Stepping Beyond Yourself

It’s hard not to think of the many ways you can be taken in and taken out nowadays. It’s a weird world where anything can happen.   No wonder so many feel the need to connect with the more soulful part of themselves.  There’s more to us than we might normally suppose. We’re riveted to what’s obvious, the immediate surface of life. We need to unrivet ourselves, create an open mental space, if we’re curious about our unrecognized potentials.  

Down the ages, humans have discovered ways to tap into these potentials.   What follows is a short list of some examples. Not the details, just the main idea.

Fasting, for example, a world-old practice where you choose not to be tyrannized by your appetites. There is no question that fasting can alter your consciousness, even as it benefits your body.

Periods of solitude, which heighten self-observation and self-awareness.  In our busy lives, we often lose track of our real goals and interests. We’re distracted and divided by all manner of interruptions. Solitude means freedom from all the gadgets and the people.

Sublimation of sexual energy is a challenging route to higher consciousness.  The more Saint Joseph of Copertino had to fight to resist his sexual fantasies the more spectacular his levitations!  There are, however, less combative ways to sublimate our unruly sexual energies.

These examples, strategies for stepping beyond mundane consciousness, all abstain from paying attention to the world. They disallow consciousness from being scattered in all directions. 

As for inducing glimpses of greater realities, there is one procedure that can propel you instantly into another universe—the near-death experience. And it can happen in a flash.  Another universe, just around the psychic corner, so to speak!

We’re talking about the universe of consciousness and ways to enter more deeply into it.  We said something about physical maneuvers. Let’s look at some mental maneuvers.  In

 meditation, we focus the stream of our awareness on one thing, thus withdrawing our consciousness from everything, except what we’re meditating on. It’s good to know there are numerous ways to meditate.  Each of us is free to choose a way, or several, suited to our personality. 

One way to meditate (focus the stream of awareness) is in partnership with others.  For example, in prayer groups, in healing circles, in ritual song and dance.  And in seances where you try to connect with spirits of the dead.  The Dionysian rites of ancient Greece and the dance epidemics of Europe were popular. At Eleusis was a nine-day ritual of fasting and dancing, which came to a climax with drinking the kukeon, a psychedelic brew. This was followed by a vision of Persephone, Goddess of the Underworld. This rite lasted for thousands of years in ancient Greece, serving to moderate the fear of death.

The challenge today is to devise group dynamic situations that work for a wide range of functions, ranging from healings to creative interaction with spirits.  For example, the Native Indian vision quest. Here you stay by yourself on some isolated corner of nature, and stay there, without food or drink, attuning yourself to the Great Spirit, until you encounter your healing vision, the sign, symbol, icon that seals your entry into the spirit world.

Sleep and Dreams are a way. Most of us spend about a third of our lives sleeping and dreaming, dead to the waking world, but reborn in another world, the dream world. We leave our bodies and enter other realms of experience.   We leave our physical bodies, become dream bodies, and enter dream space where the impossible comes to life.  Dreaming qualifies as otherworldly. It seems like a metaphysical halfway house to the more far out realms of consciousness.  The first step beyond us is inside us.   You don’t have to travel far to perform a metaphysical somersault.   

Spiritual movements are possible and do happen. – Breaking out of our mundane consciousness is a perennial need. Throughout history movements have arisen that create new forms consciousness. Some movements try to fuse spiritual quest with factual truth such as Mesmerism, Spiritualism, the 20^th century New Age, the current worldwide UAP movement, and so on,

The latter I suspect will grow in interest.  Finally, I offer a little pneumonic for those open to the idea of psychophysical experimentation. And here it is—get SET, Spontaneity, Ecstasy, Trust. Spontaneity, openness and fluidity of spirit; ecstasy, beside yourself with joy; trust, self-reliance with love. These three variables are virtues conducive to opening the gates of consciousness. In every case, the step beyond has its own quirky story.

I intend to pursue this line of exploration into the hyperpossible. Why not? For as the poet Auden wrote: We who are about to die demand a miracle.

 

 

Psychic Warfare or Evolution?

 It should be of interest that the three most powerful nations on earth, empires if you will, Russia, China, and America, all have a history of interest in psychic research. Clearly, the extended mental and physical powers associated with psychic power might well have military implications. In this post, I want to say something about China, based on China’s Super Psychics, by Paul Dong & Thomas E. Raffill (1997).

The phenomena described in this book are astonishing. The book begins with a foreword by Dr. Karen Kramer explaining how her complete recovery from cancer was due to her practice of chi gong, a Chinese spiritual practice, said to deploy a universal energy that seems to operate like psychokinesis (PK), in plain language, mind over matter.

In chapter 1, Paul Dong takes us back to Beijing in 1987 to the scene of an experiment with Zhang Baosheng, a famous Chinese superpsychic. There were about thirty witnesses. Baosheng was handed a sealed bottle, never opened, with forty-four medical pills inside; he concentrates intensely on the bottle, after which the seal was broken.  All forty-four pills were gone, and in their place, a small piece of candy was found! The candy is cited as a feature of the psychic’s “prankish personality.” It turns out that many superpsychics in China do the pill-vanishing thing (dematerialization as well as apports, matter passing through matter). 

Zhang is said to have a bad temper.  If you photograph him and he doesn’t like you, he can use his PK to disable your camera and ruin the photograph.  This reminds me of accounts of UAP entities that stop cars, elude fighter jets, toss aside bullets, turn off lights or any technical system at will. The most dramatic fact that the U.S. government doesn’t want us to know is that on various occasions alien entities have temporarily disabled American nuclear weapons’ facilities and operations. This must be extremely concerning to those in charge of our military defense systems.

But back to Baosheng. On one occasion he was visiting with high-ranking government officials for a demonstration of some EHF (exceptional human capacity.)  The moody medium refused to do it, so the head official ordered to have him locked up in a special room. Done. But when the official went home, he opened the door and found Baosheng waiting for him. Surprise! He could apport pills out of a sealed bottle; apparently, he could also apport himself out of a locked room! After this impossible performance, he found himself working for China’s Defense Ministry.  As for these accounts of apport and teleportation, there is Western data from saints to poltergeists that confirm the weird reality of matter passing through matter.   What seems new here is the degree of control the Chinese evidence seems to suggest that humans may possess over these PK powers.

True to the title of this post, given the evidence for things like psychokinesis, especially macro-PK, the idea of psychic warfare takes us well beyond sci-fi entertainment. The English physicist William Crookes was a paradigm-busting psychical researcher who claimed the discovery of “a new force” in nature—new to the physical science of the day.  The new force is manifest when we observe willed intentionality produce some physical effect, apart from any physical cause. What if we learn to mobilize by direct mental operations the “new force” to harm or deflect the mind and body of a designated enemy in war. Every time we learn to enhance our physical power in new ways, we up the ante of our destructive potential. As far as our moral evolution, so obviously stunted, PK by itself will not palliate the mounting peril. What is lacking is development of our mental powers, our telepathic and empathic powers.  We need to tune into the psychic reality of our opponents and they to ours before anything resembling rapprochement is possible. A well-rounded evolution of the psyche is the best hope for the survival of our species.

The EHF here reviewed could be used for nefarious purposes.  We learned, for example, that Baosheng could psychically remove medicine pills from a sealed container and project them elsewhere. The testy PK master threatened to project one of the pills into one of the experimenter’s stomachs. A well- trained psychic spy could cause all manner of disruptive hijinks for enemy targets. But then, reading the minds of your foes, especially if you can do so precognitively, would also be a military advantage. Information that can be conveyed without any machinery could do much mischief.   Crucial targets are closely monitored and shielded by protective bodies, but psychic attack could elude physical barriers. 

Although the Communist authorities have become alert to the dangers of psychically manipulated politics, the wider public is drawn to the healing virtues of Qigong. The attraction is widespread with three practices—breath, movement, concentration. It appears that many learn they can do things we normally assume are impossible.  The idea that millions of young Chinese people train in Qigong is worth noting, especially since American kids basic reading skills are in decline.  

Children in America are raised via what I prefer to call a passive screen culture. Contrast this with the native American vision quest.  There what you did was release yourself to some obscure portion of the wilderness, with minimal clothing and no food or drink.  And there you remain in a fasting solitude, intentional and meditative until you experience a dream or vision that speaks to you in ways that convince and deep move you. To see how this works, I would recommend that you read Lame Dear, Seeker of Visions, by John Fire Lame Deer and Richard Erdoes. It is a life of a Sioux Medicine Man.  He tells his native story, free from the ethos of his genocidal invaders.

Zhang Baosheng caused objects, including his own body, to apport from locked rooms. I can’t help fantasizing about Zhang devising an apport-inducing method for all the brutally, unjustly imprisoned people on the planet. This, of course, would be only the beginning of a worldwide psychospiritual revolution.  We must be honest and confront the strangeness of this reported claim of Chinese super-psychics.  Surely, a hefty weapon in the possible coming psychic wars.  I hope that instead of wars, all the nations come together in a quest for promoting the creative evolution of our destructively inclined species.  

China and her children of supernormal phenomena provide data that enable us to imagine ways of accelerating human evolution.    Many of these powers can be unnerving but the emphasis of chi gong is on health and well-being. Chapter Six is about an extraordinary chi healer, Nan Xin, notable as a “fragrance master,” emitting impressive fragrances whenever engaged in his healing activities. The book is full of reports of paranormal healing.

But the Communist State has pulled in the reins on the popular psychic practices.  A danger is sensed of a type of spiritual energy, which resides in us all and may with some become an instrument of miraculous creativity and even perhaps revolutionary power. In an interesting contrast, the United States intelligentsia is chary about confronting the reality of psychic phenomena or miracles, as I know from my book on levitation, which Oxford University Press refused to publish unless I abstained from confirming the reality of levitation. The reason in this case was more an anti-religious bias.  But not all publishers suffer from this intellectual small-mindedness. See my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Available via Anomalist Books or Amazon.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                     

 

 

 

 

In Praise of a Conscious Ant

I was at my computer when I noticed an ant perched on the edge of my machine, to the left of my pinky. I wondered how the little creature found its way to my keyboard.  The ant decided to go for a walk, and I observed it move in a straight line, changing directions as if it were trying to reconnoiter the whole scene. 

I placed my right index finger two inches away from the ant, blocking its path. The ant stopped and changed directions, moving at the same pace.  I repeated the obstruction and the ant kept adapting and looking for a way out. Impressed by his performance, I retired my index finger and bid the little guy farewell.

Well, I thought, that ant and I have a big thing in common.  We’re both conscious beings. The ant had to be conscious to see and react to my index finger. Given that consciousness, which pervades the whole of living nature, is one of the great scientific mysteries, I feel respect for all life forms and prefer not to kill any animate creatures for no good reason. As far as I was concerned, that ant was a walking wonder

As for insects in general, they’re very interesting.  As a life form, they are wildly successful and adaptable to environmental change; 1.2 million diverse species of these arthropods occupy our planet, whereas we mammals make up about 4,000 species. Moreover, bugs thrive anywhere and everywhere, deep in the soil of the Earth and as high in the sky as an airplane.

Even more striking is their sensory apparatus. Insects have large eyes.  They see in color and can judge distance; and they can see around themselves, night and day, and, unlike us, can sense ultraviolet, infrared, and polarized light.  And consider this fascinating bit: “Smell and taste often blur together and are detected in combined form by chemo receptors all over the bug’s body.” (See below, R. Imes.) What a sensory experience! The whole surface of the body imbued with taste and fragrance—how exotic and surrealistic!

Aside from the amazing nature of insectile life is the fact of it being critical to human survival, being the basis of the of the food supply chain, through pollination, keeping the soil healthy, and bless the scavengers, by decomposing waste and recycling nutrients. The overall effect is to keep a balance in nature, a balance, as we know, disrupted by human technology and insatiable consumerism.

 The climate crisis ought to be a reminder of the need for humility.  We need to become more aware of the natural world that we depend on for our existence. There’s a whole layer of our collective existence easy to ignore, described in a wonderful book, Incredible Bugs, by Rick Imes, a book that will startle you into awareness of the miraculous ingenuity of life.  Insects were the first living creatures to fly, and to their credit, insects turn out to be a big part of bird food. Like the Jain philosophy, abstention from killing other conscious beings (even bugs) is a way of marking the universal bond of all life forms in the bosom of infinite consciousness. I know I’m asking a lot, to respect all forms of life on Earth.  It may be a request for the impossible, but the total adventure of life is at stake.  

 

 

The Most Astonishing Fact

 What could that be? Answer--the president of the most powerful nation on Earth believes that the world climate crisis is a hoax.  Why so astonishing? The answer has two parts.  First, the enormity of the stakes entailed, namely, planetary destruction and ecocide. Second, the transcendent stupidity of the President, along with his evil indifference to the fate of our environment.

There is an ad, a voice periodically heard on public television that reminds us that a million species of living creatures, due to climate and habitat change, are slated for extinction. That’s no hoax. It’s been noted repeatedly that the President has a style in which he accuses others of the crimes he is accused of.  He learned this piece of malign brilliance from one of the weirdest creeps of the McCarthy era, the ‘lawyer’ Roy Cohn. So, it’s the president that is trying to hoax the entire world and all the scientists. We need to underscore the gigantic danger of such a man possessing the power he has. A documented pathological liar, Trump has the power to trigger an atomic war, most likely, terminal for world civilization.  This too is part of the astonishing fact we’re all forced to live with. 

While I was researching my book, The Millennium Myth, I kept taking notes on all the predictions of the end of the world made by the visionaries and prophets of history. They were all wrong.  Little did I realize I would see the day when Noam Chomsky and others would be warning us about the growing onset of climate and nuclear end time. According to the millennium myth, there is always an end time rogue, an Antichrist or Satan.
So, given the real confrontation with looming apocalypse, we need a diabolic rogue to insert into our unfolding story.    I leave it to the reader to pick a candidate for the job.

 

Three Types of Relationship

Life on Earth is heating up. One effect is to accelerate changes like the melting of glaciers, the destruction of habitats, and the predicted extinction of a million living species, not excluding humans.  The picture of the coming climate: Armageddon painted by scientists is not consoling.

 

As a species we’re facing an enormous challenge that is unavoidable, and each day the future seems to look grimmer and more disorienting. Chaos and disintegration approach on scales unprecedented.  In light of this not too jolly premise, I find myself wondering about the fragility of relationships. 

 

It struck me that there are three kinds of relationship we all have.  We are in relationship with ourselves; with other human beings; and with the natural world we’re part of. All three are problematic, given the terminal dangers introduced by human activity.

 

As for relationship to ourselves, many of us manage reasonably well. But many not so well, and problems with ourselves can range from morbid self-loathing to criminal megalomania.

 

As to how we relate to others, conflict and wars of all kinds are creating mountains  of corpses and mangled bodies, flattened houses, blasted churches, sanctuaries, hospitals and schools reduced to rubble, with millions of ruined lives in their wake. 

 

As for how we relate to the living natural world we’re a part of—the answer is miserably.  Suicidal, self-destructive, cosmically stupid, to be more exact.  Ever since the Industrial Revolution, humans have managed to create a monster called climate change. We’ve polluted, overheated, and wrecked ecosystems all over the planet.  And this is not a one-off event; it’s a process that needs to stop or else it will roast, drown and starve us to death.

 

Instead of an industrial revolution, we need a revolution in the way we see, understand and experience the world.  The creative center for the entire enterprise revolves around the way we relate to ourselves.   After all, the way we relate to other people must be a function of the way we’re tuned to ourselves.  If we’re not moderately happy, relating to other people and the natural world are bound to suffer.

 

The key to the three relationships then is how we relate to ourselves. ‘Know yourself,’ was inscribed on the pediment of the temple of Apollo. A signpost to ancient Greek wisdom.  Our relationship to ourselves is the primary challenge we need to consider. The relationship to oneself contains the potential for something transformative, even futuristic.  

 

We are thrown into a world of bewildering relationships. There is our beautiful planet and the sprawling universe. There are other humans, saints and savages we have to contend with. And finally, there is our mother the natural world with all her powers and mysteries. A mother poisoned, polluted, and exploited.  

 

We've learned to plunder the material Earth as if it were raw material made for us to use and consume. Nature is treated as a soulless resource to be exploited in whatever way serves human desires, including  profit. Technology, in this way, spells the death of the sacred. All things are now for sale.

 

So here we are, facing a frightening future. Are we up to the changes we must make to insure our survival as a species? Are there latent powers we possess but don’t know how to mobilize? A large question mark hangs over our most important relationship, which is to ourselves. The greatest challenge but also the most interesting—a relationship impossible to avoid.  

 

 

The Secret Message of Sleep

Sleep, falling asleep, seems to me a strange phenomenon.   We are awake all day, consciously engaged with the world, and then something happens.  The consciousness that I am, my experience of reality, becomes fuzzy and lethargic. Tired, it withdraws from the external world and falls asleep. At first, nothing, no more consciousness; just like death, (at least according to the materialist credo).  So, in the world of sleep, we experience the nonbeing that presumably is death.  

But that’s not the secret of sleep.  Rather, the secret is that out of the nothingness of dreamless sleep emerges the conscious world of dreams—the vestibule of the afterlife?  

We are layered creatures and range across different forms of conscious reality.  Begin with common waking consciousness. But by day’s end we get tired and need to sleep. So we enter  another interesting layer of consciousness, hypnagogia, literally, falling asleep.  This can be missed, but if you don’t fall asleep easily, you may slip into the hypnagogic state. You’re still awake but also coasting in dream space. (Surrealists love this layer of our mental life.)  In the next layer, past hypnagogia, you enter the full dream world. I have a question.  Are sleep and dream a metaphor of life after death? 

We do spend almost a third of our life cycling back and forth in our sleep and dream life.  What’s the point of our dream life anyway? From one angle, dream space looks like the connecting link between our waking space and our possible afterlife space. Is our nightly dream life signaling us from the great beyond?  Prepping us for the big transition?

As for an afterlife, there is a huge, sprawling literature, unfortunately ignored by most academics and journalists.  Evidence for an after world is vast and varied (see my book, Experiencing the Next World Now);  nowadays the leading contender for survival proof is the near-death experience.  People who have near-death experiences appear in case after case on YouTube; they tell their own stories, all quite unique while certain themes reveal a definite structure to the experience. Evidence aside, just falling asleep and dreaming seem to be telling us something about death and the afterlife—and that may be the secret message of our sleep and dream life.

 

 

Music and Human Transformation

It can be interesting to think back of our teachers, people that had an impact on our lives. I recently found myself thinking about an unusual teacher I met soon after finishing my graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University.  Unusual, because the man I’m thinking of liked to boast to me that he never read a book!

It begins with a curious dream I had of a slightly rotund and merry man who said he was a music teacher, and was prepared to be my instructor, casually adding with a smile that there would be no instruments.  I woke up puzzled. I in fact had a jazz musician friend who gave me a few lessons for the flute I was learning. I had a special interest in music, thanks to an incident in the last days of the life of Socrates.  Facing execution, Socrates is said to have dreamt several times of a goddess who had a message for him. “Socrates,” she said, “make music.”  Socrates replied by saying that philosophy was the greatest music, but this did not fly with the goddess. She returned to his dreams and repeated her message urging him to make music. 

Meanwhile, puzzled by my dream, a few days later I received a telephone call from a friend of mine, a psychotherapist, who told me about a new music teacher she discovered. Fresh from an ashram in the Himalayas, and on a world teaching tour.  Swami Nada Brahmananda was a rare practitioner of Indian sound yoga, and I should take lessons from him, my friend Alida said.            

So I checked out the place on the lower West Side and arranged for my first lesson with the musical swami.  I still recall how I felt when he first called out my name to come into his little space. It was as if we were old friends; he invited me to sit on the floor next to him. “Mind-control is life.  Rhythm is music,” were the first words he spoke.  It wasn’t long before I realized I was in the presence of a different kind of fellow human.  Educated and evolved, but not in the Western mold. “I never read a book,” he said.  He had no interest in paper, he said triumphantly.  Everything he knew, he knew by heart, and with heart, I would add. In fact, he had memorized about five hundred ragas.  The ragas were songs, stories, and lessons from various Hindu styles and traditions, touching on every aspect of life.  These he sang, played, and taught.  His musical lens on reality was magical and transcendent

To begin with, consider his name, Nada. In one scholarly translation, it refers to the fusion of breath and the fire of intellect.  This could be a description of John Coltrane and his transcendent jazz. Nada was singular in several ways. He had amazing health and lived to be ninety-eight. I met him when he was in his eighties; his skin was like a child’s.  Energy without limit seemed available to him.  He normally slept two hours a night.  Stranger yet, he never had dreams; scientists who studied him while sleeping saw no physical signs of REM sleep. By far, I am struck by the way Nada meditated. Nada Kumbaka was the monk-musician’s daily sadhana (spiritual practice), his special form of meditation. This consisted of him taking one breath and drumming on the tabla while he focused on an icon of the god Shiva. On the one breath, never blinking, he played for thirty-five minutes, an ability he demonstrated in an airtight chamber while under study by the India Medical Institute of New Delhi. His various abilities have been verified by Indian and American scientists (e.g. the Menninger Foundation.)

One more point I want to make about my former teacher.  He often reminded me that we humans are at the tail end of the Kaliyuga, the Age of Conflicts.  It was Nada’s conviction that music, which touches and can transform the soul, is the best antidote to the horrors of the Kaliyuga.  Ordinary, practical consciousness, tied to the normal ego, will not save us from the violent and heartless world we have created. A new paradigm of consciousness is needed.  Would like to hear from readers on this point.

 

A Remarkable Interviewl on Alien Visitation

Ross Coulthart has been reporting on the U.S. cover up of what is now known as unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).  Notably, they constantly invade American airspace with impunity.  Attempts to engage with these entities in the air invariably fail. In fact, they are known repeatedly to disengage any mechanisms that we deploy to stop, trap, or take them out. There’s no doubt about the reality of an unknown, and more advanced, intelligence operating in our midst.  But what do we really know about UAP other than their existence? What, who, from where, and why?

I was struck by Coulthart’s remarkable interview with Jake Barber, a U.S. airman in a UAP crash retrieval program. (Available on YouTube)  As far as government secrecy, Barber is a whistleblower who feels compelled to make public information of dramatic interest to Americans.   Barber was assigned the task of transporting a crashed, egg-shaped, unidentified ‘vehicle’ to a research facility where scientists try to reverse engineer the mysteries of the strange ‘craft’.

Several things especially struck me, beyond what I already knew. Barber describes the bare egg-shaped object, inconceivable how it flew, while noting some transient ill bodily effects he suffered. The second point that stood out in the interview was unexpected. Jake Barber recounted the strange emotional effect that came over him when he encountered the alien object he was tasked to transport.  An articulate man, he struggled to express it as the melting of himself into a feminine energy. He stressed the idea of his consciousness as playing a role in the UAP story and citing several parapsychological notions.  Ross then asked if Jake was ready to shock listeners by acknowledging a psychical dimension to his story. He wants to shock his audience, Jake replied, smiling. Apparently, we need to be shocked into a new consciousness.  Rational argument and evidence work with a minority; most of us need to be shocked out of our habitual selves and assumptions.

Barber’s surprising sense of the transcendent feminine reminded me of the 1917 Virgin Mary appearance to three children. There seems to be a connection between Marian visions and UAP.  The so-called miracle of the sun, was, I believe, a wonderful UAP-induced illusion of the sun behaving strangely. That’s the only way I can make sense of the miracle of Fatima.  Certainly, the real sun did not swoop down on the Cova da Iria and terrify 71 thousand people into thinking it was the end of the world.  (See Jacques Vallee and John Keel on the ufological link to the famous Fatima phenomena.)   In any case, it is surprising that this highly trained government official should undergo a mystical feminine presence in connection with moving a crashed UFO object.

Now to the perhaps most interesting assertion about the secret governmental UAP research. In the interview, Barber began to talk about psionics, people with psychic abilities that work with the reverse engineering crew. What I heard this time was incredible.  What I heard from Barber is that the government has a crew of psychically gifted individuals working together trying to evoke contact with the unknown intelligences.  And if I heard right, they have succeeded.  Details of the latter assertion, that humans are learning to psychically communicate with intelligent nonhumans, were lacking.

                  This is not the first time I’ve heard about groups of people that try to initiate contact with the mysterious visitors.  Barber made a curious remark, aware of its oddness, that children may in fact be the best psychic operators for the research. Of course, people trying mentally to communicate with higher beings is commonplace in religion, another topic to explore.  For now, thanks to Ross and Jake and other courageous people like them, we can be sure that the government has been and still is lying to us about UAP.  We are being visited by intelligent beings from outside our world of space and time. There are full scale operations under way trying to extract secrets of alien technologies from crashed ‘vehicles’ likely to have enormous consequences for life on earth.      

Tale of a Small Miracle

 In my last few blogs, I told stories about what seem like supernormal rescues.  That occasionally an unknown agency is said to intervene in human affairs and pull off something impossible to help someone is an intriguing idea.   Coincidentally, while writing up these posts, I had an incident that looked like a supernormal rescue.  My story is not as dramatic or poetic as the previous posts, but it counts as physically unexplained, as far as I can see.  If you have a possible explanation, please share.  

On the evening of January 8^th, 2025, it was remarkably cold and the ground almost everywhere you walked on was solid ice from a snowstorm. After dinner with a good friend, I mounted the ice-covered stone stairway up to the door of my house.  I realized then that I forgot to turn the outside light on.  I was stuck in total darkness and had to grope to find the doorknob. I noticed the key wasn’t working.  Finally, after finagling, I inserted the key, but it was jammed.  I could not open the door to my house. I then walked to the front door; the key was equally inept at opening my front door. 

Why, I wondered, go rogue on me on this precise  night when the temperature was 19 degrees Fahrenheit? I looked around and saw no lights on in my neighbor houses.  How could they help anyway?  What I needed was a locksmith.  Maybe I could make an emergency call, I thought, and reached for my phone.  Then I realized I left my phone home too.

I tried again to get into my house, but the key failed to do its job, first time in many years of unfailing use.  What was I supposed to do? The best I came up with was to spend the night in my car. I looked at the door that had me locked out in the cold.  The top half of it consisted of four small windows. I decided to break the lower left-hand window, assuming I could then reach inside and open the door, and let myself in.  I then proceeded to hit that window with my elbow, four very hard, focused blows—but, to my amazement, nothing broke. But the blows shattered the inside of the glass, the surface remaining perfectly smooth. Totally frustrated, I decide, once more, to try to open the door.  I insert the key and lo! it slides right in, and the door opens!

Inside my house, I feel grateful but somewhat amazed.  It was strange the way the key did not quite fit, jammed and failed to open the door.  I had tried about ten times at least to make the key work, but always failed. The one time it worked, there was no problem at all; the key slipped perfectly in, as it always did.  Why then did it work exactly once when I desperately needed it to work?

Let’s entertain an antique myth and suppose we have a guardian angel, or, as we might say, a subliminal self, a being with a life and logic other than everyday life and logic.  Suppose we sometimes intersect with a world where the impossible sometimes miraculously becomes real.  I told the story of my key to the locksmith who came to my house the next day, adjusted the lock and provided me with two new keys.  No matter what he did, he could not get the original key that failed to work.   All I could do was conclude that maybe I do have a guardian angel. And there’s something else.  After the locksmith finished—I didn’t recognize him--I asked how much I owed him. He smiled and softly said something I took to mean he was already paid. I assumed I would later receive a bill in the mail.  I never did.    

Saved By a Voice in Battle

Tales of miraculous rescue come in all shapes and forms. They turn up in religion, mythology, and ordinary life. They stir our imagination, our gratitude  and  perception of reality.  Such encounters can be personal but sometimes the supernormal assistance affects major events and large numbers of people.  Joan of Arc is perhaps one of the most spectacular examples of the latter. Both Joan’s and the story I’m about to recount involve hearing voices.

A student of mine in a class on the philosophy of mind, a police officer, was a veteran of the Vietnam War. In 1968 he was with the U.S. Army ‘s 101^st Airborne Division, a combat soldier in a reconnaissance platoon.  John C. was sent to Bien Hoa, located near the Mekong Delta.  The base he was stationed at was a low combat zone but not immune to the occasional rocket attack. The assignment felt like a holiday to most of the men, at least until February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day.

It was 2:30 in the morning when the air raid siren woke John up.  The base was under rocket attack and all personnel had to take shelter in the bunkers adjacent to the barracks.  By the time that John got out of the barracks the bunker he was supposed to use was already packed to capacity. He glanced around quickly and decided to get down behind a reinforced partition just outside the entrance to the bunker. He made the move and peered back into the bunker. Three light bulbs glowed dimly over the crouched soldiers.  A nervous pall settled over the men as the sound of rockets landing nearby began to fill the bunker.

 Barely a few moments had passed sitting on the reinforced partition when John heard a voice cry out, “John, get back here!” Looking toward the rear of the bunker, he was unable to see his friends, the smoky yellowish light blinding him.  He called back, “Who’s that?”  “John! Come back here!” the voice replied. The voice was clear and authoritative.

“I’m alright!” shouted John, annoyed because he couldn’t see who was calling him. Then the voice cried out again, and more urgently. This time he impulsively went back into the barrack as far as the first support beam. “Okay?” he shouts, but no one says anything, except once more the voice commands him to move to the next beam.  “Okay?” he shouts again. This time the voice was silent, so John squeezed into a seat. Wondering why he was unable to recognize the voice, he glanced back at the reinforced partition. “He’s in my spot,” John thought, and turned to ask the guy beside him for a cigarette.  As their eyes met they heard the sound of a rocket. They could tell by its clear whine that this one was going to land nearby. The next sound was a high-pitched whistle—the last sound before a direct hit.

John told me that he remembered a tremendous ball of flame explode directly where he had been sitting a few minutes earlier! Then a powerful force struck him and he blacked out. He opened his eyes to find himself covered with sand and iron planking. He was treated for a bump on his head and a cut on the knee.  All the men sitting in front of him were dead, sixteen in all. John walked around in a daze asking who kept calling him. Nobody, and nobody heard anybody calling him.  More uncanny, the intelligence behind the voice apparently knew exactly where John had to sit to escape the fatal effects of the rocket. 

John explained to me that his mother prayed for him with great insistence. He wondered if his mom’s prayers had anything to do with the voice that saved his life.  I’ll end with the last note I received from John, in which he wrote: “I often think about the tall, thin, blonde sergeant who sat where I first sat, and who was obliterated by the rocket. I feel as if my life is on loan and really belongs to someone else.  I would like to repay this gift but don’t know how.” At one point he admitted to me that his mom embarrassed him by how often she prayed for him. She often told him not to worry about anything, in short, that she had him covered. Home from Vietnam, he was no longer embarrassed by his mom’s prayers for him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Miraculous Plant?

This is a little for Christmas,  but some years ago, I was living with a girlfriend in New Jersey on River Road, facing across the river toward New York’s West Side. It was Christmas Eve, a clear night but also one of the coldest nights in a very long time.  Also, the heating system of the apartment was not performing very well. Early in the night the hissing and chortling of the pipes would die down. 

On this hyper-wintry night, the cold and the wind were closing in on us, and I thought to myself how lucky I was to have beautiful Francesca, my flute-playing lover, to stay warm with under the covers of our bed.  Wonderful, I thought, to have this living sanctuary of warmth with me at arms-length. We listened to music, had already exchanged gifts, and had dinner.

We were starting to feel the cold more, so instead of adding sweaters, why not retire to the bedroom where cuddly warmth awaited us?  My suggestion met with approval and an inviting smile. 

But then something happened—I forgot to mention: Francesca, just short of being a perfect gal, had a fiery temper. So, there we were, on the threshold of yuletide bliss, but then I said something wrong. I wish I could remember what I said. Whatever it was, it triggered my lady’s temper. The result was that I found myself backing out of the bedroom, followed by the door being slammed shut.

What was I to do? I resigned myself to sleeping on the floor. I did have to break back into my bedroom to collect what I needed to avoid freezing to death.  Suddenly, it was a lonely Christmas Eve.  Francesca made herself invisible and motionless under covers and pillows. I grabbed one more sweater and split from the bedroom. It took a moment to arrange a space on the floor to sleep, a place where I could manage my night at the North Pole. Eventually, I fell asleep.

Morning came, I woke up, and the sun was out.  But something quickly grabbed my attention. I became aware that the room, the air, was suddenly fragrant. What on earth! Suddenly, the bedroom door opened and Francesca, not fully dressed, is gazing at me. “That smell,” she said, and looked around.  I looked around too, and we both noticed something about the plant on the windowsill.  It had bloomed overnight with large white flowers!  It was the flowers that were giving off the fragrance.

 

Francesca and I said nothing but breathed in the magnificent fragrance; we looked at each other and embraced.  We didn’t say a word about our quarrel the night before. It was Christmas morning and we both felt as if the flowering in what turned out to be the coldest night of the year was a message to us about keeping a warm heart in a cold world.

For some time after, I stopped by various florists, and nobody ever heard of a plant like mine ever flowering in bitter cold.  Finally, I went to the Bronx Botanical Gardens with a photograph of the flowered plant and my story.  I remember the botanist there smiling with amazement and saying, “The plant is called dracaena fragrans. Flowering in such bitter cold was a miracle.”

Fran and I eventually went our own ways. But we can tell a story of how a mysterious plant brought us beautifully together once upon a cold time.  It was, after all, Christmas, a time about miracles.  When we woke up to the fragrance of those miraculous flowers, the anger and pique between us completely vanished. The spirit of Christmas lay behind this miracle, I thought.  Plants are living and have a certain consciousness; so perhaps the plant was stressed out by our quarreling and flowered to change the atmosphere with a new fragrance.   I’m just dreaming out loud, but if you’re curious  about the latest science of plant consciousness, you might try Dr. Monica Gagliano in Thus Spoke the Plant, an account of the author’s personal encounters with individual plants and her theories of plant consciousness.

 

 

 

Jesus and the Near-Death Experience

 Having read much of the written scientific literature, I’ve been watching people recount their near-death experiences (NDEs) on YouTube.  Often, I’ve been struck by the authenticity of what I heard, everyday folks struggling to describe a life-changing experience.  Some of the NDE stories are professionally produced with another voice smoothly narrating and a visual display meant to evoke heaven and a godly sunrise.  These NDE productions impress me much less than the unmediated personal accounts.

One of the highlights of the NDE is an encounter with a great light emanating pure unconditional love.  Among the other elements (the out-of-body state, the life-review, the meeting of deceased friends and relatives, etc.), some folks encounter a figure they instantly perceive as Jesus, the light of pure love in a personal form.  On Christmas day that I’m writing this, the NDE epiphanies of Jesus especially come to mind.

But there is something puzzling.  You would think that a near-death crisis might stir up the religious figures you were raised to believe in.  But that isn’t what I have noticed in over a year of watching these online ND stories.  What I found is that Jesus plays a critical role in the NDEs of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and avowed atheists—not just Christians.  One of the winning traits of the near-death Jesus: he comes as the perfect friend of love, not as a judge or punishing deity.  Indeed, he, as well as God when he speaks out, has a sense of humor, even of irony.  In one NDEer, Jesus appears in a suit.  The woman asks him how come in a suit?  He replies, “You wouldn’t have recognized me.” The Jews who report this experience, are keen on a jokey Jesus, and lament that Jesus was mocked and obliterated by their rabbis.  They immediately claim him as their guy and seem to forget two thousand years of Christian history. One notable Jew for Jesus is Dr. James Tour, an accomplished American biologist that rejects reductive materialism, rightly, in my view. He does, however, sound a bit extreme when, as I heard him say in his interview, that the entire Bible, both testaments, every single word, are absolutely true. Really?

My puzzlement was magnified by two recent accounts, one from a Buddhist and the other from a Muslim.  In both cases where a woman and a man had an NDE, they encountered Jesus and were instantly converted. But in these two cases, the Buddhist and the Muslim were driven to review everything lacking and deficient in their previous Buddhist and Muslim faiths.  Instead of feeling love and compassion for people of their born belief systems, they say that unless they become Christians, all the horrors of eternal hell await them. This is morally repulsive.  Gone in a flash is that beautiful idea of unconditional love.   T

The NDE is an objective and hugely significant experience by virtue of its extraordinary effects and aftereffects.  The phenomenon has a flexible structure and is recurrent, thanks to advances in modern medical technology.

There are at least two distinct explanations of this phenomenon. The first is that these are extraordinary illusions that our species has evolved as part of the dying response.  The illusions are designed to stimulate the will to live, a trick our suggestible mind needs to carry on the adventure of life, even if it doesn’t change our meaningless fate. 

The second theory is more appealing and allows us to imagine that physical dying enables us to enter a new world after we shed our bodies.  The NDE seems like the vestibule of a mental universe.  Like the physical universe, science had to grow before it understood its unimaginable vastness.  The same unimaginable vastness faces us in the mental universe. The NDE seems an authentic venture into a distinct, alternate dimension of space and reality. We are all partially acquainted with this extraphysical dimension of experience when at night we enter dream space.

People who have NDEs usually conclude they are immortal and have no desire to reinhabit their mortal bodies.  If we are immortal, then we an assume that Jesus is still alive and conscious, and open to the near-death dimension of existence.  And thus it appears to all the people who have reported encounters with Jesus.

It would also be true that all the great souls of the past have survived and may be accessible in ways that might shock us into a new awareness.  Mary, the mother of Jesus would have survived, and as we know, visions of Mary are widely reported in modern times.  

I’ve written this post as a kind of Christmas card to readers. I am drawn to the picture of Jesus that emerges from the near-death experience.  I am not drawn to the accounts of converts that hate and despise the non-Christian teachers they were raised to believe in. In the history of human experience, all sorts of great spiritual teachers have emerged, and there is room for all of them.  The fanatics that want to send all non-Christian teachers and believers packing to hell are an abomination. The popularity of the figure of Jesus appearing so frequently in the near-death experience is interesting and puzzling.   I’m curious to hear what you all might think about this facet of the near-death experience.

 

  

Can I Be Frank?

One periodically hears an ad on NP Radio about the 25 thousand therapists waiting in the wings and prepared to help the souls of afflicted listeners.  The implications of the ad were  disheartening, the image of an army poised to descend upon and save us from our problems!  I don’t mean to make light of the sea of troubles that life often is.

But I know someone who does. This fellow dares to make light of our troubles—the light of wit, of compassion, and of insight. Dr. Frank Pasciuti has been a licensed clinical psychologist and certified hypnotherapist for forty-five years.  He is the author of Chrysalis Crisis: How Life’s Ordeals Can Lead to Personal and Spiritual Transformation.  

Frank Pasciuti’s new book, Can I Be Frank? Poetic Insights that Empower and Inspire, embodies a novel venture into psychotherapy.  Using his own name in a title, punning on the adjective frank, turning his name into a challenge—can I be honest and thus fully myself?  That’s a universal question.  Am I in a world where it’s okay to be myself?  That’s a startling way to begin a book.

What is unique about this book is a poetics of therapy, so that by mingling prose with rhymes, half-rhymes, rhythms, and images, Dr. Pasciuti returns to a more shamanic mode of coping with our natural human difficulties.  Besides a short introduction, the book contains about sixty poems, in a rich spectrum of themes and moods, and alongside apt and witty illustrations. This is a book to be held, heard, and seen. The issues touched on run the gamut from the metaphysics of mind and body (Trivini, p.35) to matrimony, (You’re Not Who I Once Married, p.13.) You’ll learn something essential about how your mind works in Concentration, Meditation, Contemplation, p.61, and get a more humorous lift of spirit in It’s Hard to Hug a Porcupine, p.21.

The table of contents offers the reader a feast of options. The issues that plague us are infinite in variety and originality.  The format of narratives is in tune with the more or less chaotic flow of life.  It respects the reader’s freedom to begin wherever he or she wishes.  For example, I was captivated by the poem called Rattled to Insight, p. 62.  The poem was about a terrifying dream the author had that woke him up. 

                  I found myself outside walking through a path with lots of snakes.

                     They filled the ground, were all

                     Around.  I wanted to get through.

              I tried to step between them, but the spaces were so few.

Some of the ghastly rattle snakes started to move and threaten the dreamer and so he awakens and assumes a questioning stance toward the dream.  Awake now and thinking about his nightmare, there is a flash of insight:

                  I further came to recognize when my fears get denied

                  They rise up from the darker places where they tend to hide.   

So, the dream helped him see what he was not quite able to confront. This then was a poem about the interesting dialogues we may be having with the subconscious part of mental life.  Can I Be Frank? is full of hints and illustrations of how to use the poetics of our creative imagination to gain insight and heal ourselves.       I heartily recommend this book (available on Amazon) that will entertain and instruct you on the great art of being a human being.

 

 

              

 

 

 

 

 

Mind and Obesity

The prestigious Journal, Lancet, reports a study that predicts that in less than two decades, 260 million Americans will suffer from obesity, a condition associated with a host of diseases and disorders.  It’s easy to understand that with advertising and food technologies, the temptation to indulge the comfort that food and drink give, makes it easy to tumble into obesity.

But surely, once awake to the mortal dangers that lie hidden in that hamburger and sugary drink, the solution to the problem should be clear: be picky and eat and drink less!  But people find that hard, so out comes Big Pharma to provide drugs in the battle against obesity.     But the drug approach has obviously failed, given the giant obesity crisis the Lancet has warned us about. 

I’m skeptical about the supposed genetics of the problem. The real culprit are bad habits and lack of self-awareness. Our systems of education neglect to address the freedom of will as a central fact of a flourishing human existence.  We are educated to be fans and consumers, not life explorers with independent minds.  

 Once asked to speak about diet, I came up with this advice.  Decide on the weight you ideally prefer.  Then follow this instruction. Whenever you eat and drink, say, the normal three times a day, each time eat and drink hardy but consume only one half of what you would normally consume.  

There is nothing painful, no self-deprivation—just a healthy reduction of your intake. Continue halving your diet until you reach the weight you chose to be. Then go back to eating and drinking but be mindful and sustain your ideal weight.

There’s a problem with this plan.  Swamped as we are in a materialist ethos, there is no clear sense of the freedom of our will. Nobody reminds you that you’re a free agent and master of your life.  We need to sharpen the consciousness of our freedom—and practice using it.  

The answer to the obesity crisis is our own minds—the power we possess to say yes or no—the power to open our mouth or shut it. Use and prove your free will is real. It's a key choice—live your life or slip into slavery.

 

Einstein's Advice: Change the Way We Think or Die

 

All over the world people and countries are spending like there’s no tomorrow on updating their arsenals of selective and mass murder and mayhem—based on the need to defend oneself—or to annihilate one’s foes.  Meanwhile, the arms sales folks are rolling in ecstasy.

 

But Albert Einstein wrote: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our ways of thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking, if mankind is to survive.”

 

A substantially new manner of thinking—we should underscore Einstein’s prophetic words. They suggest that any approach that relies on old formulas for solving the world predicament probably need to be scrapped. A substantially new manner of thinking? Einstein has remarked on the importance of imagination in solving the great problems.  We have to step outside the box of our usual assumptions.

 

In Edward Thompson’s Letter to America, we read: “Nothing less than a world-wide spiritual revulsion against the Satanic Kingdom would give us any chance of bringing the military riders down.” Now we are talking about a spiritual revolution. Einstein and Thompson agree on the greatness of the challenge. It’s no small thing to outgrow one’s worldview and launch a revolution of consciousness. Something very jarring needs to happen.  Perhaps like climate catastrophe or somebody fingering a possible nuclear strike.

 

In a short play by Luigi Pirandello, The Man with A Flower in His Mouth, a man emerges from a doctor’s office with a fatal diagnosis. Possessed by this knowledge of his impending death, the world lights up for him, the smallest things swell with significance; he lingers over every detail; the doomed man’s awareness changes radically, and he undergoes a brilliant conversion of consciousness, an insight into the eternal.

 

The question is whether ours is a world with a flower in its mouth. Like the man in Pirandello’s play, will we wake up in time to see life in a new enlightened way?  Reader, what do you think?