No society wants you to become wise: it is against the investment of all societies. If people are wise they cannot be exploited. If they are intelligent they cannot be subjugated, they cannot be forced into a mechanical life, to live like robots. They will assert themselves – they will assert their individuality. They will have the fragrance of rebellion around them; they will want to live in freedom.
OSHO
I saw them cross the twilight of an age, The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn, The great creators with wide brows of calm, The massive barrier-breakers of the world
11/02/2021
04/02/2021
Suspense novelist Michael Prescott explores the non-fiction of life after death
Although Michael Prescott is best known as the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 22 suspense novels, he is also known for his blog dealing primarily with paranormal and life after death subjects. Over the past 20 years he has produced more than 1,600 blog posts with more than 50,000 comments by readers.
The end result is a departure from his fiction writing with his just-released The Far Horizon: Perspectives on Life Beyond Death, published by White Crow Books. He begins the book by examining some of the best evidence coming to us from psychical research and parapsychology over the past 138 years, since the organization of the Society for Psychical Research, then asking why, if it is so good, it is not more widely known and accepted. He offers four models of after-death consciousness, discussing each one in separate chapters. "In all four models, the space-time universe rendered by our subjective perception is the tip of the iceberg, with the other nine-tenths hidden from sight," Prescott explains. "Vast expanses of reality and vast realms of consciousness lie submerged beneath the surface, difficult for us to access. Difficult, but not impossible, as mystics, shamans, mediums, and psychics have attested throughout history."
As anyone who has thoroughly studied the evidence knows, much of it is vague, abstruse, convoluted, and often inconsistent with established religious dogma and doctrine, as well as with mainstream science. A very abstract picture of the afterlife emerges, one requiring much discernment. In effect, so much of it seems beyond human comprehension. Nevertheless, enough of it is discernible that the open-minded investigator can begin to see intelligence and clarity in the abstractness. Prescott (below) masterfully makes sense out of what seems like so much nonsense to many. As he states, it need not be "a baffling anomaly," but it can be seen as "a logical extension of our experience of reality here and now."
I recently put some questions to him by email.
I know you explain this in the book, but can you just briefly summarize how you became interested in the subject of life after death and what keeps you going on it?
The main thing was a kind of early midlife crisis in 1997 when I was 36 years old. Prior to that time, I'd been a complete skeptic with no interest in the paranormal or the afterlife. The only reading I'd done on the subject consisted of books by Martin Gardner and James Randi. I was also influenced by the skeptical opinions of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, among others. I probably would've been a good candidate for membership in CSICOP, as it was then called, had I been more interested in the subject. But in '97 I began to question my entire worldview. This was, in part, because of an experience I had when trying to come up with the idea for a novel.
I'd hit a brick wall on the book, was very frustrated and depressed, and had pretty much given up, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I felt an intense urge to sit down at my computer and start typing. I proceeded to type out a ten-page synopsis of an entirely new story that was, in effect, being dictated to me. That synopsis turned into the novel Comes the Dark, the most esoteric and "literary" thing I've written.
This experience deeply intrigued me. It got me interested in the subconscious and the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain operate, to some extent, independently of each other. This, in turn, got me to look into the nature of consciousness, which led me in a somewhat spiritual direction. Probably as a result of this, I began to feel that my outlook on life was cramped and shallow - that I was missing the big picture.
And so I began to take the paranormal little more seriously. I proceeded gradually and cautiously, because at first I felt almost foolish reading about this stuff. I started with Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields, went on to evidence for ESP, and eventually crossed the Rubicon by looking seriously at life after death. That is something I never thought I would do.
On a percentage basis, with zero being total disbelief and 100 being absolute certainty with regard to consciousness surviving death, where would you put yourself 30 years ago and where are you now?
30 years ago it was zero. These days it's probably about 90%, or maybe 95% on some days.
What will it take to get you to 100%?
It will probably take actually dying! Or at least a near-death experience. There's only so far you can go by reading about a subject or talking with other people, or visiting mediums, or recording dreams, synchronicities, and premonitions, or meditating. I've done all those things, and they're certainly helpful, but they're not quite enough to get me to 100%.
If you had to pick three cases from the annals of psychical research, parapsychology, and consciousness studies, as most convincing, which ones would you choose?
I think the Bobbie Newlove case, involving the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, is quite compelling. So is the R-101 case involving Eileen Garrett. A more recent case is the Jacqui Poole murder mystery. All three of these cases are covered in my book.
On a more general level, the cross correspondences provide very good evidence of mediumship that goes beyond so-called super-psi, but this is a whole series of cases, not just one. I don't talk about the cross correspondences in The Far Horizon, though, because the subject is too complicated to be quickly summarized.
Do you see a growing interest in this subject matter or has it pretty much flatlined, maybe even going in reverse?
My personal interest has somewhat flatlined, just because I've investigated it for so many years and it's no longer fresh to me. My book is kind of a summing-up. I wouldn't have written until I felt I'd gone pretty much as far as I could go.
For society, I think interest is increasing quite a lot. Unfortunately, there's not that much new research being done. As you know better than almost anyone, the heyday of research into the afterlife was the late 19th century and early 20th century, when there were some very prominent people involved, notably William James. I don't know of anyone today of similar prominence who is willing to stick up for this type of work.
Worse, there is very little funding. The quickest way to short-circuit your career in the sciences is to decide to study the paranormal, especially life after death. Very few people want to commit career suicide. I don't think this will change any time soon because the "scientific-government complex" is implacably hostile to such ideas. And most scientific funding, as well as publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals and tenure in academic institutions, is controlled by that complex. I'm talking about the US. Perhaps in other countries, there's more open-mindedness. I don't know.
Why so much resistance on a subject that seemingly should be welcomed by the masses?
I don't think the subject is resisted by the masses. When I bring up my interest in the paranormal and the afterlife with regular folks, I often find they've had experiences of their own that they want to share. But they keep these accounts to themselves unless they feel comfortable opening up.
The whole idea, however, is strongly resisted by the elites, who are thoroughly materialistic in their philosophy. Even very creative, intelligent people in the establishment - for instance, Elon Musk - seem boxed in by materialistic thinking. For instance, when Musk talks about the universe as a virtual-reality simulation, he appears to see it as being literally a program run on some extraterrestrial computer. That's a purely materialistic, and rather naïve, interpretation of an idea that can be interpreted in much more spiritual terms.
In my book, I go into the simulation hypothesis as one model of reality, but I make it clear that I'm not talking about a literal computer program. Instead, I'm speaking of an informational matrix that exists in a realm beyond the space-time universe we experience. It's essentially the same thing as Immanuel Kant's noumenal realm, as distinct from the phenomenal realm of direct experience. Or it could be compared to Plato's world of Forms, the true reality that we perceive only as shadows on a wall.
Unfortunately, materialistic tendencies intrude even into afterlife studies. We've seen attempts by people over the years to build a machine that can communicate with the dead. One such device, dubbed Spiricom, was the subject of John Fuller's book The Ghost of 29 Megacycles. While you never know what might work, I don't have a particularly high opinion of such efforts. For me, it's not about building a better mousetrap. We need to learn to adjust our consciousness, not improve our technology.
What is the key message of your book?
The key message is that life after death doesn't have to be compartmentalized in our thinking. We don't have to use one set of concepts or metaphors to understand the universe around us, and then come up with a whole new set of concepts and metaphors to make sense out of the afterlife. We can see both types of existence - our incarnational existence and our postmortem existence - as part of a continuum.
To do this requires grasping one essential fact, namely, that all experience is subjective. While I argue that there is an objective basis for our experience, this doesn't change the fact that experience itself is, by its nature, subjective. You can't have an experience without an object to apprehend and a subject who apprehends it, something to perceive and a mind that perceives. And as far as experience per se is concerned, perception is reality. It is impossible to detach one's perception of the event from the event itself, because the event exists, for us, only in our perception of it.
If we see reality in these terms, then postmortem reality simply involves a shift in focus — we redirect our attention from one level of experience to another. Or we alter our consciousness from one degree of perception to another. It amounts to the same thing.
We need to get away from the idea that, in dying, we are physically traveling to some other physical location that we call the afterlife. It is more like a change in perception - a broadening or widening of perception - which is why mind-expanding drugs can bring about experiences that have a lot in common with NDEs and OBEs.
In other words, it's all about consciousness, and if we see consciousness as existing along a spectrum of frequencies, then dying is no more than dialing up to a higher frequency. Which, of course, is another of the models I explore in The Far Horizon!
As anyone who has thoroughly studied the evidence knows, much of it is vague, abstruse, convoluted, and often inconsistent with established religious dogma and doctrine, as well as with mainstream science. A very abstract picture of the afterlife emerges, one requiring much discernment. In effect, so much of it seems beyond human comprehension. Nevertheless, enough of it is discernible that the open-minded investigator can begin to see intelligence and clarity in the abstractness. Prescott (below) masterfully makes sense out of what seems like so much nonsense to many. As he states, it need not be "a baffling anomaly," but it can be seen as "a logical extension of our experience of reality here and now."
I recently put some questions to him by email.
I know you explain this in the book, but can you just briefly summarize how you became interested in the subject of life after death and what keeps you going on it?
The main thing was a kind of early midlife crisis in 1997 when I was 36 years old. Prior to that time, I'd been a complete skeptic with no interest in the paranormal or the afterlife. The only reading I'd done on the subject consisted of books by Martin Gardner and James Randi. I was also influenced by the skeptical opinions of Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, among others. I probably would've been a good candidate for membership in CSICOP, as it was then called, had I been more interested in the subject. But in '97 I began to question my entire worldview. This was, in part, because of an experience I had when trying to come up with the idea for a novel.
I'd hit a brick wall on the book, was very frustrated and depressed, and had pretty much given up, when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I felt an intense urge to sit down at my computer and start typing. I proceeded to type out a ten-page synopsis of an entirely new story that was, in effect, being dictated to me. That synopsis turned into the novel Comes the Dark, the most esoteric and "literary" thing I've written.
This experience deeply intrigued me. It got me interested in the subconscious and the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain operate, to some extent, independently of each other. This, in turn, got me to look into the nature of consciousness, which led me in a somewhat spiritual direction. Probably as a result of this, I began to feel that my outlook on life was cramped and shallow - that I was missing the big picture.
And so I began to take the paranormal little more seriously. I proceeded gradually and cautiously, because at first I felt almost foolish reading about this stuff. I started with Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields, went on to evidence for ESP, and eventually crossed the Rubicon by looking seriously at life after death. That is something I never thought I would do.
On a percentage basis, with zero being total disbelief and 100 being absolute certainty with regard to consciousness surviving death, where would you put yourself 30 years ago and where are you now?
30 years ago it was zero. These days it's probably about 90%, or maybe 95% on some days.
What will it take to get you to 100%?
It will probably take actually dying! Or at least a near-death experience. There's only so far you can go by reading about a subject or talking with other people, or visiting mediums, or recording dreams, synchronicities, and premonitions, or meditating. I've done all those things, and they're certainly helpful, but they're not quite enough to get me to 100%.
If you had to pick three cases from the annals of psychical research, parapsychology, and consciousness studies, as most convincing, which ones would you choose?
I think the Bobbie Newlove case, involving the medium Gladys Osborne Leonard, is quite compelling. So is the R-101 case involving Eileen Garrett. A more recent case is the Jacqui Poole murder mystery. All three of these cases are covered in my book.
On a more general level, the cross correspondences provide very good evidence of mediumship that goes beyond so-called super-psi, but this is a whole series of cases, not just one. I don't talk about the cross correspondences in The Far Horizon, though, because the subject is too complicated to be quickly summarized.
Do you see a growing interest in this subject matter or has it pretty much flatlined, maybe even going in reverse?
My personal interest has somewhat flatlined, just because I've investigated it for so many years and it's no longer fresh to me. My book is kind of a summing-up. I wouldn't have written until I felt I'd gone pretty much as far as I could go.
For society, I think interest is increasing quite a lot. Unfortunately, there's not that much new research being done. As you know better than almost anyone, the heyday of research into the afterlife was the late 19th century and early 20th century, when there were some very prominent people involved, notably William James. I don't know of anyone today of similar prominence who is willing to stick up for this type of work.
Worse, there is very little funding. The quickest way to short-circuit your career in the sciences is to decide to study the paranormal, especially life after death. Very few people want to commit career suicide. I don't think this will change any time soon because the "scientific-government complex" is implacably hostile to such ideas. And most scientific funding, as well as publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals and tenure in academic institutions, is controlled by that complex. I'm talking about the US. Perhaps in other countries, there's more open-mindedness. I don't know.
Why so much resistance on a subject that seemingly should be welcomed by the masses?
I don't think the subject is resisted by the masses. When I bring up my interest in the paranormal and the afterlife with regular folks, I often find they've had experiences of their own that they want to share. But they keep these accounts to themselves unless they feel comfortable opening up.
The whole idea, however, is strongly resisted by the elites, who are thoroughly materialistic in their philosophy. Even very creative, intelligent people in the establishment - for instance, Elon Musk - seem boxed in by materialistic thinking. For instance, when Musk talks about the universe as a virtual-reality simulation, he appears to see it as being literally a program run on some extraterrestrial computer. That's a purely materialistic, and rather naïve, interpretation of an idea that can be interpreted in much more spiritual terms.
In my book, I go into the simulation hypothesis as one model of reality, but I make it clear that I'm not talking about a literal computer program. Instead, I'm speaking of an informational matrix that exists in a realm beyond the space-time universe we experience. It's essentially the same thing as Immanuel Kant's noumenal realm, as distinct from the phenomenal realm of direct experience. Or it could be compared to Plato's world of Forms, the true reality that we perceive only as shadows on a wall.
Unfortunately, materialistic tendencies intrude even into afterlife studies. We've seen attempts by people over the years to build a machine that can communicate with the dead. One such device, dubbed Spiricom, was the subject of John Fuller's book The Ghost of 29 Megacycles. While you never know what might work, I don't have a particularly high opinion of such efforts. For me, it's not about building a better mousetrap. We need to learn to adjust our consciousness, not improve our technology.
What is the key message of your book?
The key message is that life after death doesn't have to be compartmentalized in our thinking. We don't have to use one set of concepts or metaphors to understand the universe around us, and then come up with a whole new set of concepts and metaphors to make sense out of the afterlife. We can see both types of existence - our incarnational existence and our postmortem existence - as part of a continuum.
To do this requires grasping one essential fact, namely, that all experience is subjective. While I argue that there is an objective basis for our experience, this doesn't change the fact that experience itself is, by its nature, subjective. You can't have an experience without an object to apprehend and a subject who apprehends it, something to perceive and a mind that perceives. And as far as experience per se is concerned, perception is reality. It is impossible to detach one's perception of the event from the event itself, because the event exists, for us, only in our perception of it.
If we see reality in these terms, then postmortem reality simply involves a shift in focus — we redirect our attention from one level of experience to another. Or we alter our consciousness from one degree of perception to another. It amounts to the same thing.
We need to get away from the idea that, in dying, we are physically traveling to some other physical location that we call the afterlife. It is more like a change in perception - a broadening or widening of perception - which is why mind-expanding drugs can bring about experiences that have a lot in common with NDEs and OBEs.
In other words, it's all about consciousness, and if we see consciousness as existing along a spectrum of frequencies, then dying is no more than dialing up to a higher frequency. Which, of course, is another of the models I explore in The Far Horizon!
Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. His forthcoming book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is released on January 26, 2021.The Far Horizon: Perspectives on Life Beyond Death by Michael Prescott is published by White Crow Books.
Labels:
DEATH/DYING,
ET,
MEDIUMSHIP,
MICHAEL PRESCOTT,
PHILOSOPHY,
PSYCHOACTIVE,
RUPERT SHELDRAKE
31/01/2021
March 2021 - 3rd Wave of Awakening - Improvements & Success
As March arrives we will start to see improvements in our perspective, there will be a return of hope and relief. The start of the year was rough and depressing for many. We were asked to let go of the old world, we were grieving for a way of life that was no longer sustainable, a life we were invested in. The harder we tried to cling to our beliefs and attachments to the dying paradigm of control, the more suffering ensued. That suffering was conscious and that awareness has made it possible for us to let go. We spent some time processing all that had happened in 2020 and now as March rolls in, we will start to see some results of our hard work. It was much clearing for the collective, clearing the shadow, the miasma from our reality that felt so dark these past months.
Hope will return as we see how much work we have done on ourselves and with it a feeling of achievement. The great awakening is still in full-swing and will continue for some time as the masses now are moving into the ascension. The veil is thinning, the truth is everywhere and can no longer be ignored. Everyone will have moments of realisation of truth about something in their lives. Governments and elites of this world are desperate but they have overplayed their hand and their corruption and greed is obvious now. The people of earth are demanding their freedom and as the spring comes, as the light returns, we will start to unite and resist even more. The 3rd wave of virus will initiate a massive pushback against the restrictions and matrix control system. The pandemic narrative will start to fail and lose credibility.
Those of us working in the disclosure community, the lightworkers and starseeds will see huge improvements in our lives as we move further into the healing energies of the 5th dimension. Ancient healing gifts and abilities will increase as will our joy and inner peace. It will be a time for celebration. As the 3rd wave of awakening sweeps in there will be new codes available for download. Very expansive codes of manifestation and realisation incoming! Warriors of light unite! More and more humans are now moving onto the freedom timelines! There will be blessings big and small for all in March 2021!
30/01/2021
That is also why I am here
To feel the depth of being, the pain, the sorrow. Understanding what being human is. What the seperation entails. What the resistance means.
To wander through the underworld. That is also why I am here.
The experience of sadness and loss, the frustration, the heart is on a journey of understanding.
To feel all of life, to walk through the world and know every facet is the most precious commodity. The soul finds it's ecstasy in the breakdown, in the falling away.
There is no greater joy than in deep participation, fulfillment of the returning. I am coming home each day.
As I walk slowly through the hours, through the seasons; I walk through my seperations. I walk through my fears. I feel the cells of my body teaching me; pain is relieving me, my resistance is reading me, my depression is leaving me.
Just like tears falling from my eyes, so are the leaves falling from me. My incarnation is close to me in the cold of the night.
Do you not see the radiance?
The singing of the redemption is as the silver streams of moonlight. So fair; you have tiny shimmers like crystalline cobwebs in your hair.
The tones are softly calming, the music of the spheres. Yet once you were in utter darkness, in the midst of terror, in the crying years.
14/01/2021
Interested in alien intelligence
The demands for alien intel became so many that the CIA eventually compiled it onto a CD-ROM, obtained by Greenwald and uploaded to the Black Vault, divvied into dozens of downloadable .PDFs.
The dump comes at a moment in history when Americans are particularly interested in alien intelligence, indicated by a recent uptick in UFO sightings, and viral popularity of media relating to extraterrestrial life.
CIA releases UFO 'Black Vault' documents early: How to see them online
Federal intelligence on extraterrestrial technology — at your fingertips.
By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr.
The CIA claims they have now provided all the information on UAP they have, though there is no way to know that's true.
By way of the Freedom of Information Act, thousands of the CIA documents on unidentified flying objects (UFOs) — or Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), as the government calls them — are now accessible via download at the Black Vault, a website operated by author and podcaster John Greenwald Jr.
The CIA claims they have now provided all the information on UAP they have, though there is no way to know that's true.
Calculations Show It'll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI
The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for many decades, and scientists have just delivered their verdict on whether we'd be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost definitely not.
The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that super-intelligence which we can analyse. But if we're unable to comprehend it, it's impossible to create such a simulation.
Rules such as 'cause no harm to humans' can't be set if we don't understand the kind of scenarios that an AI is going to come up with, suggest the authors of the new paper. Once a computer system is working on a level above the scope of our programmers, we can no longer set limits.
"A super-intelligence poses a fundamentally different problem than those typically studied under the banner of 'robot ethics'," write the researchers.
"This is because a super-intelligence is multi-faceted, and therefore potentially capable of mobilising a diversity of resources in order to achieve objectives that are potentially incomprehensible to humans, let alone controllable."
The catch is that controlling a super-intelligence far beyond human comprehension would require a simulation of that super-intelligence which we can analyse. But if we're unable to comprehend it, it's impossible to create such a simulation.
Rules such as 'cause no harm to humans' can't be set if we don't understand the kind of scenarios that an AI is going to come up with, suggest the authors of the new paper. Once a computer system is working on a level above the scope of our programmers, we can no longer set limits.
"A super-intelligence poses a fundamentally different problem than those typically studied under the banner of 'robot ethics'," write the researchers.
"This is because a super-intelligence is multi-faceted, and therefore potentially capable of mobilising a diversity of resources in order to achieve objectives that are potentially incomprehensible to humans, let alone controllable."
13/01/2021
02/01/2021
Have we got it all wrong? Depression as a survival strategy
For generations, we have seen depression as an illness, an unnecessary deviation from normal functioning. It's an idea that makes sense because depression causes suffering and even death. But what if we've got it all wrong? What if depression is not an aberration at all, but an important part of our biological defense system?
More and more researchers across specialties are questioning our current definitions of depression. Biological anthropologists have argued that depression is an adaptive response to adversity and not a mental disorder. In October, the British Psychological Society published a new report on depression, stating that "depression is best thought of as an experience, or set of experiences, rather than as a disease." And neuroscientists are focusing on the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in depression. According to the Polyvagal Theory of the ANS, depression is part of a biological defense strategy meant to help us survive.
The common wisdom is that depression starts in the mind with distorted thinking. That leads to "psychosomatic" symptoms like headaches, stomach aches, or fatigue. Now, models like the Polyvagal Theory suggest that we've got it backward. It's the body that detects danger and initiates a defense strategy meant to help us survive. That biological strategy is called immobilization, and it manifests in the mind and the body with a set of symptoms we call depression.
When we think of depression as irrational and unnecessary suffering, we stigmatize people and rob them of hope. But when we begin to understand that depression, at least initially, happens for a good reason we lift the shame. People with depression are courageous survivors, not damaged invalids.
More and more researchers across specialties are questioning our current definitions of depression. Biological anthropologists have argued that depression is an adaptive response to adversity and not a mental disorder. In October, the British Psychological Society published a new report on depression, stating that "depression is best thought of as an experience, or set of experiences, rather than as a disease." And neuroscientists are focusing on the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in depression. According to the Polyvagal Theory of the ANS, depression is part of a biological defense strategy meant to help us survive.
The common wisdom is that depression starts in the mind with distorted thinking. That leads to "psychosomatic" symptoms like headaches, stomach aches, or fatigue. Now, models like the Polyvagal Theory suggest that we've got it backward. It's the body that detects danger and initiates a defense strategy meant to help us survive. That biological strategy is called immobilization, and it manifests in the mind and the body with a set of symptoms we call depression.
When we think of depression as irrational and unnecessary suffering, we stigmatize people and rob them of hope. But when we begin to understand that depression, at least initially, happens for a good reason we lift the shame. People with depression are courageous survivors, not damaged invalids.
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