A Letter from Michael

A letter from a young Marine named Michael who was wounded during the Korean War. Runs 10 minutes. Transcript below.






Merry Christmas everybody! My name is Lee Allan, and the story you are
about to hear has become a Christmas tradition. It's been broadcast for
over 25 years on radio stations all over America. The story was given
to me by Ed Harding, news director of a radio station much like this
one. It was a copy of a letter, written by a young Marine named
Michael, who was hospitalised after being wounded on a Korean
battlefield. The letter was written home to his mother, but it was
first seen and read by a Navy Chaplin. In the letter, Michael describes
what happened to him on that lonely, frozen battlefield. When the
Chaplin first saw the letter, he talked with the boy's mother, the
sergeant in charge of the boy's patrol, and the patrolled members
themselves. Privately, they will all still tell you that what you are
about to hear is a true story. Recently read the letter at Christmas
time and let it stand on its own merit. The sergeant, the patrol
members, and Michael are real people. The story is a letter, a copy of
the original. A letter from Michael.





Dear Mom,





I wouldn't dare write this letter to anyone but you because no one else
will believe it. Maybe even you will find it hard. But I've got to
tell somebody. First off, I'm in a hospital. Now don't worry. You
hear me? Don't…don't worry. I…I was wounded, but I'm okay. You
understand? Okay. The doctor says I'll be up and around in a month,
but that isn't what I want to tell you. Remember when I joined the
Marines last year? Remember when I left, how you told me to say a
prayer to St. Michael everyday? You really didn't have to tell me that.
Ever since I can remember, you always told me to pray to St. Michael
the Arc Angel. You even named me after him. Well I always have. When I
got to Korea, I prayed even harder. Remember the prayer you taught me?
"Michael, Michael of the morning. Fresh court of heaven adorning."
You know the rest of it. Well I said it everyday. Sometimes when I was
marching. Sometimes, resting. But always before I went to sleep. I
even got some of the other fellas to say it. Well, one day I was with
an advance detail, way up forward, in the front lines. I was plotting
along, in the bitter cold. My breath was like cigar smoke. I thought I
knew every guy on the patrol, but along side of me comes another Marine
I had never met before. He was bigger than any Marine I had ever seen.
He must have been six foot four, and built in proportion. It gave me a
feeling of security to have such a buddy near. Anyway, there we were,
trudging along, rest of the patrol spread out. Just to start a
conversation I said, "Cold! Ain't it?" And then I laughed. Here I was,
with a good chance of getting killed any minute, and I'm talking about
the weather. My companion seemed to understand. I heard him laugh
softly. I looked at him. "I've never seen you before. I thought I
knew every man in the outfit." "I just joined at the last minute," he
replied. "The name is Michael." "Is that so?" I said. "That's my
name, too." "I know," he said. "And then we're on, "Michael, Michael
of the morning." I was too amazed to say anything for a minute. How
did he know my name? And the prayer that you had taught me. Then I
smiled to myself. "Heh". Every guy in the outfit knew about me. Hadn't
I taught the prayer to anyone who'd listen? Why now and then, they
even referred to me as St. Michael. Neither of us spoke for a time, and
then he broke the silence. "We're gonna have some trouble up ahead.
He must have been in some fine physical shape, for he was breathing so
lightly, I couldn't see his breath. Mine poured out in grape clouds.
There was no smile on his face now. Trouble ahead, I thought to myself.
Well, with the enemy all around us, that's no great revelation. Snow
began to fall, in great thick globs. In a brief moment, the whole
countryside was blotted out and I was marching in a white fog of wet,
sticky particles. My companion disappeared. "Michael!" I shouted in
sudden alarm. I felt his hand on my arm. His voice was rich and
strong. "This will stop shortly." His prophecy proved to be correct.
In a few moments the snow stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The sun
was a hard shining disc. I looked back for the rest of the patrol.
There was no one in sight. We lost them in that heavy fall of snow. I
looked ahead as we came over a little rise. Mom, my heart stopped.
There were seven of them and their padded pants and jackets and funny
little hats, only there wasn't anything funny about them now. Seven
rifles were aimed at us. "Down Michael!" I screamed and hit the frozen
earth. I heard those rifles fire almost as one. I heard the bullets.
But there was Michael. Still standing. Mom, those guys couldn’t have
missed. Not at that range. I expected to see him literally blown to
bits. But there he stood, making no effort to fire himself. He was
paralysed with fear. It happens sometimes, mom, even to the very
bravest. He was…he was like a bird, fascinated by a snick. At least,
that's what I thought then. I jumped up to pull him down, and felt a
sudden flame in my chest. I often wondered what it felt like to be hit.
Now I know. I remember feeling strong arms above me. Arms that laid
me, ever so gently, on a pillow of snow. I opened my eyes for one last
look. I was dying. Maybe I was even dead. I remember thinking well,
this isn't so bad. Maybe I was looking into the sun. Maybe I was in
shock. But it seemed I saw Michael standing erect again, only this
time, his face was shining with terrible splendour. As I say, maybe it
was the sun in my eyes, but he seemed to change as I watched him; he
grew, bigger. His arms stretched out wide. Maybe it was the snow
falling again, but there was a brightness around him; like the wings of
an angel. In his hand was a sword. A sword that flashed with a million
lights. And that’s the last thing I remember until the rest of the
fellas came up and found me. I don't know how much time had passed, but
now and then, I had a moment's respite from the pain. I remember
telling them that the enemy was just ahead. "Where's Michael?" I asked.
I saw them look at one another. "Where's who?" asked one. "Michael".
"Michael, that big Marine that I was walking with just before that big
snow squall hit us". "Kid," said the sergeant. "You weren't walking
with anyone. I had my eyes on you the whole time. You were getting too
far out. I was just gonna call you in when you disappeared in the
snow." He looked at me, curiously. "How'd you do it kid?" "How'd I do
what?" I asked, half angry, despite my wound. "This big Marine named
Michael and I were just…" "Son," said the sergeant kindly. "I picked
this outfit out myself, and there just ain't another Michael in it.
You’re the only Mike in it." He paused for a moment. "Just how'd you
do it, kid? We heard shots. There hasn't been a shot fired from your
rifle. And there isn't a bit of lead in them seven bodies over the hill
there. I didn't say anything. What could I say? I could only look,
open-mouthed, with amazement. It was then the sergeant spoke again.
"Kid," he said gently. "Every one of those seven bodies over the hill
there was killed, by a sword stroke." That's all I could tell you mom.
As I say, it may have been the sun in my eyes. It may have been the
cold, or the pain. But that’s what happened.





Love,

Michael

Is Peace on Earth Possible?

Kriyananda explains why the yuga cycle gives him hope that peace on Earth is possible in the future.



Now, Kriyananda is not some up in the air "crazy wisdom" guru who uses religion to disguise socialism. He does not go out and promote hedonism under the guise of tantra, though he has made a number of gross errors in his life sexually. He has stated that government spending is responsible for collapsing the economy, he has built several successful communities around the world that have thrived for decades, he is not a cultural Marxist or an economic Marxist, but he does understand the value of community and working together rather than competing.



How can we get peace on Earth? The realist answer is that the old guard of super rich super greedy New World Order elite need to die out. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the Coca Cola Brothers and Mark Suckerface. People for whom there is not enough money in the universe. People who would sell their own mother for a penny and commit treason to get a no-bid contract. Then the younger people can learn from the example of Ananda and move toward communal living.

The Pyramid Deception

There is a lie that is oft perpetuated by archaeologists who are members of the scientistic magisterium. It is claimed that prior to the invention of modern building techniques and materials the ONLY way to build tall structures was to build a pyramid, and that's why pyramids were built by many ancient civilisations. This is a lie on its face.



It was entirely possible to build tall towers with straight walls. Below I provide numerous examples. It is important to address a small issue right away before proceeding. Many towers do have tapering sides. That does not negate my thesis for two reasons.



1. The taller a structure rises the more it must deal with wind resistance, as winds are stronger the higher up you go. The best solution, as seen in modern buildings such as the Burj Khalifa, is to taper the building as you go up. No one would claim that a tower like the Burj Khalifa or the Empire State Building are pyramids, but they do taper to reduce the surface area that is being bombarded by heavy winds.



2. Reducing the thickness of the walls as you go up allows you to build much taller. The base of any structure can only support a finite weight before collapsing. If you taper the structure you can make it taller than if you kept the walls a uniform thickness.



Since I intend to demonstrate that it was possible to build tall towers using pre-modern construction techniques and materials, I will only list pre-modern structures, those built before 1500.



When people think of pyramids they probably think of the Great Pyramid, and who knows how that thing was built? Maybe it was aliens. Probably not, but if ancient aliens didn't exist then how did they build everything? What people don't know is that most pyramids are nowhere near that impressive. Pyramids, for the most part, are just heaps of rubble and earth faced with stone. This is how the pyramids of the Americas were built. It's not all that difficult to create a big heap of dirt and put stones on top. While the Great Pyramid is 455 feet tall, the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico only stands at 216 feet. Pyramids throughout southern Egypt and Sudan are usually no taller than 60 feet.



The Minaret of Jam

In 1190 in central Afghanistan the Ghurid kings built a brick minaret 203 feet tall. Before anyone says "Bricks? Bricks are modern, build it out of stone!" I will point out that the ziggurats of Babylon, some of the earliest pyramids in the world, were built not of stone, but of fired bricks.  The minaret is composed of five sections, each smaller than the other, but each section itself has very straight sides.



The Qutub Minar

1220. The Sultan of Delhi, taking inspiration from the Minaret of Jam, dismantled several Hindu temples to make a 240 foot tall victory minaret. This tower does taper quite a bit, but it is far from a pyramid. It is a tower much like a lighthouse, also with five sections, built without steam power or steel cranes.



The Towers of the Himalaya

Throughout eastern Tibet and south-western China, there are hundreds of stone towers built, it is thought, within a 400 year period around 1400. It is believed they were built by numerous different civilisations for different purposes, family pride, signal towers, protection from Mongol invasions, etc. Most are between 100 and 200 feet tall, with straight sides, and either rectilinear or star-shaped bases.



The Towers of Bologna

The rich families of Bologna, in terror of vendettas, built tall towers to spy on one another. Of the hundred or more towers in the city, the most famous are known as the Two Towers. Built of stone, brick, and wood, the towers are believed to have been built on average over ten years. The shorter Garisenda Tower stands at 159 feet and leans heavily to one side. It was much taller, but the top had to be removed to prevent collapse. The taller Asinelli Tower is 323 feet and overlooks its shorter neighbor. Both were built between 1109 to 1185.



Lincoln Cathedral

The medieval cathedrals were built over many centuries, using man-powered cranes and often had to be rebuilt numerous times due to collapse. There are a few very tall cathedrals, some even taller than the Great Pyramid, but, while most were started centuries ago, most were not finished until the late 19th century. This disqualifies them from this list. One very prominent exception is Lincoln Cathedral. Built in 1311, the central spire rose to 525 feet high, towering over the Great Pyramid even at its greatest, before erosion and thieves stole some of its height. A heavy storm tore down the spire in 1549, but the parts of the tower still remaining stood at 271 feet high. With dead straight walls, it is impossible to claim that the only means of reaching fantastic heights was to build pyramids.



So far all these examples have been from the ADs, a good three thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built. This might turn some people off. "We want ANCIENT towers, not merely pre-modern towers! It was IMPOSSIBLE! Pyramids were inevitable!!!!1"



I've saved the best for last.



The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The original Seventh Wonder of the World. Built in 280 BC, the lighthouse stood at Alexandria Harbor, the gateway to the greatest city in the world, built by Alexander the Great himself and governed by his general Ptolemy. Built in three sections, with very gently sloping walls, the lighthouse rose to at least 400 feet high, almost as tall as the Great Pyramid itself! The tower stood until 1480, only 12 years before Columbus' history altering voyage, when it was dismantled to built the fort at Qaitbay by the Sultan of Egypt.








People were capable of building tall towers before modern construction, they were not required to build pyramids. There was nothing to stop ancient people from building perfect vertical walls, yet many decided to still build pyramids. Why? We don't know. The ubiquity of pyramids all over the world is a truly unexplained mystery.



It is interesting that the same people who say that to suggest a lost civilisation such as Atlantis or alien intervention is to insult the intelligence of the brown people who made these monuments, themselves insult the intelligence of ancient peoples by suggesting that the ONLY way to build tall structures was to build pyramids. It is another sign of the hypocrisy of these people.



You can't explain away why ancient people all over the world built
pyramids. Why did people all over the world build pyramids? Say it with
me, it's my favourite phrase: "WE DO NOT KNOW." We do not know. I am not here to propose an alternate hypothesis, merely to disprove the predominant hypothesis that pyramids exist all over the world because people were too stupid to build straight sided towers. I have provided you with six examples of ancient towers, now you can let the pyramid deception die.

Science and the Survival of Consciousness after Death

Dr. Bruce Greyson in a 2010 talk about survival of consciousness. Runs 42 minutes. Some of it seems familiar. Maybe there is overlap with the last presentation, maybe from another interview.

Stuart Hameroff on Quantum Consciousness

Dr. Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist and philosopher, is the co-creator, along with Dr. Roger Penrose, of the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) theory of consciousness. Orch-OR postulates consciousness as a quantum phenomenon located mainly in the microtubules of the brain. As coherent quantum information, consciousness can exist outside the brain, possibly indefinitely, retaining its unique identity, and might even be able to enter a new brain, accounting for reincarnation. Orch-OR may be unique in that it may be the only materialistic explanation for consciousness that can account for survival after death and the effects of psychedelic drugs and intense states of meditation. Dr. Hameroff also proposes an experiment for testing the hypothesis, involving different regimens of anesthetic drugs.



Dr. Hameroff explains the Orch-OR model in greater detail in this one hour interview.

Sai Baba Light Body Scam

Two men who were formerly associated with Sathya Sai Baba have taken on a new venture of scamming people out of money by claiming Baba's "light body" is speaking directly to them, something Sai Baba said he would never do. Narasimha Murthy and Madhu Sudan Naidu are con artists.

Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain?

Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, gives a one hour talk on evidence that consciousness can exist independent of the brain, including deathbed lucidity, patients with little brain tissue, children remembering past lives, and the near death experience.  Followed by questions.



From the Cosmology and Consciousness Conference - Mind and Matter in 2011.

Expansiveness

Swami Kriyananda talks about other worlds, the limitations of the body, and the relationship between the frontal lobes and superconsciousness. Runs 19 minutes.

The Seven Wonders

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus still existed after Columbus reached North America. It was disassembled between 1494 and 1530. It actually survived to the modern age but was destroyed to build a fort. The desire to kill people overwhelmed the desire to inspire humanity and celebrate the human spirit.



If one were to construct a list of the new seven wonders, what would they be? I can propose a few criteria:



1. It should be a permanent structure

2. Its design should be innovative for when it was built

3. Its construction should have been unbelievably difficult



Something easy, but tedious, should not be included. The Great Wall of China is just a row of bricks. Also as construction techniques improve the scale of the wonder should increase along with it. Building a 300 foot tall light house today would be very easy. To qualify as a wonder a structure should be wondrous. People should look at it and marvel that it was ever built at all.



I have thought of five of seven structures I would consider wonders.



New Seven Wonders

1. Giza Pyramid Complex
A complete map of the night sky, with the pyramids themselves as the stars of Orion (identified as Osiris) and the Nile as the Milky Way. The only member of the original seven wonders that still stands.

2. Borobudur
A one of a kind "learning machine" in Indonesia. After years of study, a student comprehends the meaning behind the hundreds of stone inscriptions on the spiral path up the monument and reaches enlightenment.

3. Leshan Giant Buddha
By far the largest pre-modern statue in the world.

4. Burj Khalifa
The tallest building ever.

5. Apollo 11 Landing Site (Sea of Tranquility, Moon)
The first (temporary) human habitation on another planet.

6. Undecided

7. Undecided



Potentials:

1. Kanishka's Stupa (Destroyed)
The tallest stupa ever built.

2. Sagrada Familia (Incomplete)
The greatest basilica in the world. Designed to perfectly combine ancient and modern architecture as well as elements from the human and natural world.

3. Hagia Sophia
Originally the largest church in the world, with the largest dome at the time enclosing the largest open space.

4. Larung Gar
Largest religious institution in the world, with over 40,000 monks and nuns.

What is a Mantra?

Swami Kriyananada talks about mantras, sound, and the power of intention. Runs 13 minutes.

Alexander Seton, The Mysterious Alchemist

"Alexander Seton" also known as "The Cosmopolite", was a mysterious
alchemist whose career spanned 1602-1604, when he was apparently killed
by the ruler of Saxony for refusing to reveal the secret of the
Philosopher's Stone. A Polish alchemist Michał Sędziwój visited him in
prison and bribed a guard to let him escape. Alexander Seton allegedly
died a few days later, having never revealed his secret.



A few
years later, in 1618, another adept appeared in Europe, and again in
1666. I suspect the three men were the same person. It makes sense that a
man who is immortal would need to fake his death every few decades so
no one got suspicious.



In the video below Philip Coppens explores some of the places associted with the life of Alexander Seton.

Equestria Girls: Friendship Games

How is sound coming out of Rainbow's electric guitar when it's not plugged into anything?



Evil Twi is the unibomber!



I find it hard to believe that she was able to create a magic detector having seen magic very briefly at best two times. There would have been no way to calibrate it. And when she touches the base of the statue ripples appear from the portal. When Pinkie Pie ran into it at the end of the first movie it was clear that the statue has turned completely to stone again. There should be no remnant of the portal left.



That city looks lazily done. The houses are bland and generic and the background is one solid piece. Sometimes that has been used to good effect in other cartoons, but it doesn't seem to fit here. It comes off looking rushed.



I don't like the idea of what appears to be rivals to mane six. The idea of "evil" counterparts again seems lazy. Rather than creating new characters let's just have anti-matter clones of everyone so everyone knows who they are and it saves a whole lot of time.



Hold on! Sunset has been on Earth for four years (she won that Fall Formal three times and lost the fourth to pony Twilight). How does she not know about Crystal Prep and yet everyone else does?



Principal Celestia announces the games happen every four years. Then how the hell does everyone except Sunset know about them so well, and how are they all so bitter? The last Friendship Games would have happened before they all entered high school. Maybe if a few of them have older siblings they would have heard about it, but if the games happen every four years they would have only seen a few in their lives, and they would have been little kids who wouldn't have properly understood or even cared about them. 8 minutes in and I'm not liking this premise at all. It's just so contrived.



There's a song where RD wastes a couple minutes. It seems hinted that she's friends with the head of the school band. I hope we see that expanded instead of just a one off moment.



Okay, so everyone at school knows about magic and Sunset being from Equestria. Evil Twi knows. How is it no one else does? If a magical being from another universe came to this Earth and there was a huge battle we've all seen E.T., we know what would happen. There would be no way to hide this from the world. The government would have come in and taken over. It would not end well.



Sunny needs a hug.



Evil Twi gets a much better song, but how is it she is singing in the hall and no one notices, or cares?



Why would the principal want Evil Twi to compete in a sport event when she should know she has no athletic ability? That does not make sense. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must quit. If winning is so important then Evil Twi is the last person the evil principal would want competing.



And I would say that CHS building a "reputation" is the understatement of the century. Even if they somehow managed to keep magic under wraps, which would have been impossible, it would still be all over the news that the front of the school was destroyed for no reason after the battle with Sunny that no one knows about. Let's assume you could somehow hide the fact that a magical apocalypse almost took place. It would be impossible to hide a gaping hole in the front of the school that would have taken months to fix.



This is not me overthinking things. These are huge flaws in the whole premise of the story that anyone would notice. Me as a kid would have noticed this. This story just plain does not make sense. It could never work.



No one knows that's not pony Twi, that's Evil Twi, who so far isn't all that evil, but she's the evil twin counterpart from the evil school, so I expect her to do something evil soon.



That has to be the first really good part of this movie, where everyone talks to Evil Twi mistaking her for pony Twi and then Pinkie figures out who she really is.



Evil Twi happens to have a device that steals magic. That's can't possibly go wrong.



That principal's a bitch.



Poor Brad. No one told him yet.



Did dragon Spike and dog Spike switch places? Nope, dog Spike just gained a new power.



Sunny tears Evil Twi a new one! Way to go. Just like Ken Watanabe says in Godzilla "The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around."



Evil Twi wants to "learn" things by wrecking them. Just like in the 1950s when the Van Allen belts were discovered and the US and USSR wanted to see what would happen if you nuked them. "Here's this thing and it protects life on Earth from the solar wind, so let's see if we can blow it up!" No one thought that was a bad idea at the time!



It's just like GMOs. "Let's take something that at best we have no idea what will happen and release it into the wild and feed it to 300 million people. What could go wrong?"



But it's worse than not knowing what will happen. Genetically modified soy has been shown to produce sterility and birth defects. This has been demonstrated with hamsters and pigs and yet trillions of dollars are backing forcing this crap down the throats of Americans. Europeans are smarter than that. There are a lot of horrible chemicals and GM "foods" that are illegal in Europe that are perfectly legal in America. WORSE, it's illegal to tell the public that food might contain GMOs! Every time someone tries to pass a law that says companies have to lable their food, you know, so people at least have a CHOICE, it gets shot down. Apparently "pro-choice" only means "pro-abortion". You don't have a choice when it comes to anything else.



And what happens if those GM crops were to mate with wild species? What are the potential effects for the entire biosphere if this stuff escapes our control? When there is a lack of biodiversity there is crop failure. A single parasite can wipe out an entire species and then millions of people will starve. If something goes wrong with these GM crops that are replacing all the other varieties then it won't just be one country that is affected. Food production is spread out over the world. The failure of a crop could kill a billion people. We need to think things through first.



Enough damage has been caused by just rushing into things without thinking them through first (that hasn't stopped people from rushing even faster today). When the stakes are as high they are there is no margin for error.



Sunny has remorse for bringing magic to Earth.



Bitch principal is evil. She wants Evil Twi to use the stolen magic for evil. And that's terrible.



No one thinks giving super powers to the girl who everyone has been a dick to the entire movie is a bad idea?



Repeat of battle with Sunny with role reversal. It lacks the impact of the original.



Pony Twi shows up at the end, makes a reference to the as yet unaired season five finale, and then spots Once Evil Now Good Twi.



What else can I say. It began slowly, didn't really introduce any of the new characters except Bitch Principal and Evil Twi, and then there was maybe a minute or two of a battle I've already seen. It's been done. There were some entertaining parts toward the end, but that was it. There was nothing new or groundbreaking. There were hints of possible directions the story could have gone, better directions, and then they were dropped. I understand the target audience is adults with deep pockets who have below 70 IQs and only care about "ZOMG FUN! Infinity/10! Saying 'it's a kid's show' excuses piss poor writing!", but even me as a little kid would have been underwhelmed by this third movie. Maybe it would have captured my attention for an afternoon, but the previous movies still have not left me. They deal with great archetypal struggles (especially the first one), whereas Friendship Games was just the same thing done worse to make money. This reminds me of when The Land Before Time started making a new movie every year, with more songs and less plot every time, and they just kept getting crappier, just to make money.



When you have 20 characters in a 70 minute movie there's no way even half of them can be fully fleshed out. Some of them only get a couple of lines. Who the hell are Sour Sweet, Sugarcoat, and the rest, but gimmick characters? They have no personalities. They are boring. Even Evil Twi and Bitch Principal come off as flat. The writers must have spent all of ten seconds thinking them up.



This is the kind of movie where there are 20 good minutes if you shut your brain off, but if you dare spend more than a couple minutes thinking about it it starts to suck, and the longer you think the more it sucks. Rainbow Rocks created an extended world for the characters to explore and it did a fantastic job with that. Friendship Games tried to do the same and ended up sucking. It wasn't terrible, not season five terrible, but it wasn't good either. It existed, it had good moments, it had more bad moments, it does not bode well for the upcoming fourth movie, but it is what it is, and I have to say I'm glad I saw it.



70/100

The Mystery of Death

Kriyananda expounds upon Yogananda's teaching of death, suicide, and the three worlds: gross, subtle, and causal. He talks about how desires become karma that keep us trapped in a cycle of rebirth. Runs 21 minutes.

Liquid Water on Mars

NASA announced earlier today that liquid water was discovered on Mars. For decades there has been speculation that there was water some indeterminate time in the past and that it was all gone. People speculated that other factors were at play with what appeared to be (and in fact are) features that change seasonally (remember, Mars has seasons because of its tilted axis just like the Earth does). Well, now there's no hedging bets, there absolutely is liquid water on Mars.



Hydrated salts were discovered in the Hale crater in dark streaks that change with the seasons. In the Martian Summer the ice melts and forms salt water streams that refreeze in the Winter. The high salinity keeps the water liquid at temperatures well below its freezing point. The minerals in the water are mostly magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate.



Water, so far as we know, is a necessary condition for life, and even though that water contains strong oxidisers, who knows, there may be life on Mars. Those microscopic fossils might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Dalai Lama Health Concern

UPDATE

He is doing fine.



The Dalai Lama is being evaluated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, USA. His tour for October has been canceled. They are not releasing any details at this moment.

The Power of the Guru

David Godman talks about the power of Ramana Maharshi to take away people's karma and confir upon them final realisation at the moment of death. A very moving talk. Runs 40 minutes.

Get Out and Play

I was outside on this day with absolutely perfect weather and got to thinking about kids playing outside. From there it was an easy step to adults playing outside, and why they don't.

Adults don't play, they *exercise*. It's not fun, it's torturous and hard and adults complain all the way through, they complain before, they complain after. If *exercise* is so damn horrible why don't adults stop exercising and start playing again? It could take the same amount of time, you'll still secretly be getting exercise, only you'll be having a lot more fun, and joy makes the body's secretion levels normal.

Why do adults *exercise*? It's to impress people they hate. Adults want to look better than the people they hate so they exercise. Anyone who thinks it's to impress potential mates is a fool. Look around and see, ugly people mate more than attractive people, because ugly people learn kindness and at the end of the day people would much rather be treated with kindness by an ugly person than treated with scorn by an attractive person. Attractive people will hate you no matter how good you look, so stop trying. They've had it easy, getting through life on their looks, they don't give a shit about treating people right. You're wasting your time trying to look good to impress people. In the end it doesn't matter if you have pecs on your abs or if your clothing size is somehow a negative number. You'll still get old, you'll still die. So what if you live an extra five years if they're spent in misery? I'm not saying don't take care of your body, don't turn it into a sewer, just remember when you were a kid and you played instead of *exercised* your body pretty much took care of itself.

From there my mind went to the disgusting trend of hairless humans. They look like hairless mice. It started just with women shaving their legs because of a propaganda campaign by the razor companies 100 years ago, and then it moved to men and women being totally hairless from the neck down. It's disgusting. Hairlessness has always been a sign of disease, however in the world did people come to be brainwashed to believe it's attractive? I'm pretty sure if humans were supposed to be hairless they would be.

The Worse Devils of Our Nature

2015 is a little more than half over and already wars have claimed 100,000 lives. In case you are wondering, that is more people than you will meet in your entire life. As I have been outlining every year since 2011 we are in a world gone mad. Tying into that thesis is a refutation of its antithesis, expressed in its most famous iteration in Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature, namely that this is the safest time in history.



To quote Samuel Johnson, I refute Pinker thus.



The 20th century was one long war, during which time more people died than at any time in history. And the wars have not ceased. There have been wars going on somewhere in the world during my entire life. 20,000 nuclear weapons sit on standby to wipe out humanity, up until the fall of the USSR there were stockpiles of enough biological weapons to kill 50 billion people. 200 million people have been killed by communism in the past century, another 500 million have been aborted, mostly in China.



On top of the out of control homicide of the past century there is the great danger of globalism in the spread of terrible diseases. The Spanish Flu in 1918 infected a quarter the population of the world, something that would have been impossible prior to the invention of trans-oceanic travel, killing 100 million people. The world has become so inter-connected that any disease can just hop a plane and be anywhere in a day. And with the insane level of sanitation and over reliance on antibiotics of modern society these diseases have once again become impossible to treat, just like the Black Death from six centuries ago. Germs never had it so easy.



The 20th century saw the unnatural deaths of 800 million people, making it, without question, the bloodiest century ever. If people died at this rate this at any other time in history humans would have gone extinct a long time ago.



This is absolutely not the safest time in history, it is by far the most dangerous.



And here's even more evidence. Look at all these wars, all over the world, with tens of thousands of deaths.



• Civil war in Ukraine has claimed nearly 2000 lives in these past 8 months

• The same for Libya

• 20,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan

• The war with ISIS has killed 10,000 people in Iraq and 30,000 in Syria







One inevitably wonders what ancient wars Steven Pinker hallucinated to reach his conclusion that the past was so much more dangerous than today? The only genocidal monsters from antiquity were Chingis Khan and Timur, and while the Islamic conquest of India and the Black Death were certainly horrific, humans were largely powerless to act on those catastrophes. Any modern army in the world could have prevented the genocide in Darfur or Rwanda, but instead chose to sit back and watch. Modern people are certainly no more moral than people from antiquity. In fact, the converse is probably true, that modern people are far less moral than at any time in history, choosing to do nothing while millions are raped and murdered around the world.



More people are dying today than have died before. There are more slaves today than at any time in the past. 85 people control half the world's wealth and use it to manipulate world events for their own benefit instead of wiping out disease, famine, and poverty for two billion people. People absolutely are less moral today than ever before, and the world is a far more dangerous place because of it. And if Steven Pinker thinks the opposite then he is deluding himself and is another part of the problem instead of the solution.

Oldest Quran Yet Discovered

Fragments from the Quran were discovered in Birmingham and have been dated to around the time of Muhammad's birth, or slightly before.

Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, added: "This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven."



This is more evidence in support of the hypothesis that the text of the Quran comes from Syriac Christian sources in the Negev that were altered by Muhammad or someone else to justify the Arab conquest of the region. This is why the sites associated with early Islam are being destroyed by the Saudi government and others, not to prevent people from worshipping at Muhammad's birthplace, but to hide the fact that the religion of Islam was created after the political movement had established itself, to to distance it from its Christian and Jewish roots.

The Hidden History Of The Human Race

A 45 minute video composed of bits and pieces of interviews with Michael Cremo from the 1990s about how the scientistic magisterium deliberately lies about human antiquity. Includes information on Virginia Steen-McIntyre and the controversy in Hueyatlaco, Mexico.

Why Taken is the Most Satisfying Movie in History

Taken (2008) stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, the ultimate badass. He is retired from some government job that he only refers to as being a "preventer". He's basically a clean James Bond combined with Maximus. This guy is an expert at slaughtering bad people. His daughter goes to Paris with her idiot friend who gets killed because she doesn't see the danger of inviting some random guy she met for three seconds at the airport over to have consequence free sex. The daughter gets captured by Albanians who run a sex trafficking operation (It is easier for them to work in Paris than in Albania for some reason the movie does explicitly mention, but I forget what it is). Bryan (Liam Neeson) then gets the bad guy on the phone and delivers the greatest whole paragraph ever:



"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. "



The villain, who is also an idiot, snarkly says "good luck" and hangs up.



Bryan knows this weaselly little guy who works behind a desk under another guy we never see who works behind a bigger desk who is somebody within the French government. He gets Bryan to Paris because he only has a couple days to rescue his daughter. When he gets there he kills a few really bad people and destroys a trailer and the desk jockey tells him to leave. Bryan instead tricks him and disappears.



He steals the ID of a French inspector and breaks into the hideout of the Albanians, who are idiots and do not question why a French inspector is speaking English with an Irish accent. There he meets the guy on the phone and says "I told you I would find you." He then kills everyone in the hideout except the telephone guy, who he brings to this rundown building. There he slams two railroad spikes into the guy's thighs and hooks him up to electrical wires. And asks where his daughter is. The guy does not answer so Bryan electrocutes him. He asks again and the guy again refuses to answer, because, as I've already said twice, this is one stupid criminal. Bryan electrocutes him again and then he gets fed up. He tells the thug "You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill." The guy answers. He tells him that he sold his daughter to a man named Saint-Clair. Bryan knows he is telling the truth. He says "I believe you. But that won't save you," and then he turns the power on and leaves the room, letting the guy fry, and it's like a full body orgasm. There is human garbage in the world who really do this kind of thing and they deserve not only to die but to suffer, and this movie satisfies that need in me, but I'll say more about that later.



Bryan goes back to the desk jockey who stonewalls him until he shoots his wife (she lives) and then the desk jockey does what is right instead of what is legal and reveals where Saint-Clair lives.



Saint-Clair turns out to be an American who sells young women in this Eyes Wide Shut place. His goons catch Bryan during a party and Bryan kills them all, noisily. Saint-Clair asks a waiter or someone to check out what all the noise is and the second he opens the door he gets shot in the face and dies. Bryan then shoots Saint-Clair in an elevator and demands to know where his daughter is. Saint-Clair tells him she is on the boat of this billionaire sheik that is leaving in a few minutes. Lying in a pool of blood he pleads with Bryan, saying "Please understand... it was all business. It wasn't personal." To which Bryan replies "It was all personal to me," and then empties the gun into this fucker's face.



Bryan speeds along the riverside in a stolen car and then jumps off a bridge onto the boat. He kills a bunch of people on the boat and then breaks into the room of the sheik. The sheik has his daughter. He's got a knife to her throat. The sheik thinks he's going to get out of this, he thinks he's seen enough movies to know how this works. He thinks this is the real world. He is mistaken. He tries to tell Bryan "We can negoti-" and gets shot in the face mid-sentence in the best scene ever ever. This scene is like fifty times better than when that son of a bitch got electrocuted. If real life were a movie now would be the time to smoke, but life is not a movie and smoking is a filthy habit, so I just have to come down naturally.



If you have not figured it out yet, this is the best movie ever, and the reason is very simple: this movie is the exact opposite of real life. This is the way life should be. In the real world bad people get away with doing bad things all the time. The law protects bad people, who have "rights", whereas good people get beaten in the face with a telescoping baton. Little kids get tickets for running an illegal lemonade stand while Saudi princes can run prostitution rings in the US for decades and nothing happens to them. People can get arrested for collecting rain water because the government wants you to pay the legal water monopoly for something that should be free while windmill companies can kill tens of thousands of endangered birds every year. Someone who smokes a joint gets beaten in the face and thrown in jail for 20 years while child rapists get out in only 5. That's how real life works.



Movies don't have to be like real life. In a movie good wins over evil, right wins over wrong. In a movie the ultimate badass can say "fuck their rights" and kill villains who deserve to die. A movie hero can say "fuck corrupt laws that protect bad people" and do what is right instead of what is legal and can save the innocent and kill complete monsters. And the hero of Taken does this while rubbing it in the face of the authority figure. He berates the desk jockey for caring about what is legal instead of what is right, and he is totally vindicated in the end and triumphs over evil. In movies the heroes have power and skills and weapons and the villains are weak and stupid. No movie exemplifies this more than Taken, and that is why it is the greatest movie ever. It satisfies the deep abiding need of knowing that right will win against wrong and seeing bad people suffer and good people get rewarded. Taken satisfies the need for the world to make sense and for order and justice to prevail. It is medicine for the soul.

Reminisces of Flying Saucers

I saw a blimp yesterday and it got me thinking of an event from a long time ago. In maybe 1994 I saw something fly over my house. It looked like a Sears-Haack body, a tube that tapers at both ends. It had no visible wings or tail and was completely silent. It flew overhead in maybe one second, if that. It was this event that led me to believe in the existence of flying saucers.

Many years later, writing for The Urban Mystic, I did some crude calculations and estimated that the object was moving at about 204 miles per hour. Either that or it must have been flying at a much higher altitude and have been monstrously huge. It is not the fastest thing in the world (about as fast as a top line airplane in the late First World War), but it doesn't need to be. It could have been performing reconnaissance or something. The important thing to note is that it is truly unidentified. Lacking wings or a tail there is no way it could have been an airplane, and it could not have been a blimp because it was totally silent, something the blimp that flew overhead yesterday (and every other airship I have seen) was most definitely not.

Now, absent tangible evidence such as a photograph or signed affidavit from the flight crew (in alienese possibly), there is always the possibility that I hallucinated the whole thing. Taking that into account I will say with 99.5% accuracy that I am convinced what I saw as a real object. What was it? Was it a flying saucer or some sort of human aircraft? There's no way to know. It is a true unknown flying object. What matters most is how the event inspired me to investigate further into the phenomena. The evidence for alien visitation of Earth is overwhelming, and I would have never known had it not been for this chance encounter 20 years ago.

Official 9/11 "Truth" Position

Look, I'll say it again, if you want to believe some element of the US government knew the 9/11 attacks were going to happen and did nothing to stop them deliberately to start a war, fine. If you want to believe some element of the US government staged 9/11 using CIA operatives, fine. Those are both very possible and I wouldn't be surprised if either turned out to be true.

If you believe that no planes hit the buildings, that it was space lasers, or microwave weapons, that holograms of planes covered up missiles and the planes were flown to a secret location and all the passengers were shot to cover it up, or a make believe substance called "nano thermite" was used in a controlled demolition using the phrase "pull them" which is not a demolition term, and somehow hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff was secreted into the buildings with no one noticing it, or anything else besides planes hitting the buildings as the sole cause, you're a fucking retard. Physics works, planes took down the buildings, fuck you.

William Buhlman on OBEs as Spiritual Practice

William Buhlman, an out-of-body experience specialist at the Monroe Institute, gives an hour long talk followed by 20 minutes of questions and answers. He talks about the importance of preparing for death and what comes after, something this society totally ignores to its detriment. That's the one thing the jihadis get right, eternity is more important than the temporal.



The best part was a question at 1h13m.



"Do you believe we are entering a more spiritual age?"



"No.... Without getting into it too deeply, definitely not."



Brilliant answer. I agree completely. People seem to me to be more materialistic now than ever before. Everyone drinks their thousand calorie Starfucks milkshake cup of chino drinks and they wonder why they get fat, they play video games on their Texas phones, buy their $300 Nike shoes that are made for half a penny in a sweatshop in Vietnam, mow their lawns fifty times a week, throw away more food in a day than all of Africa eats in a month, and complain about their triggurz. I hate you all. Fuck love, you people disgust me. You don't deserve love. That's something else the jihadis get right, the West is absolutely full of human garbage that is polluting the world. Jihadis are also polluting the world with their ideology of rape and murder and worship of a pedophile rapist murderer, but that's probably why they can spot human garbage with such ease, they're the worst of the worst. The West at least has some good people mixed in with the assholes, jihadism is entirely filled with assholes. The West can still be fixed, jihadis can only be bombed.



A couple of minor objections:



He does go into the whole "we need to experience things to learn about them" that I previously said sounds like nonsense. He admits this is his opinion.



In the beginning he talks about brainwashing as children and how if we were in Iran or China our belief systems would have been different. That may be, and probably is, true for most people, but it certainly was not true for me. I never bought into the game. I always thought "if adults say something is true or the way things are supposed to be, don't believe them." Adults lie to maintain the power structure because that is their only source of legitimacy. Certainly not using reason, only using force.

Suffering and The Meaning of Life

Fitting in with what I've written two weeks ago about reincarnation, I'll talk here about the meaning of life.



Michael Prescott has some speculations about why there is suffering in the world where an intelligent but not omniscient God created the world to gain life experience. Here's what I left as a comment.



I don't like the idea of God creating the universe to experience things. That seems like a cosmic version of the TV show Jackass. "Wouldn't it be cool to see what it would be like to get burned alive in a car crash? Maybe I could get out before getting killed? Wouldn't that be fun to see if I could?" It's a bit of an oversimplification, but it seems to reduce God or Spirit or even individual souls to adrenaline junkies, or at the very least people who are extremely bored with too much free time. Seeking experience for the sake of experience seems so very underwhelming to me. In its absolute worst form, as seen in some versions of "new age" literature, souls plan their lives beforehand in minute details, so you end up with a scenario where souls are basically masochists. A group of souls floating around planning their next life together when one soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!"

There are two explanations for this world of suffering that I see merit to. They both say primarily that our purpose here is to escape the world and only really differ in explaining how we got stuck here in the first place, to a degree.

In the perennial traditions and in A Course in Miracles, we individual souls exist because God needed someone to love. It's not loneliness in the everyday sense, because God lacks nothing. This is a higher level need based on over-abundance. God is so overflowing with love that it wanted someone to share it with. The world itself is seen as illusory, but even if it's not there need be no problem with suffering at all.

"Natural suffering" like volcanoes and asteroids and having to kill other creatures to survive is an easy one. The world is pretty close to as optimal as one can get. The photoreceptors in the eye can detect single photons, so they can't get any better, for example. There are trade-offs to everything because of the physical constraints of the world (which need to be unimaginably precise to permit the universe and life to exist). Humans have easily injured backs and knees, and narrow hips make childbirth painful, but those are offset by the greater benefits that are gotten through walking upright. So natural suffering can be explained through utilitarianism. Certain unpleasant situations must exist to permit much greater benefits.

The much bigger problem is human caused suffering, like rape and murder and war. That is traditionally explained through the free will defense. God wants us to share in the divine love voluntarily. Forcing us to love would be a form of metaphysical rape.

Even if the world is to an extent "real", more good is wrought through the way the world is than the bad caused by the suffering. We can share in love in more ways, even if we choose not to. Suffering then is no longer God's problem, it is a problem of our own refusal to be moral and treat one another as we should.

Of course, if the world is illusory, then we are tricking ourselves into thinking this suffering exists and our goal is to realize this and get out and back to the perfection into which we were created.

A Course in Miracles explains this wonderfully. God did not create the world, we did, and suffering exists because of our fear and guilt. Unsatisfied with the equal love God was giving to all of us in perfection, we (who find ourselves in this universe) demanded special love. We wanted to be loved more. When God refused to give in to our egoistic demands we then imagined this world up where we could be special. The dream of suffering and death "prove" we are more powerful than the God who refused us the special status we "deserve". Knowing we can't really hurt ourselves, God permits us to sulk in the corner until we get over our upset. At the same time God descended into the dream to remind us that we are dreaming and can wake up at any time when we are ready to return to the perfection into which we were created.

It makes sense because real people do this all the time. There is nothing new that we can't test about what may or may not be the motivations of spirits who want to experience horrible things just to see what it's like. The psychology of the Course is real world human psychology and can be seen in child development all over the world. Children sulk. Adults sulk. We project our emotions and delusions onto the world. We punish ourselves unnecessarily out of misplaced guilt. It makes sense to suppose that if we do this on Earth than we would do the same on a grander scale in some higher dimension. There's nothing in it that resembles speculation about what stunts Superman would pull to see if he could jump off the Empire State Building or whatever.

Suffering acts also as a motivation to escape the world. It acts as a motivation to do good to others so that we can grow in wisdom and compassion. So we move up the evolutionary ladder from plants to animals on to humans, and while the capacity for suffering increases so too do the benefits increase at a much faster rate. So a plant suffers less than a cow but it gets less out of life than the cow, and the cow suffers less than a human but it gets less out of life than the human. And this continues until we realize that the world is illusory and then we can either leave it forever or we can take the path of the bodhisattva and deliberately return to the world and choose to suffer more to alleviate the suffering of others. We can grow into perfect expressions of morality rather than just being bored and bouncing around the universe to see what it's like.

And as I've written over a thousand words by now I'll end here.

A Tale of Two Rebirths

There are two main versions of the mechanics of reincarnation that I will call "old" and "new" for sake of simplicity.

The old system has been around for thousands of years. While the details differ slightly, it is the system of reincarnation taught primarily by Hindus and Buddhists, but also by some ancient Christian sects and in Judaism until about the fifteenth century. A good outline is provided in an essay by Ken Wilber called "Death, Rebirth, and Meditation". There exists some disagreement as to what survives and how long the whole process takes, but in general rebirth takes between 49 days and 200 years; some say personality and memories do not transmigrate and others do. All the differences are really pretty minor when viewed against the similarities regarding how the mechanism itself works. Human psychology is basically the same as what modern science has shown us. Our fears and addictions carry on with us where we have to deal with them in very real terms. Psychological traumas we suffer in this life must be dealt with in this life or the next, and if we cannot overcome our problems than we will be carried aloft by them into a new rebirth. Some say we meet up with people we've known in this life (or even other past lives) in the between life stage, and that certain souls transmigrate together, and others say we do this all alone, but every action in this life always has an equal reaction in the next. There is no escaping causality, the books must be balanced, full stop. We work through our troubles, gradually perfecting ourselves lifetime after lifetime until we finally break free from suffering all together and abide as Spirit forever.

In the new system, promulgated by certain spiritualist circles and "new age" movements, the whole old system is turned on its head. Rather than beginning in ignorance and spending lifetimes trying to end suffering, in the new system we all begin enlightened and we come to this life to experience suffering. Every soul is enlightened, we come to this world with a sort of willful amnesia, and when we die we are automatically restored to perfect knowledge. The lives we live are games we play with one another, and they don't really mean anything on the other side. When we die there is no balancing of good and bad deeds, because there is no good or bad, as we plan our lives out in minute details from the beginning. People who get raped or murdered make agreements with other souls who will be doing the raping and murdering, so there are no villains and victims, and not because the world is ultimately illusory, but because the world is a game we play for life experience. In the new system souls are basically masochists. You can't really know what something is like until you experience it first hand, so a soul living in perfection might have an idea what suffering is, but it doesn't really know until it experiences it for itself.

Why anyone would want to partake of such experiences I cannot understand. If I were Superman and I knew with absolute certainty I could never get hurt I still wouldn't care to know what it felt like to drive a car into a tree or get shot in the face. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to drown or get exploded. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to live in poverty on the streets, or for that matter what it would be like to live in a mansion eating lobster every day.

The new system is very distasteful and reeks of wish fulfillment. Imagine a group of souls floating around planning their next life together. One soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!" The idea infuriates me, to be honest. I think that's much worse than the materialist idea that when you're dead you're dead and there's no justice. I would much rather live in a universe where life is ultimately meaningless and there is no afterlife than have a universe where the Nazis made an agreement with the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust that the whole thing would be staged just to see what it would be like to gas eleven million people. Admittedly the grotesquery of such a scenario is not evidence that it is not true in itself, but it does not help the case either.

It is also not helped by the types of evidence that are available to support either system. The old system, which recapitulates everything we know from earthly psychology, is attested to through near death experiences that reveal our mental state and personalities are pretty much the same after death as before, and through spontaneously remembered past lives of children that often turn out to be phenomenally accurate when later investigated. Enlightened sages also attest to the veracity of the old system through the remembrance of their past lives.

The primary evidence for the new system is through hypnosis of adults, that sometimes does produce highly accurate results (which could be more akin to a form of remote viewing), but a lot of times these memories are false, crafted by the imagination of the subject and the leading of the hypnotist. The new system is also, sometimes, attested to by channeled material, but by no means all. Some channeled material flatly denies the existence of reincarnation, other spirits admit they don't know, and some affirm the old system. The spirits that talk about group souls, of instant enlightenment following death, of coming to Earth to experience things no sane person would ever want to experience such as disease, disasters, and war, and flat out deny the existence of good and evil, seem to me to be lower spirits. Whether malicious or simply tricksters (like Internet trolls of the spirit world), they will say whatever gets them the most attention, and earthly interlocutors receiving confirmation of their desires pass it along in books that say you can literally create your reality and that morality is for squares. As John admonishes in his first epistle, we are to test the spirits to see if they are of God. Anyone from the other side can say they are advanced spirits with brilliant insight into the workings of the universe, and that is why we must use our reason and intelligence to see if what they say makes sense.

In the light of the evidence and the moral implications I would have to say that if reincarnation does exist it seems far more likely that the old system with a gradual progression from ignorance to perfection is correct.

Evil and God (Post 600)

Supposedly what I call the Non-Problem of Evil is the strongest argument against the existence of God. Boston College Professor of Philosophy Peter Kreeft explains that the concept of evil, both human willed action and natural evil, only makes sense in the context of God's existence. Without God setting a benchmark for goodness evil is reduced to nothing more than personal preference. Rather than serving as an argument against the existence of God, the existence of evil is an argument for the existence of God.



Runs 4:50

Mind in Tibetan Buddhism

At death you can no longer lie to yourself. You cannot rationalise away all the negative aspects of your life and your personality. The state of mind you have at the moment of death determins what you will experience, so it is vitally important to prepare now, while you are in this body, for what is to come. Lama Ole Nydahl of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism explains the mind and the bardos.

The Myth of Cultural Relativity

Why is it that on every video about Egypt, or archaeology in general, there has to be someone who leaves a comment about racialism? "You don't think [insert minority here] was smart enough to create something on their own! You're racialist!"

The truth of the matter is, most people in the world were not smart enough to do things on their own. People from Eurasia, and Egypt, did invent a whole lot, and had achieved a whole lot, and everyone else in the world was pretty much stuck in the stone age until the 18th century when they were dragged kicking and screaming into modernity.

People in North America did not have wheels, few had any form of record keeping, and those who had a limited usage of metal used it for ornamental purposes, not for anything practical. However impressive the accomplishments of the Maya or the Peruvian peoples, those accomplishments were all equivalent to things Eurasians had done many thousands of years earlier. Megalithic cairns dating back over 10,000 years map out precise astronomical alignments. While Egyptian pyramids were made from enormous blocks of cut stone, Mesoamerican pyramids were mostly made of rubble, only faced with stone. There were people in the Americas who built tumuli (earthen mounds), even up to probably 1500, while Eurasians had advanced beyond this thousands of years earlier. Not all cultures are equivalent, not scientifically, not technologically, not philosophically, not artistically, and not morally.

I don't think there is anyone who would argue that all breeds of dog are equivalent. Some dogs run really fast, others are exceptional at hunting waterfowl, others are useful for military work. No one would argue that all dogs are equivalent. And yet, somehow, there are some people who manage to think that all humans are equivalent. Some humans are exceptional at metal work, and philosophy, and construction, and hydrology, and navigation, and agriculture, and science, and they almost all come from the same areas. And some humans are great at making mud huts, and they pretty much live everywhere else.

The mistake is to separate humans from the natural world and make equal that which is not. As groups of humans separated geographically breed, just like dogs, different traits are passed on. Some breeds of human accumulate more beneficial traits than others, just like dogs. Some dogs (created in modern times by sick humans) have severe physical deformities that are a terrible detriment to their health. Some dogs are so deformed they cannot even breed without human intervention. The same is true with humans. Certain groups of humans are really short, others have developed the ability to digest milk into adulthood, some can run for days without tiring, and some groups of humans are incredibly smart. But for some reason while it is perfectly fine to talk about how breeding affects dogs, people get up in arms when anyone talks about breeding in humans.

I'm not talking about intrinsic human-ness, I'm not saying other groups of people should be enslaved or exterminated, as people who feel instead of think have already assumed my argument is and have stopped reading. Stupid people are just as human as smart people, just as small deformed dogs are just as dog as reasonable-sized healthy dogs. It's just that stupid people are not as smart as smart people, and so one would find it a lot more difficult to believe that a group of stupid people would be able to create more advanced structures than a group of smart people. That's what the whole issue is. It is easier to believe that certain cultures with long histories of great achievements could create certain monuments with their technology than it is to believe another culture could do the same with much more primitive technology and no suitable record of achievements. It's logic, not feelings. Try using it.

Meditation Problems and Benefits

Here's a Daily Mail article about the supposed dangers of meditation and how it's evil and you should just take a pill. There's a bullshit study out in the Lancet about all of seven prisoners who used some sort of mindfulness practice.



Inmates at seven prisons in the Midlands took 90-minute classes once a week and completed tests to measure their higher cognitive functions in a ten week randomised control trial.

The prisoners’ moods improved, and their stress and psychological distress reduced - but they were found to be just as aggressive before the mindfulness techniques.



Aside from the uselessly small sample size, mindfulness is not designed to target aggression. Mindfulness deals with getting above feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. Mindfulness is a way of developing
wisdom, which is only the ability to recognise Emptiness. There are
separate practices for compassion and shadow work to deal with
aggression. From the perspective of the Absolute NOTHING is arising,
no thoughts, no perceptions, no emotions. It is impossible to deal
with relative issues from an Absolute perspective because there is no
relativity to deal with! 



The guiding principle of mindfulness is to live more ‘in the moment’, spending less time going over past stresses and worrying about future problems.



The guiding principle of mindfulness is to notice the moment-by-moment arising and ceasing of conditions so as to disidentify with them. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts; you have feelings, but you are not your feelings; you have sensations, but you are not your sensations; you have perceptions, but you are not your sensations. You are the Witness of all things that are arising and ceasing, and as Witness you cannot see yourself.



It is a secular practice that is said to help people recognise and overcome negative thoughts while noticing small pleasures.



This right here is the problem. It is not a secular practice to lower blood pressure or anything else they claim it to be. It is a spiritual practice to recognise Spirit as such. Just because there are side benefits does not mean that those benefits are the main, or even a significant, focus of the practice itself. Without a proper framework any realisation will not stick. You can get into certain states and make the mind unmovable, and then as soon as you get out of them you are back to who you were before you started. If you were a jerk before meditation you will be a jerk after meditation. The other areas you work on are to stop yourself from being a jerk in the relative world so that when you stop meditating you don't go back to being a jerk.



There are five different practices that must be used in conjunction to hit the mind from all angles if you want to do everything you can go guarantee enlightenment:



1. Wisdom

The ability to recognize Emptiness. Absolute Truth. Worked at through state training, concentrative or insight. (e.g. praying without ceasing, visualization, "the Terminator thought", awareness of the breath)



2. Compassion

The ability to manifest morality in the world. Relative truth. (Sila, radical forgiveness, tonglen)



3. Shadow

Unconscious aspects the self does not identify with. The source of attachment and projection. (Psychoanalysis, dream analysis, 3-2-1 process)



4. Framework

Thinking. Philosophy. Stages of development. This is what makes realization stick. Without it you've just had an experience that can be interpreted as anything, agita, a drug trip, hallucination, demons, messianic status, etc. (Retreat from untruth, Integral AQAL model, A Course in Miracles text, Socratic method)



5. Body

Physical exercise and nutrition. This is to maintain the body so you can be healthy and fit enough to do the mental work in the manfiest world. Having a healthy body allows the mind to transcend the body more easily because the fewer physical problems there are to serve as distractions (hunger, pains, fatigue, illness), the more effort can go into training the mind. (Calisthenics, weight lifting, hatha yoga, tai chi chuan, proper diet, vitamins)



Meditation and mindfulness is promoted by celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Russell Brand, who boast of its power to help people put stress out of their minds and live for the moment.

But the treatment can itself trigger mania, depression, hallucinations and psychosis, psychological studies in the UK and US have found.

The practice is part of a growing movement based on ancient Eastern traditions of meditation.

However, 60 per cent of people who had been on a meditation retreat had suffered at least one negative side effect, including panic, depression and confusion, a study in the US found.



Those mediation "retreats" are ridiculous. Spend three days stroking your own ego and you'll become enlightened.



With regard to bad drug trips, some people take drugs to try to short cut enlightenment. And when they get taken above the mundane and see that life as they know it is all illusion and time doesn't exist they cannot handle it all at once and some commit suicide. You shouldn't take dope looking for pretty lights and sounds because you might get all of Beethoven downloaded into your brain in a nanosecond.



Dangers exist because we've spent countless eons living with reduced consciousness, practically unconscious compared to the great heights we are meant to attain. Change requires a great many steps that one must necessarily traverse. That's why most change is gradual. So gradual, in fact, that most people don't even notice it, like aging. Abrupt change requires going through all those steps all at once and usually looks like getting struck by lightning. One cannot bench 500 pounds having never exercised before, the muscles need to adapt. And if one were to attempt such a feat it would be very painful. The same is true with trying to force all of cosmic consciousness into a brain that is hardwired to focus on food and reproduction and the egoic pursuits.

Problems only arise when people try to force too much current through a wire that is not rated to handle it. In most people there's little current, but some people spend years getting the current to expand to the point where they can handle it. Sometimes, usually when people do something they're not supposed to, there's too much current and people have bad experiences, but that's not some jerk God doing it to be mean, that's someone who has only lifted a pool noodle trying to bench 500 pounds all at once.



That's why there's so much secrecy surrounding mystical initiation. It's the same reason calculus or sniper training aren't taught to kindergartners, there are a lot of prior steps that must be learned first because there are a whole lot of ways to mess things up even with simple mistakes.



The average person is nowhere near ready to find out the inner workings of one's own mind. It would be like taking someone from the middle of the Amazon forest who has never had contact with the modern world and putting that person in the middle of Hong Kong and expecting the Amazonian to become a millionaire in a weekend. It's impossible. That's why the eightfold path does not begin with samadhi, it begins with the intention, or determination to follow the path through till the end, and then it immediately moves to morality. A moral framework is necessary to get a person to become receptive to these higher realities.



If you're using meditation as a means of blissing out or lowering your blood pressure you're trying to fly a kite during a thunderstorm and hoping that lightning might produce a really cool sensation when it strikes you.

Uri Geller's Tricks?

If y'all remember the early days of The Urban Mystic, there was probably the biggest, and maybe the only, controversey in Urban Mystic history when Bob Couttie tried to spam the site! I let him post his comment and then eight months later he posted the same comment and I deleted it and then he accused me of censorship. That led to some work by a reader/guest contributer countering Couttie's claims regarding Uri Geller and nitinol. I purchased a very old copy of Couttie's book (which is out of print), read it, and wrote a 16 page refutation that so far is up only in PDF format. One day I will turn it into a separate page on the site as well as a video series.

That was 2010. The crux of the matter is does Uri Geller use trickery to bend spoons or not? I don't have an answer, and I've made clear on The Urban Mystic many times that I think it could go either way. Some of his feats are probably tricks, but there is good evidence that he has genuine powers as well. Remember, Uri Geller became a multi millionaire not by bending spoons, but by dowsing for oil, and he has been very successful at finding oil and minerals just by pointing at spots on maps. There is also the experiments performed at SRI with dowsing that appear legitimate.



The reason I bring this up is that I have discovered a video of Bob Couttie talking about Uri Geller, with some evidence of what might be trickery. I'll leave any interpretation up to you, my valued couple of readers. Enjoy.

Why "Taxing the Rich" Doesn't Work

There are at least 7 reasons why the idea of taxing the rich and giving it to the poor does not work. I'll break them down for you below.



1. "Not Rich" Syndrome

The definition of who is "rich" is a lot like a number of other terms that belong on sliding scales. Someone who is rich is usually someone who has more money than the person making the definition. "I'm not rich, but that guy over there making $30,000, he's rich." That guy says "Rich? You must be joking! I'm just getting by, but that guy, making $80,000, now he's rich." The third guy says "I'm not rich! Those greedy bastards making $250,000, they're rich, and they should be taxed more!"



2. "Not I" Syndrome

The people who do admit they are rich usually believe they deserve some exemption to having to pay higher taxes. A leftist who wanted to raise taxes on the rich called in to The Savage Nation a few days ago and he admitted that he was, in fact, rich. However, he believed he shouldn't have to pay higher taxes, only other rich people. You see, he takes every tax exemption he can so he only pays a fraction of what a less crafty person would at his income bracket, and he believes that his genius at finding these loopholes means he is entitled to pay less. The caller wanted to raise taxes but did not want to close the loopholes that would shield him from having to pay those higher taxes! Taxes, in this instance, become a penalty for stupid people.



3. Rich People Don't Pay Taxes

The 80 people who possess half the money in the world never pay taxes anyway. Warren Buffett pays as little taxes as possible, so do the Clintons and the Bushes. The really rich people don't get money from income, so they already don't have to pay income tax – the form of tax that people who want to "tax the rich" want to increase, and they have armies of lawyers to find every single loophole to get out of paying the taxes that do apply to them. Warren Buffett always says that income tax should be raised and that his secretary pays more income tax than he does, but what he never mentions is he makes very little income. Most of the money Buffett gets is in the form of capital gains, which he conveniently does not want taxed any higher. He's distracting the public with one hand to disguise what his other hand is doing.



Remember, in the US, the IRS does not care how much you pay beyond the minimum amount you owe. You can legally give them as much money as you want over what you legally owe. If you owe $50,000, you can legally give them a million dollars and they will gladly accept it to buy a new hammer or toilet seat.



4. Corporations Don't Pay Taxes

Just like rich people, corporations (which somehow count as "people" but unborn children are just "tissues") don't pay taxes either. Corporations are to people what Superman is to man. Corporations can deduct expenses, like utilities. If you try to get off having to pay your gas bill or make a car payment you'd get your gas shut off and your car repossessed. A corporation can get a tax break. Corporations can use past losses to offset future gains. In the red last year? It doesn't matter that you've made billions, you can subtract what you didn't make from what you did and get free money from Uncle Sam! Corporations can create smaller, shell corporations in tax havens to launder money and avoid paying taxes. And the big one, corporations that are really super in the red can get bailouts if they have their hands in too many cookie jars. If a big corporation like AIG were to go bankrupt it would cause a depression, so the government can't let that happen. You see, some corporations are "too big to fail."



5. Dekulakization

Whenever taxes are raised the only people who lose more money directly are kulaks. Kulaks are the mythical "tight-fisted" independent farmers (mostly Poles and Ukrainians) who Stalin murdered out of racial hatred while claiming to fight capitalism. In American terms the kulaks are the entrepreneurs. They are the people with two mortgages on their homes to fund a business that employs a couple dozen people. On paper they may be millionaires, but very little of that money is liquid. In fact most of these modern day kulaks are in the red, but few ever speak of real world economics, and so these paper millionaires must be taxed to the point where they lose their businesses. Destroying small businesses is a death sentence for the economy, because that's where most new jobs are created. Raising taxes is like pouring cement into a car's engine.



6. Eat the Poor

The only other group of people hurt by higher taxes are poor people. Fewer businesses means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs means more unemployment, and unemployment tends to go hand-in-hand with being poor. That's not the only way poor people are hurt by higher taxes. Those tax-exempt corporate people can raise their prices if they ever get in a situation where they can't weasel their way out of having to pay a tax, thus forcing poor people to have to pay whatever the corporations owe. Sure, minimum wage might go up every few years, but it's always behind inflation, so an extra dollar an hour is really less than what you were paid five years ago because the price of commodities has gone up. It really is the case that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, whether taxes are increased or not.


7. To Each According to His Need

If we're going to redistribute wealth, and do it globally and do it right, chances are you won't see a dime. A billion Africans take precedent over the average poor person in America, because they are just that much poorer. Poor people in America have a car, a TV, and are obese, while poor people in Haiti literally eat cakes made from mud to eliminate hunger pangs because there's not enough food to eat a real meal every day.



And if we were to do this just in America? The people who would reap the rewards are the same people who reap them now: the welfare scam artists. Deadbeats who have ten children so they can get food stamps to pay for makeup and booze, people living together who all file separately so the household looks really super poor on paper, I've seen all types. There are people who know how to game the system to suck up as much welfare as possible, and they often live better than the people working two jobs who support them with their taxes. Do you think this would change if we just "tax the rich" more? In a country where 80% of government spending on welfare is lost in bureaucratic inefficiency and political slush funds, I don't think so.



Bonus 8th Reason: What is Fair? 

Alright, you've convinced me, let's do this. Let's tax the rich. Let's make them pay their fair share. So, what is their fair share?



The problem with the definition of fairness is that it is even more nebulous than the definition of rich. That's why leftists have switched over to using the word equality, because enough people have caught onto the fairness nonsense. Leftists love to say the rich should pay their fair share, but if you ever press them to give a real world percentage they will turn irate and say you are deflecting the issue. Leftists never say anything concrete because then people would see they're idiots. It reveals the lie to get into details, so they stick to slogans that they repeat Ad nauseam, just like Rules for Radicals tells them to do. How much taxes are fair? More. It's never fair because you can always tax more, but if leftists ever said this you'd see they're not interested in fairness, only control.

God and Buddha

Robert Thurman and Deepak Chopra rap for an hour and a half on Buddhism, Vedanta, God, primordial awareness, suffering, liberation, contradiction, and everything in between. A lovely dialogue.

Integral Christ

UPDATE: Integral Christ is now available in PDF format complete with additional pictures and about three errors corrected. 



 If the crucifixion took place in 33 AD then the day was today, 3 April. The last time Holy Week took place at the same time as the first Holy Week was 1942. The next time it will happen again is 2026. If my calculations are correct Jesus was killed 2 weeks before his 39th birthday.



On such an auspicious occasion, the first in the lives of probably most people who have ever visited The Urban Mystic (though I love my septuagenarian readers just as much, probably more), I will take this time to write a very special piece about the most famous man who ever lived.



Who was Jesus Christ? I've already written about his birth, about his life, the conspiracy to kill him, the resurrection, and the possibility that he visited India during those missing 18 years. What is left to write about?



How about the ways in which we interpret Jesus.



I listened to an audio program from Integral Life that was little more than a 45 minute commercial, but it got me thinking about the way people at different developmental levels interpret Jesus and what part of his life and teaching they may focus on.



We hear about magic stage Christianity focuses on Jesus as personal savior who can miraculously alter the world. A child's view of Jesus as a superhero who is there to save you. The miraculous is the focus at this stage; it is what convinces the believer.



Mythic Christianity would focus on Jesus as the Way the Truth and the Life. Jesus prescribes behavior and you have to obey, you have to accept Jesus as your personal savior or you'll go to Hell forever. This is the Christianity of the Crusaders and most of medieval Europe and even going into the Reformation. The difference between the old Catholic church and Luther's church was the interpretation of whether Jesus' Law included belief only or if acts of charity were needed to cement one's place in Heaven.



Rational Christianity, the Christianity of Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, Rene Descartes, and Isaac Newton. We have a God who is grand designer of the universe, and while Jesus is fully divine he is also fully human. Jesus is a wisdom teacher.



There's a pluralistic Christianity would deconstruct Jesus. It would be seen as unchristlike to say Jesus is the only way to God. Belief no longer needs to have any connection with truth, if truth even exists; belief is my own feeling about something and everyone has different, equally valid beliefs.



But what is integral Christianity? Who is the integral Jesus? This question may be too large even for this massive essay. To scale it back I'll focus on a much smaller scale.



The dialogue did ask four interesting questions about what would be included in an integral version of Christianity: Do you need the virgin birth? Do you need miracles? Do you need Jesus dying on the cross? and Do you need the resurrection?



Remember, the key feature of second tier is supposed to be to integrate all of first tier. We're supposed to look at everything that has come before and work it all together. Ken Wilber's working hypothesis is that no one is entirely wrong. Every level is right about some aspect of reality in some way. What I try to do is find what works at each level and put it all together, bridging the gaps, to create a unified whole. What the people over at Integral Life seem to do is talk about the lower levels and then take whatever Green-Post Modern says and declare it the truth of everything. There seems to be a very strong Green bias in the supposedly second tier integral community. But that's a topic for a different discussion. Right now what I will attempt to do is integrate all of first tier into a second tier version of Christianity. I will start by answering the four questions presented in the dialogue.



Now, I have absolutely no idea if Mary was a virgin or not prior to Jesus' birth. Mentioned in Matthew and Luke, the virgin birth went relatively unquestioned for most of the history of Christianity. Matthew makes reference to a prophecy from Isaiah that the messiah would be born of a virgin and he sees Jesus as fulfilling that prophecy. Why did Matthew and Luke tell different versions of the same story, and why did Mark and John not mention the virgin birth at all? We can excuse Paul because his central focus was the resurrection as the singular event in history in which sin and death were overcome, but is the silence from Mark and John any indication of anything?



It is not impossible for such an event as a virgin birth to occur. It has never been observed in mammals in the wild, but scientists have been able to tinker around with mice and rabbits, and in 2007 human embryos were created this way for use in stem cell research. God can do anything that a human can do, so technically God could turn the reptilian gene on and make a fatherless Jesus as a demonstration of sovereignty over nature. The biggest problem is that the offspring of such an event is always female. Again, however, it is possible to tinker with an X chromosome in the lab and create a Y chromosome from it, since they have homologous genes. It is technically possible for a scientist today to create a male embryo from the cells of just the mother, but no one has ever done this before and it doesn't happen in nature, which really would make it a miracle par excellence.



Did it happen? We can't say. Are we required to believe it happened? Well, if we follow what Paul says then technically no. A virgin birth is not a requirement for an integral Christianity.



Do we need miracles? Surprisingly they seem to agree that events that might be considered miraculous actually do happen. There are healers who use methods such as laying on hands and other energetic methods, and not only do they produce statistically significant results, but these alternative methods are sometimes even covered by insurance, so energy healing is not something on the fringe, it is acceptable medicine. Phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis have been demonstrated to exist with greater scrutiny than any other field of science ever. Double-blind protocol was invented to study psychic phenomena, starting with Mesmerism (a form of hypnotism). Just as ancient people would consider an airplane magic if it were somehow transported back in time, it is safe to say that they would have considered psychic powers to be a form of magic or miracles.



Richard Rose, an iconoclastic physicist and engineer as well as a mystic, certainly accepted what he called "magic," which appears to include psychic phenomena. Looking at Ken Wilber's classification of the developmental levels it is possible that Richard Rose would have been considered third tier, meaning permanently ensconced in states of transpersonal awareness. Rose would almost certainly have been considered integrally developed, and he not only accepted the existence of psychic phenomena, but also demonic possession.



A lot of miracles in the New Testament definitely could be explained through psychic phenomena, albeit at a larger scale than what is seen in a laboratory setting. Miracles can indeed be a part of integral Christianity, and if we're using the word "miracle" as a pre-scientific term to mean "psychic phenomena" then the existence of miracles is already an established fact.



What about the crucifixion? Does integral Christianity need a crucifixion? Well, what exactly is the alternative? The dialogue brings up the swoon hypothesis. They say that people in the Gospels acted like Jesus was still alive. They say he was taken off after only six hours, his body was put in a tomb instead of left on the cross to rot like typically happens with criminals, that the herbs used to anoint the body were typically used to revive people and not to anoint the dead. People are acting like he isn't dead? Really? Only John mentions anything put on Jesus' body, and he says myrrh, aloe, and unnamed spices. Aloe is certainly used in medicine, and so is myrrh, but myrrh is also used in embalming the dead. But what about the swoon hypothesis? I have to say it is the most ridiculous alternative to crucifixion anyone has come up with. People have suggested it was a double who was crucified, some people say that the whole story was made up, some people even say that God replaced Jesus' body on the cross with Judas, but anyone who believes in the swoon hypothesis knows absolutely nothing about medicine.



Let us look at the Shroud of Turin, an object that realistically depicts what is mentioned in the Gospels. Jesus was scourged by a Roman flagrum. The man on the shroud has 120 such marks on his body. There have been people who have died from a few lashes from a regular whip back when capital punishment was legal in the West, in the British navy for example. A flagrum is about 50 times worse than a whip. A flagrum is like a whip with three strips of leather with iron barbells, nails, or broken glass tied to it, wielded by a professional killer. He had a crown of thorns placed on his head. His eye is swollen shut from the beating he received, his nose is broken. His shoulders were dislocated when he was crucified. The nails used in the crucifixion would have rendered his hands nonfunctional, not to mention the excruciating pain from putting pressure on the median nerve in the wrist. After six hours on the cross Jesus' heart would have been beating over 140 beats per minute, he would be near suffocating, dehydrated, exhausted, between 10-20% of his blood would have been lost. Then the Roman centurion thrust a spear through Jesus' side and "blood and water" poured out of the wound. This is a very telling remark from John. The heart is surrounded by a cushion of clear fluid. When the spear pierced Jesus' heart that clear fluid came out with the blood. It is doubtful that even professional executioners in the first century would have known about the existence of pericardial fluid. The fact that John mentions this is strong indication that he witnessed an actual event.



In order to complete the swoon hypothesis the Apostles would have needed to fool professional executioners that Jesus was dead. In the tomb they would have needed to treat wounds that would probably have been fatal even with modern emergency surgery. Jesus would have needed an emergency heart transplant, a blood transfusion, his shoulders would have had to been put back in place and his nose would have had to have been set. 36 hours later Jesus would have needed to roll an enormous stone away using his nonfunctional hands, overpower the guards standing outside the tomb, walk seven miles from outside Jerusalem to Emmaus, sneak into a locked room with no evidence of forced entry, and fool people including his Apostles and his own mother that he was resurrected and had conquered death and not a bloody and beaten mess who had barely escaped death. He would have had to convince people so thoroughly that 11 of the 12 Apostles would overcome their fear of the Romans and go to their death as martyrs to preach a Gospel they knew was a lie.



The swoon hypothesis is absolutely impossible. One thing is certain, the Romans were experts at killing people. If they said Jesus was dead then he was dead. He wasn't in a coma, he wasn't faking, he was absolutely dead.



The dialogue also mentions a supposed lack of documentary evidence of the crucifixion. Lack of documentary evidence? Josephus and Tacitus both say that a man named Jesus was crucified by the Romans. What do you want, a CNN video from 33 AD actually showing the nails going in?



The crucifixion is as close to an historical fact as we can get. We know from historical sources that a man named Jesus preached in Judea in the first century and he was crucified by the Romans. That is fact. If the crucifixion isn't part of integral Christianity that's just plain denying fact. That would be like integral chemistry denying the existence of atoms.



Now we come to the big one. Does integral Christianity need the resurrection? The men in the dialogue dodge produce yet another flippant response. They say something like "Well I don't care, 'he died for my sins', that doesn't mean anything to me." Not only did they dodge the question, I also suspect they enjoy sinning. I mean sinning is fun, at the time, but I suspect they don't repent afterward.



But the answer to the question is an unequivocal yes. You don't need to believe in the resurrection to practice Jesus' teachings, you don't need to believe to accept the existence of an historical Jesus, but to be a Christian the central tenant is belief in the resurrection. That is nonnegotiable. Paul says that there can be no Christianity without the resurrection and that if the resurrection did not happen we should immediately through Christianity out because it is false:



But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. (1 Cor 15:13-17)



Who am I going to believe, Paul, the inventor of Christianity, as the man who took a small following of an obscure Jewish teacher and made it a world religion everyone can belong to, or some guy in 2015 who doesn't even care about the concept of sin?



Here's what Richard Rose has to say:



"Evidently Jesus was able to come back and get his body, since the body disappeared from the grave, and later reappeared on the road to Emmaus. This does not prove that Jesus escaped physically from the grave, but could imply that the spirit of Jesus was able to simulate a body and to discard the mask at will.

"To say that a personality has found a means to travel from one dimension to another and to be seen in both is not unreasonable, although it implies a special talent. The SRF (Self Realization Fellowship) movement claims that some of its masters were avatars who had the ability to come and go between the spiritual planes and they were also reputed to have extensive creative ability. This brings us to the word illusion, for many believe this world to be one of illusion and that some liberated spirits are able to evoke the illusion at will." (The Albigen Papers, p. 84)



Rose is speaking of chapter 43 from Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda's guru Yukteswar Giri had died and his body was buried and then a few days later he reappeared in physical form before Yogananda to console him and teach a valuable lesson about life and death:


"Angelic guru," I said, "your body looks exactly as it did when last I wept over it in the Puri ashram."

"O yes, my new body is a perfect copy of the old one. I materialize or dematerialize this form any time at will, much more frequently than I did while on earth. By quick dematerialization, I now travel instantly by light express from planet to planet or, indeed, from astral to causal or to physical cosmos." My divine guru smiled. "Though you move about so fast these days, I had no difficulty in finding you at Bombay!" (Quote taken from the original public domain version, which I have as a text file, so I unfortunately can't say what page it came from.)



What about A Course in Miracles? If we look at the unpublished "Special Messages" section the Voice (identified as Jesus Christ) says the following about the resurrection:



My body disappeared because I had no illusion about it. The last one had gone. It was laid in the tomb, but there was nothing left to bury. It did not disintegrate because the unreal cannot die. It merely became what it always was. And that is what “rolling the stone away” means. The body disappears, and no longer hides what lies beyond. It merely ceases to interfere with vision. To roll the stone away is to see beyond the tomb, beyond death, and to understand the body’s nothingness. What is understood as nothing must disappear.

I did assume a human form with human attributes afterwards, to speak to those who were to prove the body’s worthlessness to the world. This has been much misunderstood. I came to tell them that death is illusion, and the mind that made the body can make another since form itself is an illusion. They did not understand. But now I talk to you and give you the same message. The death of an illusion means nothing. It disappears when you awaken and decide to dream no more. And you still do have the power to make this decision as I did.



Is resurrection even possible? Resurrection, not mere revival of the body. Both Richard Rose and Paramhansa Yogananda seem to think so. And you may think to yourself, sure Rose and Yogananda may, may, have had a center of gravity in third tier, but Yogananda could still have been cognitively at amber and Rose at orange, or whatever. You might say that the Course was written by Hellen Schucman subconsciously, and she might have been at orange or maybe green, who knows.



Someone with a cognitive level of teal or turquoise, even someone at green, would see this is all a myth, it's impossible, the resurrection is a holdover from a mythic consciousness and it's really symbolic of our spiritual resurrection within Christ consciousness. The death of the separate self sense and the resurrection into nondual spirit as such. This also achieves the conquest of sin, because from a nondual perspective there is no sin. Nonduality transcends good and evil (unfortunately most people today misinterpret the nondual traditions and instead of transcending anything just act egotistically and think they are transcending good and evil). Sin is entirely a product of the separate self, so when we die to the separate self we are eliminating sin. And that's fine. I don't disagree with that interpretation. It is lovely symbolism and capable of producing profound spiritual experiences.



But my question is is it possible for an integral Christianity to include a bodily resurrection of Jesus? I've presented eye-witness testimony of resurrection and spiritual communication. Now let's take another look at the Shroud of Turin. I keep bringing up the Shroud because I think it is strong evidence in favor of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If we are able to overcome the speculation that it is a forgery then we are left with what appears to me to be two possibilities: that the Shroud was formed through some unknown natural process related to the decomposition of a body that has never been seen before or since, or that the Shroud is a relic of a miracle, a physical testimony to the the ultimate event in history.



The evidence that the shroud is not a forgery is very strong. The first piece of evidence is the dating. One sample from the Shroud of Turin was taken and dated. First off, testing one sample proves nothing. Second, the sample was taken from a corner where a repair was made. The radio carbon date of the sample is off because it did not come from an original part of the cloth.



Next we have an illumination from a Hungarian manuscript the Pray Codex.



The illumination depicts a crucified man who looks like the man in the Shroud with his thumbs retracted (because the nails damaged the nerve) – medical knowledge a medieval monk would not have known. The picture also depicts the man on a cloth with a similar weave as the Shroud, and an L-shaped series of burn marks in the same place as on the Shroud. Crucially, this manuscript was made almost a century prior to the earliest date attested to by the carbon 14 testing of the Shroud. This is strong evidence against the Shroud being a medieval forgery.



Then comes the list of high improbabilities; things that no medieval artist should know or would even think about.



 ● The blood stains – which have been tested and are real human blood – have no image underneath them. That means the blood was placed on the cloth first and the image created afterward. The forger would need to know exactly where to place the blood, correctly depicting the flow of gravity around a three dimensional body, both when held vertical during the crucifixion, and then later when the body was horizontal within the tomb, and then paint over it.



 ● The forger would need to know what an authentic Roman scourging looked like to produce an accurate representation.



 ● The forger would need to know what an authentic Roman crucifixion looked like, including putting the nails in the wrists and not the palms, as was the tradition during the middle ages. The forger would have needed to know that the thumbs would retract from the injury.



 ● The forger would need to put Jerusalem pollen on the cloth to fool 20th century scientists who would conduct microchemistry on the Shroud.



 ● The forger would need to paint using an unknown medium (no paint, no dye, no pigment of any kind was ever discovered on the cloth, there are no indication of brush strokes or any application of any material) in perfect negative of an image that is almost invisible up close and does not become visible until many 40 feet away, in order to produce a positive image only after the invention of photography many centuries later.



 ● The forger would need to encode 3D information within the image so that 20th century computers could extract a full 3D life-sized image of a man.



If the Shroud is a forgery then the forger would need to be the greatest artist who has ever lived and will likely ever live, and yet the forger would have to have produced absolutely no other work during his lifetime.



Now that the idea that the Shroud is a forgery has been refuted it is up to you to decide whether the Shroud of Turin is the natural byproduct of an unknown process of decomposition that has never before or since been observed, or a genuine miracle.



Integral Christianity certainly can include a bodily resurrection. We certainly can have room for interpretation and experiences. It is possible to have visions of Christ, just like deathbed visions of relatives. I'll say this for the first time, I have had a vision of Christ. He reached through my body, touched my spine, and instantly healed a childhood injury that had filled most of my life up to that point with constant pain. No hallucination can do that, that was a genuine miracle. (Unfortunately, six years later I re-injured my back at work. I don't expect Jesus to come back and heal me every time I get hurt, that was a one off event with spiritual ramifications.) Could the Apostles have had such a vision? I certainly think Paul did. But a mere vision does not explain the empty tomb. Remember, people at different levels can interpret the empty tomb and the resurrection differently, but when reading the Gospels we must take into account the writer's original intent. We can read interpretations into the Gospels that the writers could never have imagined, about Christ consciousness and symbolism of this and that, but to know what they were talking about we must take into account their own level of development. First and second century Jews would not have a clue what you're talking about if you start speaking in postmodern terminology.



When Paul was writing his letter to the Corinthians he was not talking about some experience you can have and gee isn't that swell, but other people can interpret things their own way. The Gospel writers were not using the empty tomb as a metaphor for anything. They do not paint themselves as particularly bright within their own Gospels. Jesus has to constantly explain himself in ever more details before the Apostles finally get it in John at the Last Supper. The Gospel writers depict events that would have been embarrassing for a first century Jew. If they were writing metaphor they would not have put so many inconvenient details within the text, they would have presented Jesus as Superman.  These people were writing what they thought was the true account of real events. If Paul says that Christianity cannot exist without the resurrection, he's not talking about an experience he had on the road to Damascus, he's not using the empty tomb to talk about shunyata, they really found a tomb with no body and they explain it by saying Jesus physically rose from the dead. Without that, without the resurrection, there can be no Christianity.



So where does that leave integral Christianity? Well, I've certainly demonstrated that miracles exist, whether we use the word "miracle" or "psychic phenomena," I've shown that the crucifixion was a real historical event, and, most controversially, I have presented evidence in favor of the resurrection, and have argued that our own interpretation, while important, should not be read into the minds of the Gospel writers.



You can certainly love Jesus at any level. You can practice Jesus' teaching in the manner interpreted at any level and have that practice be appropriate for that level. However interpretations should not trump facts. Postmodernism deconstructed the world, and integralism is supposed to reconstruct it, taking what works at every level and synthesizing it into a seamless whole. It is not enough to say every level has its own interpretations, its own value structures, and just leave it at that. While true, that is not the whole picture. Our own interpretation must go hand-in-hand with the interpretations of the Gospel writers and with the facts of Jesus' life in order to complete the picture and create a truly integral Christianity. We must live the teachings of Jesus body, mind, and spirit, exercising our charity and compassion, our rationality, and our prayer and contemplation so that we too may "die daily" to our separate self as Paul did 2000 years ago.



It is Easter Sunday. Rejoice! Christ is risen!