Tuesday, April 29, 2014

A Virtual Library of Parapsychology



http://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/our-psychic-past-in-digital-libraries-v-lexscien-library-of-exploratory-science/

A Metaphysical Meditation On Knots

Exchanges Between Two Universes
This video excerpt from a series of an Audiobook published On Youtube focuses on G I Gurdjieff's last tome, "Life is Real,Then Only When I Am" The means by which Gurdjieff composes his creation is interesting in of itself, which seems overly elucidated.
However, this is an intentional technique formulated as if you will, as a form or variant of meditation, meant to have certain effects depending on who is listening. I thought some may be interested in this sample and exposure to a writer who was contrarian to the ordinary.
The employment of making the message more extended reminds me of a test I encountered during my participation in a certain class. I was told to get out my watch and begin when the sweep of the watch hand reached twelve. I was told to try to avoid inner associations ( wandering ) for one minute.
Needless to say, I failed.
The question the test asked for us to determine if we could, what exactly is free will? Is it a behavior that our biology resists? That is the question posed that Gurdjieff addresses in his own inimitable manner. What is the relationship between our inner and outer worlds?

 

Mathematical Impossibilities and Using Illusions

A brilliant article recently appeared in The Guardian by Tom Chivers regarding a perspective I happen to share with him. Many times, it is what others have to say rather than my own ruminations that are striking.
This exploration of perception and the nature of what cannot be directly ascertained relates to what I was referring to in the essay on structure and anti-structure as well as the architecture of language and Chaos Theory. Regardless of how many materialist scientific reductions are supplied to simple answers as well as the paranormal communities use of labels proliferates, the universe we inhabit is much more illusive than anyone can describe. I suppose this can be a source of consternation or wonder and awe depending on what sort of day you are having.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100268845/use-your-illusion-why-human-vision-is-a-
mathematical-impossibilit

y/

Friday, April 25, 2014

Woodhouse

Anomalies: Anti-Structure and Restructuring Critical Assumptions


Is the paranormal, normal? In past posts I have ruminated that the prosaic is as paranormal as the unknown perhaps this statement is a means to frame how and why we define both. Do the definitions we use fit our situation? Is Chaos Theory applicable to the paranormal? Backing into the basics of critical assumptions may be useful. Quantum entanglement comes to mind as the interaction of forces that are seemingly separated combine as cross influences create realities that are intertwined.. which then is further refined by the uncertainty factor that there is a 50\50 chance of probability in how any manifestation manifests. Superimposed on this behind the scenes fabric of our experience is the relationship equally entangled and shared by structures and anti-structures as much as the case of matter and anti-matter, and yet both are reconciled in a extremely subtle and pervasive manner than defy s any simple label. Does this suggest that the paranormal is more likely than not?

Structures and Anti-Structure

The lack of repeatability in the strictest sense of this term is a hallmark of the deconstructive process buried in anomalous accounts of reality being more pliable than our encyclopedia suggests. The structure of our written and spoken languages, whether it is mathematical or alphabetic relies on the consistency and repeatability of stereotypes, whereas anti-structure is anything but stereotypical and yet the terms we use to describe the various aspects of it are repeatable.

In terms of our own species, this irony revolves around "I" versus "Not I" in terms of bias projection as applied to structure. Whether it is the Greek interpretation of Gods with human natures to biocentrism of consciousness is harnessed to tool making whether it is an automobile or any of the desert religions or the paranormal field. Sciences being the outcome of controlling relationships toward a human outcome that is favorable in theory and yet the anti-structural nature of the tool maker's relationship with unpredictable outcomes is duly noted. Is it that we blur the distinctions between our languages and nature?

Whether it is Albert Einstein's deep regret he suggested atomic weaponry to Roosevelt or the introduction of kudzu to the South, or the application of pesticides, or the consequences of fossil fuels suggests that anti-structure is alive and well beyond the paranormal field. One could ask if in these cases science was actually psuedo science. One could then ask if restructuring has a higher value than structure or an equal place in projection bias, which is inescapable. All of this is the nexus of anti-structure.

The entire definition of the paranormal is noteworthy in that any manifestation that is inexplicable to the tool making of science as a structure is paranormal. 


The application of tool making to consciousness by way of our languages or to nature itself which is decidedly non human as to it's purpose in regard to our species survival as a structure upon anti-structure as defined by purpose seems to encompass a central question, what is our purpose? We require one.

Anti-Structure As Play


Even with the strictest of rules any game can be played by there is uncertainty and entanglement and one could say the universe is more at play than following a linear course of simple causation we can directly observe or predict. Can you predict you will win a game of tennis? 

Even the old bromide that time is an arrow is now being discovered to be not so.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/quantum-theory-flow-time

The paranormal field infers that play is more important than structure in relation to purpose. What is play? A verb versus a noun as an active anti-structural element within the composition of structure. One could say in the role of play outcomes are determined. One could say perhaps that play is the active upon the passive that becomes reconciled when either deniability or affirmation is undecided.

Play is the conduct, course, or action of a game a particular act or maneuver in a game: as the action during an attempt to advance the ball in football the action in which a player is put out in baseball  the action in which cards are played after bidding in a card game the moving of a piece in a board game (as chess)

 one's turn in a game (it's your play) recreational activity; especially : the spontaneous activity of children absence of serious or harmful intent : jest (said it in play)the act or an instance of playing on words or speech sounds gaming, gambling an act, way, or manner of proceeding : maneuver<that was a play to get your fingerprints —( Earle Stanley Gardner) or deal, venture the state of being active, operative, or relevant, other motives surely come into play ( M. R. Cohen) several issues are at play or brisk, fitful, or light movement (the gem presented a dazzling play of colors), free or unimpeded motion (as of a part of a machine); also : the length or measure of such motion scope or opportunity for action  a function of an electronic device that causes a recording to play emphasis or publicity especially in the news media as wished the country received a better play in the American press.

Chaos

As defined by the folks at The Fractal Foundation..

Principles of Chaos
  • The Butterfly Effect: This effect grants the power to cause a hurricane in China to a butterfly flapping its wings in New Mexico. It may take a very long time, but the connection is real. If the butterfly had not flapped its wings at just the right point in space/time, the hurricane would not have happened. A more rigorous way to express this is that small changes in the initial conditions lead to drastic changes in the results. Our lives are an ongoing demonstration of this principle. Who knows what the long-term effects of teaching millions of kids about chaos and fractals will be?
  • Unpredictability: Because we can never know all the initial conditions of a complex system in sufficient (i.e. perfect) detail, we cannot hope to predict the ultimate fate of a complex system. Even slight errors in measuring the state of a system will be amplified dramatically, rendering any prediction useless. Since it is impossible to measure the effects of all the butterflies (etc) in the World, accurate long-range weather prediction will always remain impossible.
  • Order / Disorder Chaos is not simply disorder. Chaos explores the transitions between order and disorder, which often occur in surprising ways.
  • Mixing: Turbulence ensures that two adjacent points in a complex system will eventually end up in very different positions after some time has elapsed. Examples: Two neighboring water molecules may end up in different parts of the ocean or even in different oceans. A group of helium balloons that launch together will eventually land in drastically different places. Mixing is thorough because turbulence occurs at all scales. It is also nonlinear: fluids cannot be unmixed.
  • Feedback: Systems often become chaotic when there is feedback present. A good example is the behavior of the stock market. As the value of a stock rises or falls, people are inclined to buy or sell that stock. This in turn further affects the price of the stock, causing it to rise or fall chaotically.
  • Fractals: A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems – the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds etc

In light of this one considers the vagueness of both sides of two terms, the normal versus the paranormal. Perhaps we require a better conceptual model beyond that of a contradictory dualism that plays out between skeptics and believers both of which might be irrelevant.
One could say that the meaning of both terms is at play and is in essence, anti-structural when compared to the complexities of the realities we inhabit.



Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Welcome To The World

                          
 
This is a journey past the Disneyland economies of downtown Chicago, past the manicured parkways, the pricey public artworks, the flowerpots placed on every corner. Stroll down South Michigan Boulevard, beyond the home of Chess Records that happened to be one of the birthplaces of African Americans having invented Rock and Roll. What you will find is a raging, silent American Apocalypse buried under the hubris of the consumerism and entertainment of mass media.  Detroit if armed to the teeth fighting over the contents of a dumpster. There are no words that can match an image.



A close personal friend of mine happens to be both a forensic psychologist dealing with homicides as well as providing treatment for addictions. We were discussing this or that when he suggested that all we live in a world of sublimated addiction as opposed to the more obvious examples of self destruction.
The question arose that perhaps genocide can best be illustrated as having the layers of an onion. Genocide and self destruction as a raw wound in the side of a antiseptic portrayal of reality as portrayed on television where neurosis, a fascination with the grisly details of homicides, and scripted realities are laced with artificial sweeteners to induce a torpor of all things being equal in the haze of ambivalence, where fiction and reality are meshed into a synthesis of artifice where the victimized may as well be computer generated filler in between advertisements for the latest way to remain eternal, to drive the most advanced car, to swim off a warm beach into the sunset.



 Enough bullshit to float a ship. Community denial can be a game played with the passive aggressive merry-go round of circuses fed by willing shills, syncopates,and generalized hucksterism.
Where the Romans may have been poisoned by lead pipes, we have been shilled by the toxicity of television.
Some do not have this luxury of commercialized escapism. That is reality not painted over by diversion.


Chicago was my hometown where I was born and the promised land of African Americans seeking an exit from the racial torments of a South that had barely changed despite a Civil War. Chicago is one of the most segregated cities you will ever come upon. For all the rhetoric about how simply superior America is, one would have to go over to Africa itself to find the same level of grinding poverty and hopelessness in the 21st Century. Technology means nothing, serves nothing in this regard. It may as well be 1860.
For all of the political football and cheer leading this country uses to shill preemptive wars or police actions, you will not find the same impetus to create jobs on the South Side. Foreign aid counted in the billions atop the billions that has largely become the equivalent of a mob bribe.Its called buying influence that follows the same in DC by our corporate masters. The sweet smell of rancid detritus.
All of the nonsense about a post apocalyptic about citizens turning on other citizens to survive might not be so nonsensical here and now, there in Englewood.
36 dead over a single weekend. The second record breaking carnage on one weekend that followed another. I lost a son.I know what its like and you never "recover". I hope you never know this particular misery but then again one half of a an entire city does. Writing about it doesn't do a damn thing.


That made an association in my mind to the meta-novel by William S Burroughs, The Nova Police and the role of culture steering outcomes wherein the question of the chicken or the egg becomes blurred. Then it came to mind that morality as attached to the definition of wealth is a sword that cuts both ways as a sort of quantum valuation that depends on who is looking. What if no one is looking, or chooses to look away?  Morality as driven by a self organizing control system set by defaults that depend on appearances alone...based upon suggestion, inference and consensus. All of the aforementioned facets of addiction, morality, mass hypnosis and observation appear to be self referential and progress underneath the skin of culture can appear to be akin to riding a stationary bicycle.

“All that they [the Nova Mob] offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.
“And what does my program of total austerity and total resistance offer you? I offer you nothing. I am not a politician. These are conditions of total emergency. And these are my instructions for total emergency if carried out now could avert the total disaster now on tracks:
“Peoples of the earth, you have all been poisoned. Convert all available stocks of morphine to apomorphine. Chemists, work round the clock on variation and synthesis of the apomorphine formulae. Apomorphine is the only agent that can disintoxicate you and cut the enemy beam off your line. Apomorphine and silence. I order total resistance directed against this conspiracy to pay off peoples of the earth in ersatz bullshit. I order total resistance directed against The Nova Conspiracy and all those engaged in it. “The purpose of my writing is to expose and arrest Nova Criminals. In Naked Lunch, Soft Machine and Nova Express I show who they are and what they are doing and what they will do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly – (Signed) INSPECTOR J. LEE, NOVA POLICE"
-William S Burroughs


The buried psychology of the abnormal as consensus accepted as business as usual. The war on poverty, the war on drugs...Which war if your context? Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan...?
History as innuendo twisted into interesting shapes. Domesticating ignorance as a crop yield to sway mass hypnosis in order to create a coherent narrative of division to create distinct identities. Nation states and the indoctrination of states of mind.... This as opposed to that poised against uncertainty as a defensive barrier which harkens back to  the territorial prerogatives of the animal kingdom which was mistakenly labelled as evolution.  Possession as a demonic activity versus the equal ruse of personal possession, from a blade of grass to a Toyota always to be fueled by the convenience mislabeled as necessity..pragmatism that has enough holes in the torn fabric of errors to fill one's mind with cynicism in the face of opportunity.
Old songs whose plaints are seemingly universal in the sense of remaining relevant in a disturbing manner.
Organised crime, legalized or otherwise, robbery as a law in juxtaposition to weaponry and the term "non lethal weapon" as an innuendo twisted into a facade of reasonable men exploiting those who have weapons versus those that have not as an economic ploy.
My recent post on my travails during the year 1969 float without a tether to the quiet conflagrations that become historical footnotes rather than a story in of itself, a narrative lodged in a proverbial genetic variability that has at it's axis, a constant, the fruit of reaping what has been sowed by others long ago.
The self immolation of LSD versus the same in gang warfare all within the contests that are a consistent barometer of institutionalized conflict. the prerogative of a Nova Police. The news becomes a footnote to what is being sold between broadcast segments. That new Ford truck with increased fuel economy is superimposed on genocide.

Old songs whose plaints are seemingly universal in the sense of remaining relevant in a disturbing manner.

Our attention shifts to Chicago....where nation states mirror one another in a microcosm within a macrocosm.




"Among those killed were two men who were slain Sunday afternoon in the South Lawndale neighborhood. The victims were sitting in a Lincoln Navigator near the corner of 28th Street and Sawyer Avenue around 1 p.m., when an orange Hummer blocked their path. Two people wearing masks and armed with guns exited the Hummer, and sprayed the Navigator with nearly a dozen bullets, right near a police “blue light” camera.Two men — 32-year-old Juan Ocon, and 19-year-old Timmy Bermudez — were shot and killed.The Hummer fled south on Sawyer Avenue after the shooting. The Navigator also drove off, but was found a short time later at the corner of 24th Street and Kedzie Avenue, police said. Ocon was pronounced dead at the scene. Bermudez died less than an hour later at Mount Sinai Hospitalhe head. Means’ mother said the boys were killed over a dispute that played out on Facebook.“An argument led to this, that’s crazy,” said Camille Cochran, 42. “Now, I don’t have my son no more.”Also killed over the weekend were two teens found dead around 10:30 a.m. Saturday in an apartment building in the 8200 block of South Houston Avenue. Jordan Means, 16, and Anthony Bankhead, 18, both had been shot in tr victims of fatal shootings over the weekend included 4e-year-old Darren Rey, who was killed Saturday morning in an alley in the 2900 block of West Flournoy; 19-year-old Nicholas Ramirez, who was killed early Saturday in the 1600 block of West Hubbard Street, after someone in another vehicle shot him during a chase; and 20-year-old Trevolous Pickett, who was killed Friday night in a gangway in the 5200 block of West Congress Parkway.Eugene Andrews, 37, has been charged in connection with the murder of Darren Rey.
It was the second weekend in a row at least 36 people were shot in Chicago.

Monday, April 21, 2014

1969


The image of a perfectly clear mountain stream tumbling down the sheer rock held my gaze for several minutes. In a rare moment of clarity, I had a visualisation of all the jumbled reasons I took to the road at the naive age of 18.
It was something as simple as that, something you could not come across on the flat plains and grasslands of Illinois. That is not to say the road was always favorable. Atter a full day of extending my thumb in Kansas, darkness made my mannequin act more pointless than it appeared during daylight, and after pushing myself into a sleeping bag, in the early hours of morning, a pack of wild dogs spent an eternity snarling at yours truly stuffed inside that cocoon.
Then there was the Navy kid who indulged in one too many amphetamines who rolled up to provide a ride across the Mojave Desert who in the psychotic thrall of a metabolism on overdrive, that treated me to a infinite tape loop of the Hallelujah chorus on his eight track player. As I slept on the desert floor during a midnight rest stop, he suddenly started his car without warning and began to drive away...Hey!
At that time, my generation had taken to the highways of a lost American landscape going everywhere with no actual destination in mind. As Norman Mailer observed that while the Vietnam war was grinding away the hearts and minds of this country, many of us were napalming our minds with no exit in sight.
One of the prettiest girls in my high school class jumped off a cliff. My girlfriend's cousin drove his motorcycle into a moving train.
Assassinations and self loathing at the end of a rifle barrel rolled by with the months as cities burned and love it or leave it became a choiceless choice...intentionally so while liberating this or liberating that became a sort of signal noise yet to be deciphered as any coherent alternative.


Larry and I found an old mimeograph machine and organised students into a cadre of like minded malcontents to air our grievances against “the machine” only to have your author wander from out of a driving rain into some now nameless bookstore and out of idle curiosity pick up Ouspensky’s translation of Gurdjieff’s teachings, and with a random opening of the table of contents found “Man Is A Machine” ...Several dialogs with Larry much later, he had purchased ( somehow) the incredibly expensive volumes of commentaries on those teachings and soon our wise and learned minds babbled about the buried philosophies of Jethro Tull..while all of the senior class staged a walkout on the football field to defiantly protest assigned seating during lunch hours as an act as surreal as the chaining of the exit doors during “pep” rallies
I kd you not.
In order to demonstrate the toxic nature of peanut butter cookies served in the cafeteria, I lit one afire and tossed it across the table. The Dean of Students somberly informed me he ran out of room in his file folder that accounted for such heinous acts. Larry was approached by this crew cut authoritarian and shaken only to have several place settings of school cafeteria silverware drop out of his pants and jangle to the floor. Hmmm..we were stir crazy in a hermetically sealed pressure cooker.
One of our star football players discovered that the spray can of chalk fixative in art class made a handy blowtorch...Dennis put his talents as a naturally gifted portraitist, worked in a pencil medium to work selling nudes passed under the formica tables in exchange for cigarettes.
What did we learn in school today? As the draft lottery racked up warm bodies for incineration, we bounced off of every available wall. A nifty example of this passive \ aggressive dualism during a art assignment to sketch nature, we slowly moved further and further away by stealth in sight of the gas station just beyond those trees...Our befuddled and exasperated teacher shouted vainly..come back! .
The kid ran up to me on the sidewalk  along the streets of Berkeley shoving a pair of dirty sneakers in hand while pronouncing that these were his last personal possessions although he remained clothed...In Denver during a maniacal deep freeze, a born again Ahab dressed entiely in black ranted against we the homeless, offering a moment of warmth and soup in return for being preached at interminably
Although I was frozen to the bone, I walked away for this less than charitable offer only to be given a bowl of soup in a greasy spoon by a kind hearted grandmother type who had known her share of paying dues to a aching sense of necessity.


We were relentless in search of a Oz far removed from the conveyor belt of being molded into automatons, or so we thought without being self aware enough to express it, like rolling stones pushed by a stream we did not relish our future prospects of being ground down like our largely “successful “ parents...and yet in every move that was made, although in hindsight the entire play was my generation’s pantomime of adulthood as some ideal summer perfect  day lived to the fullest without effort beyond that which seemed to suit us at the moment.
Sitting in the audience of one of what was more than likely one of the first seminars of the women’s liberation movement whose activities were equally interesting due to my attractive companion as well as idle curiosity, I was summarily called out in front of an entire auditorium for being male and was tossed out into the street. Ah, liberation versus liberation versus language, images and stereotypes as if the universe was defined by Look Magazine.
Memories of a divine comedy.
Call this a metaphor, call it a misspent youth,...it is probably both that I suspect rolls like a player piano in a continuum occupied by similarly disadvantaged wisdom as randomly demonstrated by the youths of Rome or some other quiet conflagration of civilizations yet to pop out of the soil...

Saturday, April 19, 2014

The Forensics of A Dream Superimposition


This account from an anonymous university chaplain was submitted to the Rhine Institute in response to a request for accounts of dreams that connected physicality to events by way of a non local means, specifically within a dream state. I have written essays on Vallee's Theory of Everything which suggests that energy and information are the Janus face of  realities that are not directly observable. What is interesting is the state that distinguishes itself from the automatism of surrealistic associations that are unedited in their playing out of their creators in a atypical dream state that produces validated transception of information on a non local basis and yet is linked to the physicality of measurable events....what is the nature of this hybridised experiential reality?
Coinciding with coming across this account I also found this while browsing

http://dailygrail.com/Mind-Mysteries/2014/4/Do-Humans-Have-the-Ability-Sense-the-Future-Survey-Experiments-So-Far-SaysYes

More:

http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2014/04/feeling-future-meta-analysis.html

The Story

On January 15, 1963, I was in my office in the University Chapel, putting the finishing touches on a sermon I was to preach there the following day. It was late in the afternoon of a very cold, icy and blustery day. The students were in the latter part of their final examination period for the fall semester.

The telephone interrupted my sermon work, and the caller was a friend, the Reverend Arnold Matthews, then Pastor of a large Methodist church in an NC town some distance away. He told me that he had to depend on me to take some sad news to a member of his church who was then a freshman at our university. His name was Wayne Milton Jr. and he roomed in a basement or ground floor room in a men’s dormitory, room NN-025. I checked my student directory and found the information to be correct. Arnold told me that Wayne Jr.’s father had a heart attack and died earlier in the afternoon, and he told me in some detail how the death had occurred. He asked that I go to Wayne Jr.’s room and tell him of the death and ask that he come home at once to be with his mother.

I put on my hat and overcoat, and I walked very carefully over the ice to the room Arnold had identified. Once at the door, I paused for a prayer and then knocked on the door. There was a soft “Come in” in response. On opening the door, I looked into the darkened room, with a table light at the far end of the room. A student was sitting at that light, studying for his next exam. Another student was asleep on a bed near the door. I tip-toed my way to the student who was studying, and asked him if he were Wayne. “No, that’s Wayne asleep.” He then introduced himself to me as Wayne’s roommate, Frank Parker. It is important to my story to note here that Frank remained in the room the entire time I was there.

I asked Frank if Wayne had been asleep very long. He replied that Wayne had been soundly asleep since lunch, so far as he could tell, for Wayne had been up most of the night, preparing for a final exam he had taken that morning. I asked if any word had come to the room that afternoon pertaining to Wayne’s father. He replied that nobody had come all afternoon, and of course they did not have a phone in the room. I told Frank the basic facts. He said he was certain that Wayne knew nothing about it, for he, Frank, had been studying there all afternoon.

After a moment I sat on the edge of Wayne’s bed. I moved his shoulder with my hand and he opened his eyes for a moment. I told him that he needed to wake up. I asked him if he knew Arnold Matthews. He said, “My home church Pastor.” I said, “Well, Wayne, I’ve just had a call from him and he gave me some information to pass along to you.” I was determined to make Wayne ask me if something was wrong. But he said nothing. He simply lay there and looked at me. Then I said, “He told me something about your Father.” He just looked at me. “The news is not good, Wayne. Your Father had a heart attack.” I paused and waited a bit. No comment. No question. Finally, I said, “I’m sorry to tell you, Wayne, that your Father didn’t make it. He is dead.”

Wayne closed his eyes for a minute or two and I remained quiet, with my hand on his shoulder. I decided to put the best “face” on it I could, so I told him that it might comfort him a bit to know that his father died in an effort to save a little girl’s life. Wayne opened his eyes and listened. I went on to relate how Arnold told me that he died. He was driving home from Winston-Salem to his hometown when he saw that a car had slid off the road into the ditch, in the ice storm. He stopped and asked the driver if he could help her. She replied that her daughter had pneumonia and she was trying to get her to the nearest hospital. Mr. Milton said he would try to push the car enough to get her out of the ditch. While she was driving and he was pushing, she noticed in the side-view mirror a look of great pain on his face, and he died right there in the ditch.

Wayne suddenly exploded. “That’s not how I saw it! I mean—that’s not the way it was in my dream.” I asked him if he had experienced a dream about his father’s death while asleep in the afternoon. (By this time, his roommate was by the bed, hanging on every word!) Wayne replied that he had experienced an awful nightmare, which so disturbed him that he had great difficulty in getting back to sleep.

I then asked him to tell his roommate and me how he saw it in his nightmare. He said that he saw his father sitting behind the steering wheel of his car, in front of a red brick building which had a hospital sign on the front of it. His Father was looking at him with a look of great pain on his face, and just before his head dropped to his chest, he said, “Goodbye, Wayne.”

Well, Frank and I could only hear what he said. Quickly, the roommate made plans to drive him to his hometown, and after admonishing them to drive slowly and carefully, I sent them on their way.

A week later, after the funeral of his father, I was sitting at my desk in the Chapel, and Wayne burst into the room. He said, excitedly, “Chaplain, you remember how I said I “saw” it happen? Well, the lady came to Dad’s funeral, and she told me just how it happened, and it happened exactly as I told you I saw it in my dream. Dad did tell me good-bye before he left.” He went on to explain that the lady did, indeed, notice the look of pain on Mr. Milton’s face as he pushed her car, so she told him to stop pushing. She asked if she carried her little girl up to his car on the road, would he drive them to the next hospital. He said he would, and when they arrived there, she asked Mr. Milton to wait in his car out front while she ran her daughter into the emergency ward. When she returned to his car, Mr. Milton was dead behind the steering wheel!

Many secularistic scientists would claim that this is all coincidence. Wayne Jr., however, has from the beginning believed his father sent him a “good-bye” message by thought transference. -------- signed by the Chaplain.


Broken Threads of Rationalism

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Walking On Gilded Splinters: Musings on Belief and Logic

Philosophic Determinism


"I walk on gilded needles just to see what they can do"
-Dr John

"The study of human psychology is the study of abnormal psychology"
_G.I Gurdjieff

When Evidence Is Secondary to Philosophy

Is it any wonder that rationalists are destroying the natural world? The pioneering founder of cybernetics, Gregory Bateson observed that the way the human mind works is not how nature operates, and if this is so, is knowledge as it is defined, a verb of subjectivity rather than a noun?
Perhaps one way to frame this potential dichotomy is to observe the apparent objectivity of direct relations found in nature as contrasted to the subjectivity of the human mind. That is not to suggest one nexus of phenomenon is superior to the other, but rather ask, how does this impact how we define our environment and all that occurs within it as a matter of indirect translation and our use of various descriptors as conceptual platforms of observation? It may be we occupy a house of mirrors. I daresay that knowledge has become a argumentative contest of suspicions, nothing more. The basis of William S Burroughs novel, "The Nova Police" was based upon the concept that an authoritarian regulatory agency utilised control over the populace by fomenting and heightening conflict. One could take this literally if one has a philosophic bent toward conspiracies, but I suspect the disorganized nature of the paranormal community has less psychological insight into their own lack of progress than do those outside of their self defined identity. Robert Anton Wilson called this "naive realism".

The skeptical and the believer regarding climate change have their parallels in the study of paranormal phenomenon wherein pragmatism is secondary to social agendas. One could say behind this layer of a proverbial onion is one's conclusive philosophic stance toward uncertainty.The third layer could be considered to be belief systems based as a reactive stance to saying I simply do not know in the face of the aforementioned social pressures that are conductive to labeling, personal attacks that are weighed on a equal basis as the questions that are at hand. After decades in my own studies of various phenomenon, one could say as Walt Kelley once observed, "We have met the enemy and they are us."
Perhaps this essay states the obvious but my own view is that when the obvious becomes illusive, it could be an indication that the return to square one is called for. One could say another quotation is called for. It was Krishnamurti who simply stated that the truth is a pathless land.

In the erstwhile chaos of the paranormal community, what constitutes evidence is a surrealistic game of smoke and mirrors based largely on the opinions of preference whose argumentative postulates are seeming formed by a preference of appetite, wine versus beer, onions versus leeks...as dissected by the iconoclastic Paul Kimball.

http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-burden-of-proof-and-true-believers.html

When evidence becomes ambivalent, it just may be that the philosophic underpinning of any individuals world view overrides any other consideration and if unencumbered by agnosticism, the argument becomes more important than achieving a balance between belief and uncertainty.
Is there any state one can achieve in the evaluation of any phenomenon that constitutes an arm's length transaction? One considers the permeability of facts as well as the societal indoctrination we are exposed to
as suggesting that subjectivity has no place in science. This essay in The Society of Scientific Exploration's library suggests that the mythology of science that surrounds it can, at times, resembles religion.

"Until the middle-to-end of the 19th century, science was acknowledged to 
be characterized by the certainty of its knowledge. Philosophers, natural phi- 
losophers, scientists-and often the same individuals could properly be called 
any one of these-agreed that science equalled infallible knowledge. But that 
stance has proved to be untenable. For example, as science progresses, one 
can look back and note that the purportedly infallible science of yesterday 
has been replaced: making it plausible, indeed likely in the extreme, that 
today's science will also be found wanting in the future. "

http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_01_2_bauer.pdf

That is the pervasive and indirect provocation of those that attempt to deconstruct the inexplicable in a game of surrealistic terminology. The words, Demon, UFO, Sasquatch, Greys have transited the border line from placeholder references to a pseudo physicality to be debated in the absence of conclusive arguments on either side. Yet much like the wavering weather extremes within the general umbrella of climate change, phenomenon comes and goes in waves, whether it is a weather front of tornado activity or a wave of strange lights seen in the atmosphere, the psychology of both sides colors both the blatantly obvious as well as more subtle aspects of experiential realities.

As a contrast to the philosophic projection bias of public opinion, when science weighs in by the dissection and measurement of associations of the physical universe alone, something very strange occurs..what constitutes coherency disassembles itself. Russell Standish expands upon this in his very interesting book, "The Theory of Nothing" of which he says,  "The title ``Theory of Nothing'' came from the observation that the more inclusive a scientific theory, the less specific its predictions can be without additional ad hoc assumptions. The ultimate theory of everything is just a theory of nothing. Yet surprisingly, the theory in Theory of Nothing does have some explanatory and predictive properties, which follow from the second assumption, which links the laws of physics to the laws of psychology."

http://www.hpcoders.com.au/nothing.html

Both sides of this positivist argument, whether it is climate change or the study of the paranormal state that appearances are deceiving. The sharing of this nexus is the loci where the agnostic is pummeled by the interpretation of evidence in the politics of consensus whose motivations are so varied, it would require an encyclopedia to list each and every one.

No matter what philosophic underpinning is lurking behind any claim or for that matter, any theory, one sees that the implications of these stances has a personal implication to those that hold them as defensive barriers.

Yet, none of this is discussed or evaluated and remains hidden only to be evidenced by the atmosphere of ambivalence toward reaching any objective balance on the subject matter.


The Role of The Agnostic

Name the formality of a social structure made of dissenting provocateurs such as I label myself ...a rag tag group of restless pawns to the slings and arrows of the quest to pin a tail on the donkey of a misnamed and singular realty.
Are those enmeshed and entangled in the brew of anomalies, in reality, a creature of uber-skepticism who have failed to be convinced by consensus, who view the universe as yet to be given a convincing portraiture?
I suspect we fail to be convinced by the answers at hand while lacking answers ourselves. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Any answer is better than none. Or is it?
The instinctual fear of uncertainly is certainly is at play.

Within our ruminations we acknowledge the transient nature of knowledge itself which is deconstructive to the uncreated that lurks unseen,that descends to fill the container of the mind to be molded by language which has no relationship to rationality. A rose can be a dog if we call it such.
The tool of symbols inherent in language becomes a veil for experts whose presumptions are subject to the immeasurable as if one could contain the delimited in a glass box...to be counted as if the mathematics of zero as if zero had any other meaning other than to demarcate themselves from creative nature itself.


The artifice of counting comes to mind, the presumptions of a void that requires filling while language is the crystalline lattice work of a snowflake captured in hand that vanishes once it is held and returns to the provider. We accept to surrender to the futility of counting as one leads to relations unaccountable, ascending and descending in imagination where the uncreated seeks form and form as an expression of who happens to be looking in what circumstance within a finite container that serves us as a lens.
Yet religiosity pervades the facing of the uncertain. Whether it is the explanatory mythology's of two thousand years ago or at the present moment.

Naive Realities

The demonology of emotional energy has a territorial prerogative based upon food as a possession whereas no one owns anything. Nation states and the presumptive drawing of boundaries has its role as well in the positing of critical assumptions that are more a matter of conveyance than the ownership of the natural world being grounded in reality outside of self reference.

Does this strike you as absurd? UFO as a mistranslated of the delimited and uncreated descending to be captured in a container of “like”, and \ or resembles in the physicality of metaphors that denote relationships and not solid objects as we accept there are no solid objects except by the senses wired to signal communications. There is no object of pain, it is a signal. We accept this as an indication that physicality fits hand in glove with what cannot be directly observed. One can see this reflected in the two opposing theories of the nature of consciousness.One theory states that consciousness exists entirely in the physical brain, while the other states that the physical brain is a receptor for a quantum information field. Rather than the game of ping pong between the two sides currently being played, one could simply accept that the observer of phenomenon is ignorant of the nature of what is observing, or more succinctly, the nature of the observer has a direct bearing on what is seen.

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/5e7ed624986d

Most seek sobriety in a tavern. Most nod in a complacency of fear of what cannot be repeated, extended or measured by rationality. The alien arrives in a sea of babble and so what can be said? In this tavern, it is better to say nothing as every symbol is misconstrued and bent to the felicity of consensus as a form of willing logic and causation to be linear as defined by the appearances that are controlling agencies. We accept this as subtle and difficult discernment.


Subjectivity and Objectification

The container of formulated references that define themselves within their users. The demarcation of God as a precept of God made in mankind’s image versus the Gods within natures image as the deflection of mirrors, one presumption leads to dividing the indivisibility of the immeasurable, as if to seperate atmosphere from water, earth from minerals and expecting to create life in these file folders for the unnamable that we have given terms to.
The Anomalist unravels knots to create tapestries made of knots seeking the definitive in the movement of trajectories within comparisons, only to find himself accepting a surrender to an ascent with wax wings that melt under the weight of a puzzle whose pieces mutate in resistance to a frame. We call this the best guess in a post editorial forensics of what cannot be named seeking names. Call this the nexus of a qualifier.
What are we left with? The deconstruction of ruses, of ploys, of the scrims of self comfort as a form of creative self flagellation? I suspect we are agents of a provocation we cannot name, to unravel a comfortable chair that can lead to madness, self parody, the bartering of one delusion for another delusion more suitable to sit upon.We accept the universe we inhabit is a rumor mill.
The best guess could be most accurately framed as suspicions rather than the steps of a ladder that most climb in the fool’s errand of a definitive conclusion, a final episode, a logical explanation wherein each piece locks like the tools of language into a comprehensible, coherent relationship that stretches to infinity.
The field is chock full of the naive realism of terms made into solid objects whereas the weight of ironies within this quest asks a central question. What is the alternative? If you must sleep, sleep well? Do we restless folks regularly walk off the face of the earth only to find ourselves at a McDonalds of the mind at 3am?
I suggest to you we are surrealists at play, playing as a developmental stage that ties to the ascent of imagination to make the passage between what is to come and what has passed in a game lodged between death and life. A sense of humor is required but his is not a joke aside from the joke we expell when donning the cap of expertise before a willing audience of alcoholics in this tavern.

An except from the following link is pithy and to the point..

First of all, if we adopt a surrealist viewpoint, then, as we have seen, art logically must be and naturally will tend to be surrealist, and thus be justifiable only in its ability to reveal the new, the "never seen," the parallel activity of thought and chance in consciousness. ..... More important by far -- infinitely more important, perhaps -- is the response that arise in the individual who tries to openly experience the work as "evidence" in the case for the sublime as the living center of the surreal unity of psyche and "external reality," of inside and outside."

http://alangullette.com/essays/lit/surreal.htm


I define myself somewhere on a map without a cartography, perhaps located somewhere between sobriety and falling off my stool as the music plays on with or without me, thinking I have stirred the pot when the pot has stirred me.
And so it went and so it goes within the only game in town.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Arrival As Departure: Going Home Again


“I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows.” 
― Loren EiseleyThe Unexpected Universe

I came to my former home from my current home, along with my daughter in a journey toward a future past, the site of my son’s death, the damages caused by renters to be remediated by yours truly so Kara could begin a independent life freed from the confines of a childhood watched over by yours truly and my wife, Sue.

We found the house empty, filthy, damaged, and hermetically sealed in a sickening smell of decayed food, vomit, animal feces and all of these senses I occupy were akin to an association with death. Kara was visibly upset and overwhelmed and as a father, I found myself compelled to reset this scenario for her. The Maintenance Man.

This was to be a benchmark of a new stage in her life, one we had discussed as a family for some time as well as it being the home where Matthew had passed away in the night to be found by yours truly cold, lifeless..a corpse. Pausing for a moment on the nexus of this convergence I wondered if this gathering of a life’s work was like the encounters archeologists find themselves confronted with. Layers upon layers of dwellings, each buried and built atop one another, layered in strata that yet composed a singularity.

While repairing this damage, I stayed in my sister’s home, sleeping in what had been my mother’s bedroom on what had been her bed. In the midst of this flurry of reconstructing the past damage to that home, there was the interior reconstruction of loose and free floating suspended memories also associated with the past, as damaged and in need of repair as the physicality of broken windows, damaged appliances and soiled carpeting. One appeared to be the mirror of another in a cycle of organisation, deconstruction and inherent reconstruction as if one had occupied a station directly in the path of tornado alley.

A sort of ironic persistence in the face of lacking an exit.
As I settled into that bed for the night, I steered my mind toward the sleep of forgetting as rest in the silence of her former room, now strewn with her personal items stacked in boxes, the furniture pushed into the far corners of the room.  

During the passage of night, I found myself with a sense of arriving in a dark, crowded room of shadow figures moving within it as if I were in a bus or railway station while being afflicted with an obscured vision from a case of a proverbial glaucoma of my inner sight.
Matthew seemingly glided to face me as feelings of loss, a deeply penetrated sadness washed over me that heralded his communicated that he had a sense of never having accomplished anything worthwhile in the midst of life that could be remembered as leaving a legacy that would be remembered..I countered that this was not so, that he was an accomplishment in of himself not to be devalued by a lack of leaving material evidence of this behind. It was a highly emotional encounter. In this miasma of a scenario, all common sense I had vanished and asked if not begged for him to stay, to not leave this encounter. How foolish, how true.

Matt said that where he was had an accompaniment of like individuals who were positive in working through and assisting each other through this very issue of unfinished business as he faded back into the darkness…as I awoke in the light of early morning streaming through the windows as another passage of time would unravel itself.

I awoke and immediately disbelieved any of this had occurred in any real sense and yet the potency of the encounter in it’s essence had filled me as if I were the container of a transaction that was in of itself, a reconstruction, a path unfulfilled and yet busying itself with reinvention. Certainly an odd admixture of a continuum containing separation, closeness and lacking any definitive conclusion. Finding myself inside of this membrane of memory superimposed by the reinvention of a past narrative what came to mind several days later was once again the words of Thomas Wolfe in You Can’t Go Home Again.

“Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again