed his existence and told me the same story.

At times I was sure I heard him, or his reindeer or the jingle of the sleigh-bells – my faith gave me some degree of enhanced perception.

Now I am older and I can enjoy the myth and the magic of those childhood day. In many respects seeing behind the curtain as it were gave me more questions and, indeed, a greater sense of awe…

Awe?

Yes… about how my parents were able to execute some of their well meaning deceits; about how I could be fooled; about the power of belief ..

BUT there was more…

A real fascination for how the legend that became Father Christmas has a resonance above and behind the commercialisation of the holiday period. How pagan tradition sits with Christian tradition without there being so much as a dismissive thought when Christmas and Fertility are mentioned in the same breath …. a I could go on…

So whilst there was no Father Christmas there was a set of ideas, thoughts and intentions behind the myth that were and are important.

Back to the quote in question…

 It is impossible from this viewpoint of separation to perceive the true nature of who we really are, of matter and energy, and of the life force in everything that we have labeled “God”.

So, using my Father Christmas anaology – when I was a member of the Religion of Santa Claus I may have had been told the connections to other mystical teachings (the birth of Christ) but I could not really see from the ‘inside out’ as it were and think of a world that could have ‘presents’ and no Santa.

More importantly once I had recovered from my Santa Delusion (to misappropriate a certain well know book title) I was able to see and acknowledge the interconnected nature of thoughts and ideas which had created him in the first place.

“Santa” was much more than a marketing ploy by a famous drinks company (who, despite urban myth were not the first to describe a jolly-old red-suited Father Christmas) but was a symbol of so much more that I came to value (and of some things I did not).

Having ‘been Santa’ (that is an actor playing the role of Santa professionally) I am aware of the impact the image has and the way people  of all ages react emotionally to ‘him’. For the most part the reaction is one of joy and positivity; of connecting to memories or some idealistic zietgiest …. there is nothing wrong with this as far as I am concerned. Where it would become a concern is where the esteem and regard the character is held in becomes a vehicle for manipulation and control – a kind of extension of the idea that ‘you need to be good or else no presents’.

 

So let’s see where we can find some ‘common ground’.

Most of us have the ability to sense ourselves as individuals – distinct and independent from each other

Most of us would accept that our awareness of the outside world changes from time to time and place to place

Further, then, I would argue that most of us would recognise that our sense of the world outside (what we see, hear, feel, taste and smell) is limited by the sensory apparatus we possess.

Most of us would be willing to accept that some of the sensory information we process is processed without conscious thought – we would be willing to conceive of a sub-conscious or unconscious set of processes.

Most of us would be willing to accept that the way we behave is the result of what we feel; what we think; what we value; what we need – on other words what motivates us to do something.

Many would further accept that there are conscious motivations and as well as unconscious ones.

Some of us would be willing to accept that our inner sense of the world is constructed from our sensory experience of the world ‘out there’ and moreover have had the experience of being fooled into seeing something that was not there (for example)

Some of us would be willing to accept that our emotions have an effect on how we make sense and react to what we perceive.

I think that apart from a pedants need to change some of the specific wording above that most people would take the above as ‘given’ and not really want to argue too much about the claims. Of course there are some with psychological or neurological conditions for which some of the above may not apply, but on the whole we have a general agreement that there are levels of experience which we can call …

  • External Sensory
  • Internal Sensory
  • Consciousness
  • Unconsciousness  or Sub-Conscious
  • Behavioural

This is the MIND and BODY bit which forms part of objective reality which can be studied by scientist, philosophers and rationalists.

Ideas in this real can be tested against scientific (objective) criteria and, for the most part, we can set-up hypotheses which we can attempt to falsify (part of the scientific method).

So far so good..

Now ..

Most of us will have had experiences which we might describe as being ‘different’ and not necessarily related to external experiences – they are personal.

Emotional experiences, which can be felt as unique and personal, are of course related to aspects of brain chemistry but have an impact above and beyond the simple behavioural framework in which they occur.

These experiences can have a sense of being “beyond self” and indeed some of us will have had a sense of what could be called, mystical, spiritual or even transpersonal experiences.

Again brain chemistry is involved but what triggers the bio-chemical responses can be questioned and, in the absence of an acceptance that the mind can ‘create’ these experiences it is likely that we will call these spiritual experiences as being a connection to some universal source of essence.

So now we have the oft quoted trinity of Body, Mind and Spirit.

The issue of course is that whilst many of the body-mind experiences can be subjected to the questions of the rationalist, those we could call a spiritual experience may not be and, more importantly, get ‘caught’ by the web of an individual, group or cultural belief systems.

At this point discussion can ‘break down’ since any attempt to explore a personally powerful experience with rational techniques may seem like an attack on belief even when it is not.

Once emotions run high conversations get defensive and prone to logical fallacy after logical fallacy – and finally the ad homenim attacks which get us nowhere. The truth is, of course, that spiritual beliefs are not necessarily subject to the same rational explorations as are the components we see as being part of objective reality. The existence God, as well as well perhaps spirits or ghosts are not falsifiable in the scientific sense.

The best we can do is explore and seek to understand what individuals mean by the spiritual words and frameworks they use.

I found the chart below very interesting in that is seems to be an attempt to link the  “Great Chain of Being” is usually given as something like: matterbodymindsoul, and spirit to the more ‘popular’ religious belief systems.

 

Source: Integral Life

All of the major belief systems seem to echo the following ‘truths’..

1) The individual has become disconnected from a (or the) spiritual source

2) The personality (outer representation of the individual) and the behaviours (the interaction of the individual between self, others and the outside world) of human beings need to brought in line with the destiny, desires or plan of the divine.

3) Reconnection with the spiritual source requires sacrifice, learning, and personal commitment.

4) That there is, by definition, a spiritual source to reconnect with in the first place – a matter of personal belief and/or self-referred revelation generally following some kind of personal epiphany.

 A note for the atheists who are of a scientific persuasion ….

If you, as an atheist, are willing to accept the concept of an infinite universe – in mathematical and scientific terms – then, by definition, there are an infinite number of possibilities for the mechanisms of nature (or not) which define ‘reality’.

So, therefore, there is high possibility of a universe existing in which a God exists – as well as a universe in which the laws of nature we know or think we ‘understand’ do not apply.

A note for the Christians and others who seem to engage in circular arguments…

 

Counter argument to the Christ myth

Counter argument to the Christ myth (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Here are some interesting thoughts …

Some of the best evidence for the afterlife is:

  • People on their death beds see spirits who come to help them make the transition. These experiences have been confirmed in various ways and shown to be objective phenomena and not hallucinations. Sometimes other people attending the dying also see the same spirits at the same time. In one case a spirit communicating through a medium told of how she assisted a dying man. A relative of the man was sought out and the information the man related to the relative confirmed what came through the medium. (see below: Death Bed Visions)OK So how can we prove that these experiences are not hallucinations, the result of expectation, confabulation, retro-fitting reports to expectations or confirmation bias?To be presented as evidence the burden of proof lies with the claimant.
  • Near the time of their death the spirits of the dead have appeared to friends or relatives at distant locations where more than one person present at the location sees the spirit. (see below: Crisis Apparitions)So how do we confirm this? These are non-falsifiable surely and, of course, such accounts as anecdotes are subject to some of the same concerns mentioned above.
  • Mediums sometimes receive communications from spirits who are unrelated to and unknown by the sitters and the medium. These spirits come through to communicate for purposes important only to themselves. They give verifiable information about their identity and cause of death. (see below: Drop-in Communicators)The Medium particularly and some of those attending already have  a belief system which is based upon the reality of spirits and spirit communication. If the information is given cannot be verified at the time, i.e. no one in the session knows the person coming through, how can we rule out expectation and cherry picking when it comes to researching only information that fits that which is revealed? The specificity of the information needs to be questioned.
  • Mediums can receive communications from spirits even when the person getting the reading is not present in the room with the medium. In these cases, the medium may not know who the sitter is and cannot get any type of feedback from the sitter yet the medium can bring through specialized knowledge known by the spirit. (see below: Proxy Sittings)The same questions as posed above need to be asked. In experiments I have conducted the mediums were unable to identify in  a reading someone who had ‘passed’ from six photos (hence five of whom were alive)
  • When people are unconscious and near death, they sometimes experience leaving their body and when revived, bring back information that they could not have obtained with their normal senses even if they had been conscious and that information is later verified as correct. “Scientific” explanations cannot explain this and other aspects of the phenomena. (see below: Near Death Experiences)This again is subject to questions about the nature of the information – its specificity. The scientific explanation of NDE’s relies upon some well established neuro-science.
  • Children have been studied who remember past lives. They can speak languages they have never heard. They remember geography, faces, and names of people in locations they have never been to. They have birthmarks on their body where they had sustained injuries in the previous life. An investigator interviews everyone involved, the children, the current families, surviving members of the families from the previous life and everything checks out. (see below: Reincarnation)This is interesting and there could be many explanations, which include cultural expectation (hence unconscious coaching) and confirmation bias. Some examples of rigorous investigation of cases has shown a bias in the nature of the questions asked by the original researchers – leading questions asked of children and relatives to get the answers required.
  • Spirits have communicated parts of messages through different mediums. When combined, these partial messages produce a complete message. The messages contained very specialized knowledge known to the spirit and were communicated spontaneously, not at the request of any living person. These messages show that the spirit lives on after the death of the body, retains knowledge from its earth life, and continues to have the ability to initiate, organize, and carry out complex activities. (see below: Cross Correspondences)An interesting observation but it does not rule out mind-to-mind communication between the mediums. The specific nature of the knowledge, the information and its clearly defined ‘spontaneous’ origin beg some questions.
  • Experiments attended by scientists and a stage magician have been conducted under controlled conditions where voices of spirits were heard, objects were materialized, and images imprinted on photographic film. (see below: The Scole Experiments)As noted by other commentators on the Scole Experiments were not controlled effectively..Brian Dunning notes” ….the investigators imposed little or no controls or restrictions upon the mediums, and at the same time, agreed to all of the restrictions imposed by the mediums. The mediums were in control of the seances, not the investigators. What the Scole Report authors describe as a scientific investigation of the phenomena, was in fact (by any reasonable interpretation of the scientific method) hampered by a set of rules which explicitly prevented any scientific investigation of the phenomena.”After reading about some of the controls imposed I feel that any competent magician could’ve reproduced some of  the physical phenomena.

    Often Quoted Individual Cases

    • The spirit of a grand master chess player plays through a medium at the grand master level in a style characteristic of the time of his life on earth.
      Source: The Survival Files by Miles Edward Allen
      http://www.aeces.info/Top40/Cases_8-25/case24_soulmate.pdf
    • Is the validation of a style possible since we know moves of Masters are studied in detail by students of chess?
    • Could the medium play chess and was he or she any good?
    • There is a magicians ‘trick’ in which a magician with no (or little knowledge) of chess can play 10 Grand Masters simultaneously and win/draw most of them
    • The challenge of confirmation bias 
    • A scholar of Asian languages speaks in Chinese with a spirit who successfully explains an ancient Chinese poem that modern scholars did not understand.
      Source: Psychic Adventures In New York by Neville Whymant
      http://www.freewebs.com/psilib/PsychicAdventuresWhymant.txt
    • So if scholars could not interpret who was available to falsify the claim?
    • Spirits of crew members of a crashed dirigible, R-101, “provided technical details about its design and construction, recollections of test flights, discussions of political pressures and unrealistic deadlines that plagued the project, and a description of the crash itself and its causes” and “the personalities of the dead airmen also came through in recognizable detail”.
      Source: “R-101″ by Michael Prescott
      † http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/R-101.htm 
    • Interesting and I would like to see the details of the evidence, the availability of the technical information and how specific it was.
      Also see:
      The Survival Files by Miles Edward Allen
      http://www.aeces.info/Top40/Cases_8-25/case14_R101.pdf
    • Relatives of a deceased child receive convincing evidence of identity from the spirit of the child.
      Source: “An Amazing Experiment” by Charles Drayton Thomas
    • Specificity of information and the ratio of ‘hits’ to ‘misses’ would be an interesting question here.
    • What were the pre-existing beliefs of the parents?
    • “Police in Nelson, B.C., have found the body of a young woman who disappeared last March, and they credit a local psychic for pointing them in the right direction.”
      Source: CBC News Thursday, January 27, 2005
    • What does ‘pointing in the right direction mean’?
    • The use of newspaper stories does not, in my opinion, constitute reliable, unbiased evidence.
    • The Sylvia Browne experience?
      http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/01/27/psychic-body050127.html#
Now the point is not about questioning a belief, but in questioning the evidence which is presented as scientific.
As I have said several times, the experiences which stem from our beliefs are important to the individual and they bring meaning and inspiration.
A scientist’s view of a universe following physical laws is not necessarily poorer for the absence of God and of course a mystics view of the cosmos is not necessarily richer because of the absence of science.
When I share an experience with someone, I share their perception of the world and their beliefs about it. I am honored that they have chosen to share that part of their personal  universe.
I hope that when I share my experiences they are met with similar respect…
BUT …
IF I present a personal experience as evidence for something I would like others to accept as being part of universal truth, then I would hope that they would be willing to question my perceptions and my conclusions.
IF I then try to convince people that my metaphysical construct is the ‘best’ or ‘only way’ I should expect questions and honest debate and not shy away from the rationalists desire to ascertain the quality of my evidence or the mystics recognition that there are differences in the way the universe can be expressed and understood by the individual.
My model of the way ‘the world is’ and my relationship with the universe is based upon my learning, my reflections and my experience and anyone who immediately assumes a superior experience because they are either ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘enlightened’ would capture my interest; my questions and if necessary the re-evaluation of my beliefs.

Evidence for the Afterlife : Source

Brian Dunning : Source

 

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