1. The kid was super annoying.
2. Gort was in 2 scenes, and he turned into a cloud of little bugs that ate everything in the second scene, for no reason.
3. The CGI Gort looks totally fake. They could have shot an actor on a green screen and made him look 20 feet tall like Xerxes.
4. Klaatu has magical powers that fluctuate depending on what the plot calls for at any given moment.
5. Klaatu has magical powers, full stop.
6. Klaatu kills people to show how violent and destructive humans are?
7. Life is so precious that the super advanced aliens need to abduct animals on an ark because they plan on killing every living thing on the planet?
8. The super advanced aliens invented a weapon that eats absolutely everything, including rocks, because they wanted to wipe out the humans. Why not just engineer a human specific virus and spare all the other creatures?
9. The alien super weapon can convert any random matter into more copies of itself regardless of the chemical composition of what it eats, and it can apparently generate a limitless supply of energy out of nothing.
10. If the aliens have free energy and they are so worried about humans polluting the Earth why not just give humans the free energy technology and solve the problem without killing anyone?
11. Klaatu makes one half-assed attempt at contacting all the world leaders and then decides "To hell with it," and releases the super weapon to destroy the planet.
12. Klaatu's people are hypocrites, as John Cleese points out. Klaatu's people DID destroy their home world, and in a fit of desperation developed free energy, and instead of giving other species the same opportunity, they decide to wipe them out instead.
13. Klaatu's people can cancel inertia, so why does he need the password to escape the government prison? Why doesn't he just blast his way through the walls?
14. The size of the killer bugs Gort transformed into varies depending on the scene. In one scene they are microscopic, in another they are clearly the size of common garden ants.
15. Klaatu DOES say "Klaatu barada nikto" but super loud "dramatic" music drowns it out.
16. Why did Klaatu's ship land on Earth in 1928 to pick up Keanu Reeves' body and then decide to come back in 2008 to kill all humans when humans were clearly making progress in saving the planet by that time. The worst time for ecological destruction was in the 1950s when thousands of open air nukes were being detonated. Pollution and environmental destruction have decreased since then, so humans are making progress, if at a somewhat slow pace. Klaatu should be able to appreciate that more people care about the environment now than ever before.
17. Klaatu destroys Gort in the end.
18. The device Klaatu uses to destroy Gort not only destroys all electronics on the planet, it stops everything mechanical, whether it is electronic or not!
19. Building on the horror from 18, think of all the people who died when all machines were destroyed? Every plane in the air fell to the ground, all submarines sank and were crushed in the ocean, everyone in an elevator is trapped and will suffocate, everyone on a ship is permanently stranded at sea unless they can paddle to shore, everyone who requires insulin will die now that there is no refrigeration, ALL vaccines and medicine will be wiped out, food production will decrease dramatically, 5 billion people, at least, will die. The annoying kid and the suspiciously attractive scientist will almost certainly die within the year. Rather than saving humanity, Klaatu has pretty much doomed humanity to the iron age permanently, since all the scientists and engineers who will be needed to rebuild the Earth's infrastructure will almost certainly die. It would have been a lot more merciful just to wipe everyone out rather than let billions of people starve to death.
20. WHY THE HELL DIDN'T KLAATU JUST GIVE HUMANS THE DAMN FREE ENERGY TECHNOLOGY?! That would have solved every single problem with the story. None of this makes any sense. That's why changing the story doesn't work. The 1951 story was perfect. "Humans have developed nuclear weapons and rockets and the aliens don't want humans to spread war to outer space so they quarantine the Earth." Works perfectly. The 2008 story makes no sense. "Humans are polluting the Earth so aliens who completely destroyed their home planet with pollution will completely destroy the Earth and remake it without humans." That makes no sense. Just give humans the free energy and no one will ever pollute again! Then no one needs to die! It only takes a few seconds to think this through. The writers could have come up with something just as relevant to the 21st century as nuclear weapons were to the 1950s, but NO, they came up with something incredibly stupid with more plot holes than Swiss cheese! It does not make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
Monday, April 11, 2016
Saturday, April 9, 2016
Reincarnation Questions and Hypotheses
There are a few reasons I suspect reincarnation is both possible and exists:
1. As a child I had past life memories (I don't remember anything now). I stopped talking about it when no one believed me.
2. It is the best explanation for other children who have veridical past life memories.
3. It explains certain things about human development that we don't understand.
4. It makes sense mechanically, working as a sort of metaphysical version of gravity.
5. It's fair.
6. Pretty much everyone believed in reincarnation in some form until the 14th century. (Reincarnation, of at least certain individuals who suffer traumatic deaths, is still a part of orthodox Judaism today.)
The main questions that exist surrounding the idea of reincarnation are as follows:
1. Which of the two suggested mechanisms for reincarnation is accurate, the individual soul coming back life after life as all the world's religions suggest, or the new age model where different souls incarnate that are connected through an "over-soul"?
2. How long is the typical duration between successive incarnations on Earth?
There seems to be a great deal of leeway with this, depending on the belief of the person. Some people who believe in instantaneous reincarnation may indeed instantaneously reincarnate. In the Tibetan model rebirth takes place after 45 days, ideally, though with reincarnated lamas it looks like it usually takes 2 or 3 years. With a lot of people from the Second World War and the Holocaust they seem to have started coming back after 50 or 60 years. Yogananda suggests 200 years is a normal time. I suspect that people wait to reincarnate until after the whole family has died, so they can all meet up again before departing once more for Earth, although with sudden horrific deaths the wait time seems to be a lot shorter.
An enlightened being can reincarnate at will, but with the average person I suspect something akin to the Hindu system is in place where a person spends time in one of the astral heavens until the merit they accrued in the previous lifetime has expired (which may take hundreds or even thousands of years) before having to come back. This makes sense, metaphysically.
3. How many souls are there that are incarnating? Let's for the moment just talk about humans. (I suspect more advanced animals like apes and dolphins also reincarnate like humans, but we can't ask them so it's impossible to know. Also animals who have spent a great deal of time with humans, like pets, also may have individual rebirths. Generally it is said that wild animals, and I suspect plants too since recent studies with tomatoes and trees reveal that at least certain plants are conscious too, tend not to have individual souls, but I have no idea.) There are at least 8 billion human souls, and since the maximum number of humans possible on the Earth is assumed to be about 12 billion let's say that's the minimum number of individual souls. That would mean that the time between incarnations would necessarily be very short. If, on the other hand, there were 100 billion souls then the time between incarnations would be very long, since there have only been 108 billion people who have ever lived, so only a handful would have ever reincarnated. If there are 1 trillion souls then no one will ever need to reincarnate because it will take millions of years to run out and hopefully humanity will all reach enlightenment before then and we can be done with the Earth permanently.
4. Why are all, or most, of the faculties lost in the interim between incarnations? Babies, even of enlightened beings, still have to learn to walk and talk all over again, and very few people come here knowing calculus (reincarnation is, I think, the only explanation for genius as seen in people like Freeman Dyson who knew more about mathematics as a very young child than most people ever learn in a lifetime). You would think someone like the Dalai Lama who has come back 14 times now would be born knowing how to walk and talk, because he has that much more experience than an ordinary mortal.
It does seem that some memories sneak through, at least at the beginning. Young children exhibit xenoglossy, speaking languages they never learned, but they knew from a previous life. This universally disappears after 4 or 5 years. And with genius and rapid development of certain faculties there seems to be some degree of anemnesis at play. If you learned something ten times already then relearning it in your next life will be very easy.
These lists are in no way exhaustive. Rather, they serve as a useful summary of the situation.
1. As a child I had past life memories (I don't remember anything now). I stopped talking about it when no one believed me.
2. It is the best explanation for other children who have veridical past life memories.
3. It explains certain things about human development that we don't understand.
4. It makes sense mechanically, working as a sort of metaphysical version of gravity.
5. It's fair.
6. Pretty much everyone believed in reincarnation in some form until the 14th century. (Reincarnation, of at least certain individuals who suffer traumatic deaths, is still a part of orthodox Judaism today.)
The main questions that exist surrounding the idea of reincarnation are as follows:
1. Which of the two suggested mechanisms for reincarnation is accurate, the individual soul coming back life after life as all the world's religions suggest, or the new age model where different souls incarnate that are connected through an "over-soul"?
2. How long is the typical duration between successive incarnations on Earth?
There seems to be a great deal of leeway with this, depending on the belief of the person. Some people who believe in instantaneous reincarnation may indeed instantaneously reincarnate. In the Tibetan model rebirth takes place after 45 days, ideally, though with reincarnated lamas it looks like it usually takes 2 or 3 years. With a lot of people from the Second World War and the Holocaust they seem to have started coming back after 50 or 60 years. Yogananda suggests 200 years is a normal time. I suspect that people wait to reincarnate until after the whole family has died, so they can all meet up again before departing once more for Earth, although with sudden horrific deaths the wait time seems to be a lot shorter.
An enlightened being can reincarnate at will, but with the average person I suspect something akin to the Hindu system is in place where a person spends time in one of the astral heavens until the merit they accrued in the previous lifetime has expired (which may take hundreds or even thousands of years) before having to come back. This makes sense, metaphysically.
3. How many souls are there that are incarnating? Let's for the moment just talk about humans. (I suspect more advanced animals like apes and dolphins also reincarnate like humans, but we can't ask them so it's impossible to know. Also animals who have spent a great deal of time with humans, like pets, also may have individual rebirths. Generally it is said that wild animals, and I suspect plants too since recent studies with tomatoes and trees reveal that at least certain plants are conscious too, tend not to have individual souls, but I have no idea.) There are at least 8 billion human souls, and since the maximum number of humans possible on the Earth is assumed to be about 12 billion let's say that's the minimum number of individual souls. That would mean that the time between incarnations would necessarily be very short. If, on the other hand, there were 100 billion souls then the time between incarnations would be very long, since there have only been 108 billion people who have ever lived, so only a handful would have ever reincarnated. If there are 1 trillion souls then no one will ever need to reincarnate because it will take millions of years to run out and hopefully humanity will all reach enlightenment before then and we can be done with the Earth permanently.
4. Why are all, or most, of the faculties lost in the interim between incarnations? Babies, even of enlightened beings, still have to learn to walk and talk all over again, and very few people come here knowing calculus (reincarnation is, I think, the only explanation for genius as seen in people like Freeman Dyson who knew more about mathematics as a very young child than most people ever learn in a lifetime). You would think someone like the Dalai Lama who has come back 14 times now would be born knowing how to walk and talk, because he has that much more experience than an ordinary mortal.
It does seem that some memories sneak through, at least at the beginning. Young children exhibit xenoglossy, speaking languages they never learned, but they knew from a previous life. This universally disappears after 4 or 5 years. And with genius and rapid development of certain faculties there seems to be some degree of anemnesis at play. If you learned something ten times already then relearning it in your next life will be very easy.
These lists are in no way exhaustive. Rather, they serve as a useful summary of the situation.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
My Problems with Spiritualists
I usually have two problems with most spiritualists. First to clarify, when I say "spiritualist" I categorically DO NOT mean people who say they are "spiritual but not religious." I've already written at length my distaste for those people. Spiritualism is the belief that spirit exists distinct from matter (or within some realm of more rarefied subtle matter or etheric or astral matter) and can be contacted through mediums. And this has been tested scientifically and there are really only two possible options to explain the data:
1. The Survival Hypothesis. The minds and personalities of people survive death of the body in pretty much the same state as when they were alive and they can communicate, at least at a rudimentary level, with the living.
or
2. The Super-ESP Hypothesis. The minds of certain living people are capable of extraordinary feats of ESP bordering on omniscience, whereby they can access information about the deceased by reading the minds of multiple living people all over the world simultaneously and access other information through remote viewing of locked drawers, diaries, or other varied sources, often coming up with information that is not known to the bereaved person or persons and not verified until much later, all this coupled with a subconscious dissociative personality disorder that the medium believes with absolute conviction is a real deceased individual they are communicating with.
And that's it. And after 150 years of testing no one has devised an experiment to distinguish between the two conclusively for the unfortunate reason that all the scientists working on the problem are stuck trying to convince die-hard atheist materialists who serve as the gatekeepers of what is and is not officially sanctioned science that real information is being attained through psychic means.
You might think that's a false dilemma and decide to take the third option, but, to be honest, if you take the third option I question your intelligence and would be surprised you would even know what a false dilemma is or that you had the capacity to fully comprehend the issue.
3. The Demon-Haunted World. A class of non-physical (or astral) beings called demons exist and they are omniscient, or at least as intelligent as necessary to trick humans that they are deceased humans because God is an asshole and filled the universe with billions of demons who trick people because God is an asshole and wants to send 99.999% of people to suffer in Hell forever.
If you accept options 1 or 2 you are a rational person who has examined the evidence. If you accept option 3 you are a moron. If you reject them all and accept option 4, that it's all deliberate trickery from often Nobel Prize winning scientists who want to ruin their reputations by studying ghosts, you're either ignorant of the data or a cynical asshole and most likely never even bothered looking at the data because you reject it a priori.
As a side note, we can get into metaphysics, with astral and etheric and subtle energies and all that stuff some other time, and I know Ken Wilber has talked down the issue and has promoted his "Integral Post-Metaphysics" and Kant's critique of metaphysics, but if you read Excerpt G (page 46), Ken does admit to true metaphysics within his model:
" The fact that the subtle (and causal) bodymind can transmigrate the gross bodymind is indeed metaphysical; but the fact that these subtle energies are postulated as real, concrete, detectable, often measurable—if subtler—energies, stops the whole conception from spinning off into the vaporware of pure metaphysics. If you read hypothesis #4 in conjunction with the first three hypotheses, I think you will see that they are at least consistent with each other; and thus I believe that an integral theory of subtle energies can accommodate the existence of transmigration, if we decide, on other grounds, that there is enough evidence to conclude that transmigration occurs."
It's a good read, but if you're in a hurry you can watch this video.
Getting back to the central issue of what my problems with spiritualists are.
The first problem is the denial of the good that other religions (specifically Christianity and to a lesser extent Buddhism) have and continue to bring to humanity. I wouldn't say this is the hatred of religion, as we see in the "spiritual but not religious" people (except Islam, which they adore), and it probably is not cultural relativism either that says "all religions are equal" or some such nonsense. It might be a sort of spiritual myopia. They are so invested in the truth claims of their own beliefs – the messages delivered by spirits – that they reject out of hand the truth claims of opposing beliefs. So, for example, if spirits say reincarnation does not exist they will believe it without hesitation even though the spirit they are communicating with might be lying or ignorant or both. A second possibility is similar to when you're a teenager and you're embarrassed by what you did as a child, which is basically how climbing the developmental ladder works all through first tier. First tier stages (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, or any other conceptions) are all exclusive in their thinking. Someone who is ethnocentric looks down on someone who is egocentric (and on someone who is worldcentric), just as someone who is worldcentric looks down on someone who is egocentric and someone who is ethnocentric, even though they themselves necessarily had to pass through all the lower stages to get to where they are. This continues, quite naturally, until one reaches second tier – integral – and can appreciate that all levels have truth and utility appropriate for people at that level.
So, someone who is a spiritualist would reject the truth and utility of organised religion even though for the vast majority of people who have ever lived organised religion is the only thing keeping them from stealing and killing and raping. Religion not only serves as a social glue, it serves as the only affective social glue that has ever been discovered. And since everyone starts out at square one when they are born and has to learn reason and morality, eliminating religion is a particularly bad idea because until people mature to the level where they can apply reason to appreciate natural law and morality (which for most people is never), religion is necessary to keep people from becoming monsters.
Sometimes, yes, religions do influence people to become monsters, particularly lower level religions, but certainly Christianity has had its reformation and the worst Christians you will ever likely encounter are assholes who protest soldiers' funerals.
Aside from legitimacy, religion provides the only affective means of bringing people enlightenment. This ties into the second problem I have with most spiritualists, which is something I'll call subtle reductionism, what Ken Wilber calls the Vishnu Complex. I'll get to that in a minute.
One of the central beliefs of spiritualists is the extreme gradualist approach to development, that spirits develop astronomically slowly, though inexorably, over gazillions of years to reach ultimate perfection. If I could spend fifty trillion eons in an astral heaven where my thoughts instantly manifest my desires I'd say that's a pretty good deal. The general idea is that it gets boring after a time and then you decide to progress. And I'll admit, after the hell and hardship of this life I might look forward to some downtime.
The classic counter to this, which makes sense to me, is the argument of reincarnationists that once your merit is worn out you have to come back here, so the astral worlds are temporary. The only way out of the cycle is enlightenment. The idea of progression through infinitely more rarefied realms does have somewhat of a parallel with the idea of a pure land in Buddhism or Sri Yukteswar's Hiranyaloka from Autobiography of a Yogi. You can progress to a special astral world where the infinite merit and compassion of an enlightened being permits you to progress spiritually without the need to reincarnate.
Now you might not want to believe in reincarnation, and I think most spiritualists don't, for the pretty thoughtless reason "Who would want to come back?!" Very few people, I suspect, would want to come back, but the traditions maintain that it's more like jumping off a cliff. Once you jump you don't get to choose whether you fall down or not, gravity will take over automatically. You don't get to choose whether you reincarnate or not, unless you're already enlightened, your spiritual gravity pulls you unconsciously where you are most suited, and for most people that's back here on Earth. Even if you don't believe in reincarnation, and I think it makes a certain degree of sense, there's still one more reason to see the gradualist approach as not all that's great.
The gradualist approach really does not solve the problem of suffering in this life, it defers it to the next. There is a bit of an inherent laziness to it. "If I'm going to get there anyway I might as well take my time." That is very similar to the traditional religious approach of suffering through life with the knowledge of a reward in the afterlife. The idea of a metaphysical safety net is certainly comforting and has served humanity very well for millennia, but it does not bring about true transpersonal development. Even in an astral heaven there is still self and other, there is still separation, and where there is separation there is suffering. That is why spirits choose to leave the lower astral heavens, often called "Summerland", where thoughts manifest instantly, because it gets boring after a while. The types of suffering in astral worlds are radically different than in the physical world (and in the astral hells are much worse), but as long as separation exists suffering necessarily exists. Enlightenment is the only way out, and religion provides the only door to enlightenment.
That brings us to my second objection, subtle reductionism, which is nothing other than the denial of the causal. Subtle reductionism is nowhere near as disastrous as the gross reductionism of fundamaterialists, it is definitely a step in the right direction, but in denying the existence of the causal one is also denying the ultimate end of suffering.
Basically the subtle realms work like psychotherapy. One reaches an end of psychotherapy when one realises that one can go on forever. The subtle realms are like that. You ascend higher and higher, into ever more subtle planes of illumination and bliss, and it just doesn't stop. There is no upward limit, there is no ultimate end. In meditation people can spend a lifetime just getting to more rarefied states and just bliss-out and as soon as they come down and have to go to work they are the same jerk as they were from day one. You can certainly gain psychic powers through forms of meditation, but if you just keep ascending through all the essential lights and sounds you will not reach enlightenment. This inertial desire to keep ascending through the subtle is what Ken Wilber calls the Vishnu Complex. You are so enamored with God you don't want to seek your true identity. And since you have to stop meditating eventually you will suffer when it ends. As long as separation exists suffering necessarily exists. And that's all the gradualist approach of most spiritualists promises, ever higher states of lights and sounds.
This denial of the causal is wonderfully presented in Greg Stone's book Under the Tree. It's a pretty obscure book, so I'll explain it a little. This man with a punny name encounters ice on the highway and runs his car off a cliff and goes into a coma. He has a near death experience that spends a great many pages just trying to convince him he really is dead, since he doesn't believe in an afterlife, and then it goes off into explaining how the universe works.
Mr. Pun's spirit guide explains to him why all the religions are wrong when they say that we are all one. You see, we really are all separate, but when you incarnate on the Earth you have to pass through a filter, and that filter only lets one soul through at a time, and since we all have to squeeze through that filter we think, "Oh, only one can fit, so there must be only one of us," but that's just faulty logic.
Except that's not what any religion says at all. Remember, you do not automatically become enlightened upon death. If you did there would be absolutely no point to life here on Earth at all. It would all be a waste of time and you could be a child rapist or an axe murderer and it wouldn't matter because we all go up into light and bliss when we die anyway. That's exactly the same horrible belief as the materialists who say you die and rot, just in the opposite direction. If nothing you do in this life has any impact on the next, and we're all just here to learn lessons, or to experience suffering, or because it's rousing good fun, then life truly is meaningless and you might as well just shoot heroin all day, because it won't make one bit of difference. If Hitler and his victims go to the same place after death then the universe is completely lacking in justice or compassion and was created and run by Satan.
Since you do not become enlightened upon death (and we know this because spirits coming through mediums admit to it; they admit to not knowing everything), then anything you hear from spirits about anything other than their particular state of being is just their own guess. If spirits tell you they enjoy coffee and cigars and fine velvet arm chairs on the other side, then you can believe them. If spirits tell you what is happening at the ultimate level, and that they know with absolute certainty how everything works and the mechanisms of reincarnation or whatever, they're either outright lying or they are guessing. Since the personality remains intact then a liar on the Earth is a liar in the afterlife, and subconscious biases and fears still cloud one's thinking.
One group of people we can believe are enlightened individuals on this Earth, because they all say the same exact thing. There is no guessing with enlightenment, there is just experience, or more accurately lack of experience. In the causal there is nothing arising. There are no separate things, just consciousness as such. Nothing bad arises to torture you and leave, nothing good arises to torture you when it leaves, there are no others, there is no you, there just is. And they all say this, for the past 3000 years, they all say this. No one is guessing since this is not speculation of what is happening at higher levels because all levels have been left behind. You step off the ride completely.
Ramakrishna explains this beautifully. He was a life-long devote of Kali, and he would go into spontaneous ecstasy and be engrossed in her image. When he met the naked swami Totapuri and tried to learn Advaita he kept seeing Kali when he meditated. Furious, Totapuri stuck a piece of broken glass between Ramakrishna's eyes and admonished him to meditate on that spot. The next time Ramakrishna meditated he says "As soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it clove Her in two. The last barrier fell. My spirit at once soared beyond the relative plane. I lost myself in samadhi." (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, page 49)
You can see a wonderful depiction of this from the 1955 Bengali film biography of Ramakrishna.
And it's like that for everyone. Ramana Maharshi, Richard Rose, Ken Wilber, everyone. You too can check it out for yourself. I did. You do not need to take anyone's word for it, you need accept no beliefs handed to you from spirits, you can meditate for a really long time and see for yourself if enlightenment is all it's cracked up to be. You don't need to consult mediums, you don't need to wait countless eons to ascend higher planes in the afterlife, you can do this right now, in this lifetime, and it is the single most important thing you ever will, or can, do.
There is nothing in the causal. It is completely empty. If ascending higher subtle realms is like climbing stairs to higher and higher floors in a building, then the leap to the causal would be like going from the third to the fourth dimension. It's not higher than the highest floor in the building, it bypasses height all together. It is not getting to the next level in a video game, it's shutting the game off and realising that it was a game all along and not real. It's not that there is no you, there is only me, there's no me either. You step into the causal and no one is home, there is just consciousness as such. There is awareness but it is in no way tied to any identity, and you realise that any identity you held was just a contraction of all that is, no more real than the characters in a movie are to the actors who play them.
All that said, spiritualists are leagues ahead of the average person in the world today, and light years ahead of the fundamaterialists who are the elites who run the world and act as gatekeepers to what is and is not science. I would love for all the world to adopt the beliefs of spiritualists, I would love for mediumship to be taken seriously, for psychical studies to become the paramount branch of science. It would solve very nearly all the world's problems. At the same time it is imperative to realise that mediumship can only take one so far, and that we all must take up the discipline and strive toward enlightenment, whether now or in some future life. The comfort value of survival wears off once you survive death. Then a whole new set of challenges arise that you must face. Psychological challenges from all the subconscious baggage you have accumulated over this and possibly other lifetimes. All that needs to be worked through eventually. The choice is yours to deal with it over the next gazillion years or right now, all at once, in this lifetime. Most people can't, but you definitely should try. Try as if your life depended on it.
1. The Survival Hypothesis. The minds and personalities of people survive death of the body in pretty much the same state as when they were alive and they can communicate, at least at a rudimentary level, with the living.
or
2. The Super-ESP Hypothesis. The minds of certain living people are capable of extraordinary feats of ESP bordering on omniscience, whereby they can access information about the deceased by reading the minds of multiple living people all over the world simultaneously and access other information through remote viewing of locked drawers, diaries, or other varied sources, often coming up with information that is not known to the bereaved person or persons and not verified until much later, all this coupled with a subconscious dissociative personality disorder that the medium believes with absolute conviction is a real deceased individual they are communicating with.
And that's it. And after 150 years of testing no one has devised an experiment to distinguish between the two conclusively for the unfortunate reason that all the scientists working on the problem are stuck trying to convince die-hard atheist materialists who serve as the gatekeepers of what is and is not officially sanctioned science that real information is being attained through psychic means.
You might think that's a false dilemma and decide to take the third option, but, to be honest, if you take the third option I question your intelligence and would be surprised you would even know what a false dilemma is or that you had the capacity to fully comprehend the issue.
3. The Demon-Haunted World. A class of non-physical (or astral) beings called demons exist and they are omniscient, or at least as intelligent as necessary to trick humans that they are deceased humans because God is an asshole and filled the universe with billions of demons who trick people because God is an asshole and wants to send 99.999% of people to suffer in Hell forever.
If you accept options 1 or 2 you are a rational person who has examined the evidence. If you accept option 3 you are a moron. If you reject them all and accept option 4, that it's all deliberate trickery from often Nobel Prize winning scientists who want to ruin their reputations by studying ghosts, you're either ignorant of the data or a cynical asshole and most likely never even bothered looking at the data because you reject it a priori.
As a side note, we can get into metaphysics, with astral and etheric and subtle energies and all that stuff some other time, and I know Ken Wilber has talked down the issue and has promoted his "Integral Post-Metaphysics" and Kant's critique of metaphysics, but if you read Excerpt G (page 46), Ken does admit to true metaphysics within his model:
" The fact that the subtle (and causal) bodymind can transmigrate the gross bodymind is indeed metaphysical; but the fact that these subtle energies are postulated as real, concrete, detectable, often measurable—if subtler—energies, stops the whole conception from spinning off into the vaporware of pure metaphysics. If you read hypothesis #4 in conjunction with the first three hypotheses, I think you will see that they are at least consistent with each other; and thus I believe that an integral theory of subtle energies can accommodate the existence of transmigration, if we decide, on other grounds, that there is enough evidence to conclude that transmigration occurs."
It's a good read, but if you're in a hurry you can watch this video.
Getting back to the central issue of what my problems with spiritualists are.
The first problem is the denial of the good that other religions (specifically Christianity and to a lesser extent Buddhism) have and continue to bring to humanity. I wouldn't say this is the hatred of religion, as we see in the "spiritual but not religious" people (except Islam, which they adore), and it probably is not cultural relativism either that says "all religions are equal" or some such nonsense. It might be a sort of spiritual myopia. They are so invested in the truth claims of their own beliefs – the messages delivered by spirits – that they reject out of hand the truth claims of opposing beliefs. So, for example, if spirits say reincarnation does not exist they will believe it without hesitation even though the spirit they are communicating with might be lying or ignorant or both. A second possibility is similar to when you're a teenager and you're embarrassed by what you did as a child, which is basically how climbing the developmental ladder works all through first tier. First tier stages (archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, or egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, or any other conceptions) are all exclusive in their thinking. Someone who is ethnocentric looks down on someone who is egocentric (and on someone who is worldcentric), just as someone who is worldcentric looks down on someone who is egocentric and someone who is ethnocentric, even though they themselves necessarily had to pass through all the lower stages to get to where they are. This continues, quite naturally, until one reaches second tier – integral – and can appreciate that all levels have truth and utility appropriate for people at that level.
So, someone who is a spiritualist would reject the truth and utility of organised religion even though for the vast majority of people who have ever lived organised religion is the only thing keeping them from stealing and killing and raping. Religion not only serves as a social glue, it serves as the only affective social glue that has ever been discovered. And since everyone starts out at square one when they are born and has to learn reason and morality, eliminating religion is a particularly bad idea because until people mature to the level where they can apply reason to appreciate natural law and morality (which for most people is never), religion is necessary to keep people from becoming monsters.
Sometimes, yes, religions do influence people to become monsters, particularly lower level religions, but certainly Christianity has had its reformation and the worst Christians you will ever likely encounter are assholes who protest soldiers' funerals.
Aside from legitimacy, religion provides the only affective means of bringing people enlightenment. This ties into the second problem I have with most spiritualists, which is something I'll call subtle reductionism, what Ken Wilber calls the Vishnu Complex. I'll get to that in a minute.
One of the central beliefs of spiritualists is the extreme gradualist approach to development, that spirits develop astronomically slowly, though inexorably, over gazillions of years to reach ultimate perfection. If I could spend fifty trillion eons in an astral heaven where my thoughts instantly manifest my desires I'd say that's a pretty good deal. The general idea is that it gets boring after a time and then you decide to progress. And I'll admit, after the hell and hardship of this life I might look forward to some downtime.
The classic counter to this, which makes sense to me, is the argument of reincarnationists that once your merit is worn out you have to come back here, so the astral worlds are temporary. The only way out of the cycle is enlightenment. The idea of progression through infinitely more rarefied realms does have somewhat of a parallel with the idea of a pure land in Buddhism or Sri Yukteswar's Hiranyaloka from Autobiography of a Yogi. You can progress to a special astral world where the infinite merit and compassion of an enlightened being permits you to progress spiritually without the need to reincarnate.
Now you might not want to believe in reincarnation, and I think most spiritualists don't, for the pretty thoughtless reason "Who would want to come back?!" Very few people, I suspect, would want to come back, but the traditions maintain that it's more like jumping off a cliff. Once you jump you don't get to choose whether you fall down or not, gravity will take over automatically. You don't get to choose whether you reincarnate or not, unless you're already enlightened, your spiritual gravity pulls you unconsciously where you are most suited, and for most people that's back here on Earth. Even if you don't believe in reincarnation, and I think it makes a certain degree of sense, there's still one more reason to see the gradualist approach as not all that's great.
The gradualist approach really does not solve the problem of suffering in this life, it defers it to the next. There is a bit of an inherent laziness to it. "If I'm going to get there anyway I might as well take my time." That is very similar to the traditional religious approach of suffering through life with the knowledge of a reward in the afterlife. The idea of a metaphysical safety net is certainly comforting and has served humanity very well for millennia, but it does not bring about true transpersonal development. Even in an astral heaven there is still self and other, there is still separation, and where there is separation there is suffering. That is why spirits choose to leave the lower astral heavens, often called "Summerland", where thoughts manifest instantly, because it gets boring after a while. The types of suffering in astral worlds are radically different than in the physical world (and in the astral hells are much worse), but as long as separation exists suffering necessarily exists. Enlightenment is the only way out, and religion provides the only door to enlightenment.
That brings us to my second objection, subtle reductionism, which is nothing other than the denial of the causal. Subtle reductionism is nowhere near as disastrous as the gross reductionism of fundamaterialists, it is definitely a step in the right direction, but in denying the existence of the causal one is also denying the ultimate end of suffering.
Basically the subtle realms work like psychotherapy. One reaches an end of psychotherapy when one realises that one can go on forever. The subtle realms are like that. You ascend higher and higher, into ever more subtle planes of illumination and bliss, and it just doesn't stop. There is no upward limit, there is no ultimate end. In meditation people can spend a lifetime just getting to more rarefied states and just bliss-out and as soon as they come down and have to go to work they are the same jerk as they were from day one. You can certainly gain psychic powers through forms of meditation, but if you just keep ascending through all the essential lights and sounds you will not reach enlightenment. This inertial desire to keep ascending through the subtle is what Ken Wilber calls the Vishnu Complex. You are so enamored with God you don't want to seek your true identity. And since you have to stop meditating eventually you will suffer when it ends. As long as separation exists suffering necessarily exists. And that's all the gradualist approach of most spiritualists promises, ever higher states of lights and sounds.
This denial of the causal is wonderfully presented in Greg Stone's book Under the Tree. It's a pretty obscure book, so I'll explain it a little. This man with a punny name encounters ice on the highway and runs his car off a cliff and goes into a coma. He has a near death experience that spends a great many pages just trying to convince him he really is dead, since he doesn't believe in an afterlife, and then it goes off into explaining how the universe works.
Mr. Pun's spirit guide explains to him why all the religions are wrong when they say that we are all one. You see, we really are all separate, but when you incarnate on the Earth you have to pass through a filter, and that filter only lets one soul through at a time, and since we all have to squeeze through that filter we think, "Oh, only one can fit, so there must be only one of us," but that's just faulty logic.
Except that's not what any religion says at all. Remember, you do not automatically become enlightened upon death. If you did there would be absolutely no point to life here on Earth at all. It would all be a waste of time and you could be a child rapist or an axe murderer and it wouldn't matter because we all go up into light and bliss when we die anyway. That's exactly the same horrible belief as the materialists who say you die and rot, just in the opposite direction. If nothing you do in this life has any impact on the next, and we're all just here to learn lessons, or to experience suffering, or because it's rousing good fun, then life truly is meaningless and you might as well just shoot heroin all day, because it won't make one bit of difference. If Hitler and his victims go to the same place after death then the universe is completely lacking in justice or compassion and was created and run by Satan.
Since you do not become enlightened upon death (and we know this because spirits coming through mediums admit to it; they admit to not knowing everything), then anything you hear from spirits about anything other than their particular state of being is just their own guess. If spirits tell you they enjoy coffee and cigars and fine velvet arm chairs on the other side, then you can believe them. If spirits tell you what is happening at the ultimate level, and that they know with absolute certainty how everything works and the mechanisms of reincarnation or whatever, they're either outright lying or they are guessing. Since the personality remains intact then a liar on the Earth is a liar in the afterlife, and subconscious biases and fears still cloud one's thinking.
One group of people we can believe are enlightened individuals on this Earth, because they all say the same exact thing. There is no guessing with enlightenment, there is just experience, or more accurately lack of experience. In the causal there is nothing arising. There are no separate things, just consciousness as such. Nothing bad arises to torture you and leave, nothing good arises to torture you when it leaves, there are no others, there is no you, there just is. And they all say this, for the past 3000 years, they all say this. No one is guessing since this is not speculation of what is happening at higher levels because all levels have been left behind. You step off the ride completely.
Ramakrishna explains this beautifully. He was a life-long devote of Kali, and he would go into spontaneous ecstasy and be engrossed in her image. When he met the naked swami Totapuri and tried to learn Advaita he kept seeing Kali when he meditated. Furious, Totapuri stuck a piece of broken glass between Ramakrishna's eyes and admonished him to meditate on that spot. The next time Ramakrishna meditated he says "As soon as the gracious form of the Divine Mother appeared before me, I used my discrimination as a sword and with it clove Her in two. The last barrier fell. My spirit at once soared beyond the relative plane. I lost myself in samadhi." (The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, page 49)
You can see a wonderful depiction of this from the 1955 Bengali film biography of Ramakrishna.
And it's like that for everyone. Ramana Maharshi, Richard Rose, Ken Wilber, everyone. You too can check it out for yourself. I did. You do not need to take anyone's word for it, you need accept no beliefs handed to you from spirits, you can meditate for a really long time and see for yourself if enlightenment is all it's cracked up to be. You don't need to consult mediums, you don't need to wait countless eons to ascend higher planes in the afterlife, you can do this right now, in this lifetime, and it is the single most important thing you ever will, or can, do.
There is nothing in the causal. It is completely empty. If ascending higher subtle realms is like climbing stairs to higher and higher floors in a building, then the leap to the causal would be like going from the third to the fourth dimension. It's not higher than the highest floor in the building, it bypasses height all together. It is not getting to the next level in a video game, it's shutting the game off and realising that it was a game all along and not real. It's not that there is no you, there is only me, there's no me either. You step into the causal and no one is home, there is just consciousness as such. There is awareness but it is in no way tied to any identity, and you realise that any identity you held was just a contraction of all that is, no more real than the characters in a movie are to the actors who play them.
All that said, spiritualists are leagues ahead of the average person in the world today, and light years ahead of the fundamaterialists who are the elites who run the world and act as gatekeepers to what is and is not science. I would love for all the world to adopt the beliefs of spiritualists, I would love for mediumship to be taken seriously, for psychical studies to become the paramount branch of science. It would solve very nearly all the world's problems. At the same time it is imperative to realise that mediumship can only take one so far, and that we all must take up the discipline and strive toward enlightenment, whether now or in some future life. The comfort value of survival wears off once you survive death. Then a whole new set of challenges arise that you must face. Psychological challenges from all the subconscious baggage you have accumulated over this and possibly other lifetimes. All that needs to be worked through eventually. The choice is yours to deal with it over the next gazillion years or right now, all at once, in this lifetime. Most people can't, but you definitely should try. Try as if your life depended on it.
Saturday, April 2, 2016
Freeman Dyson on Global Warming
Freeman Dyson speaks about anthropogenic CO2 and its negligible effect on the Earth's climate.
Humans are affecting the climate, the questions are how much and is it a bad thing.
Increased atmospheric CO2 is leading to a greening of the Earth, with an increase in agricultural yields and wild plant growth, as revealed by satellite data.
It is interesting to note that the same phenomenon was seen in the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago, where atmospheric CO2 was twice what it is today (800 PPM) while mean global temperatures were the same as today. The Carboniferous is named for the proliferation of plant life around the planet that led to the formation of coal deposits. Increased atmospheric CO2 leads to increased plant growth, which sets up a negative feedback loop whereby the warming effects of atmospheric CO2 are negated.
The aptly named Cryogenian period, the coldest time in Earth's prehistory, also saw the highest concentration of atmospheric CO2, several hundred times what it is today.
The whole CO2/warming correlation is a dead horse, and while there's no point killing it anymore, it is entertaining, so let's listen to the brilliant physicist, co-inventor of Orch-OR, and the visionary behind the Orion nuclear powered rocket. Runs 22 minutes.
Humans are affecting the climate, the questions are how much and is it a bad thing.
Increased atmospheric CO2 is leading to a greening of the Earth, with an increase in agricultural yields and wild plant growth, as revealed by satellite data.
It is interesting to note that the same phenomenon was seen in the Carboniferous period 300 million years ago, where atmospheric CO2 was twice what it is today (800 PPM) while mean global temperatures were the same as today. The Carboniferous is named for the proliferation of plant life around the planet that led to the formation of coal deposits. Increased atmospheric CO2 leads to increased plant growth, which sets up a negative feedback loop whereby the warming effects of atmospheric CO2 are negated.
The aptly named Cryogenian period, the coldest time in Earth's prehistory, also saw the highest concentration of atmospheric CO2, several hundred times what it is today.
The whole CO2/warming correlation is a dead horse, and while there's no point killing it anymore, it is entertaining, so let's listen to the brilliant physicist, co-inventor of Orch-OR, and the visionary behind the Orion nuclear powered rocket. Runs 22 minutes.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Some Cultures Are Better Than Others
The West is the best. Paul Joseph Watson provides examples of abominations such as slavery, child rape, biting the penises of babies, and public defecation as actions that are ignored by cultural Marxists because they are part of the culture of brown people and if you criticise brown people you are a racialist, you racialist.
White people didn't invent slavery, white people ended slavery and half a million soldiers and another half a million civilians died to end it. Kuwait did not "officially" outlaw slavery until 1977, and it still exists in African and Muslim countries around the world. In fact there are more slaves now than in the 1800s, and slaves cost only a fraction of what they used to.
The Chinese invented paper and gun powder, but they also eat anything that isn't bolted down, including tiger penises which they believe is an aphrodisiac. Tigers are nearly extinct because of this practice.
The Indians invented zero and the hashing algorithms used in modern search engines, but they also leave dead bodies to rot in the open and use the the streets as toilets.
The Arabs invented the distillation of alcohol, but they also practice slavery, treat women as property, and chop the heads off homosexuals.
White people didn't invent slavery, white people ended slavery and half a million soldiers and another half a million civilians died to end it. Kuwait did not "officially" outlaw slavery until 1977, and it still exists in African and Muslim countries around the world. In fact there are more slaves now than in the 1800s, and slaves cost only a fraction of what they used to.
The Chinese invented paper and gun powder, but they also eat anything that isn't bolted down, including tiger penises which they believe is an aphrodisiac. Tigers are nearly extinct because of this practice.
The Indians invented zero and the hashing algorithms used in modern search engines, but they also leave dead bodies to rot in the open and use the the streets as toilets.
The Arabs invented the distillation of alcohol, but they also practice slavery, treat women as property, and chop the heads off homosexuals.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
A Future I Did Nazi Coming
I just had a brilliant, and sad, idea. What if we changed two things about history? What if the Nazis were not driven by fanatical racialism, just German nationalism, and what if they won WWII?
The second part is easy to imagine, it very nearly happened several times, but Hitler was chronically disposed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Britain could have been knocked out in the first month at Dunkirk, or starved out if one stupid pilot didn't drop his magnetic mine on a sandbar and let the British get a hold of it, Rommel could have driven his tanks all the way to Persia, took all the oil Germany could have ever needed, and started a massive rebellion in India to cripple Britain, and Moscow could have been taken had Hitler not sent Army Group Center all over Russia on a wild goose chase.
The first part is more difficult to imagine, but I'm allowed one break from reality in this counterfactual and that's the one I'm taking. In my scenario there is no Holocaust, just revanchist Germans who want to reclaim their place in the sun.
The first consequence of this scenario would be there would be no Cold War. There would be no clash of East and West, no rise of communism in China, no Korean War, no Vietnam War (the Japanese might have faced some trouble, but they probably would have just slaughtered people until the rebellion died down), no nuclear arms race. What about a war between Germany and Japan? What war? A cold war would mean technological parity, and that just did not exist. The Japanese were very good at copying things, but they were terrible at coming up with new designs on their own. The Japanese Zero fighters which were shooting down American planes left and right in 1941 were rendered useless by American innovations like the Hellcat and the radio proximity fuse. As long as the Germans don't give their technology away then the Japanese would not get nuclear weapons, not for many decades, at least.
And neither would America. If the Nazis do not drive out the Jewish scientists as they did in our timeline then all the greatest minds in the world would still be in Germany.
Whether the Germans would have developed an atomic bomb during the war is hard to tell. They might not have needed one. Assuming they were working on all the advanced science projects in the new timeline as in ours, then at the very least they would have developed something called "Virus House", which was a bomb filled with plates of enriched uranium separated by kerosene, which acts as a neutron absorber. The bomb was supposed to be dropped over Britain at a few places (London, Scapa Flow) in the water where the force of impact would send the uranium plates crashing into one another setting off a chain reaction that would contaminate the water an spread radioactive steam over a wide area. These were not nuclear bombs in that they would never go critical, they would be like miniature Chernobyls. Had there not been a German brain drain before the war they really could have come up with their own Fat Man, maybe drop it on Stalingrad if need be, depending on where their timeline diverges from ours.
Another consequence of this scenario would be routine space travel. You could imagine taking a rocket plane from Berlin to Tokyo in 3 hours. Germany was working on something they called the "America Rocket", which was a 2 stage man-piloted rocket that would fly all the way around the world and deliver a kamikaze nuclear attack on New York City. They were also developing something called the "Mars Rocket". I'll let you guess what that project's destination was. When you consider that German rocket technology is what was behind both the US and Soviet space programs, it's not difficult to imagine the Germans getting to space all on their own after the war ended. One can imagine the Germans landing on the Moon by 1955 and reaching Mars by 1980. By 2016 there would be permanent colonies on both the Moon and Mars, and maybe a floating colony on Venus (Venus' atmosphere is so dense that a capsule filled with regular air at 1 Earth atmosphere pressure would float like a balloon). Using nuclear pulse rockets a 50-year mission to the nearest stars would have been launched and might even be half way to its target. A two generation crew would be on board, with the future scientists who would do all the exploration leaving Earth as infants to be taught by their parents on the way. Most of the adult crew would likely be dead by time the ship reached its destination, and the babies would now be 50 years old. It would necessarily be a 1-way trip, but there was no shortage of people willing to die for the Fatherland.
What would happen beyond that is harder to imagine.
The second part is easy to imagine, it very nearly happened several times, but Hitler was chronically disposed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Britain could have been knocked out in the first month at Dunkirk, or starved out if one stupid pilot didn't drop his magnetic mine on a sandbar and let the British get a hold of it, Rommel could have driven his tanks all the way to Persia, took all the oil Germany could have ever needed, and started a massive rebellion in India to cripple Britain, and Moscow could have been taken had Hitler not sent Army Group Center all over Russia on a wild goose chase.
The first part is more difficult to imagine, but I'm allowed one break from reality in this counterfactual and that's the one I'm taking. In my scenario there is no Holocaust, just revanchist Germans who want to reclaim their place in the sun.
The first consequence of this scenario would be there would be no Cold War. There would be no clash of East and West, no rise of communism in China, no Korean War, no Vietnam War (the Japanese might have faced some trouble, but they probably would have just slaughtered people until the rebellion died down), no nuclear arms race. What about a war between Germany and Japan? What war? A cold war would mean technological parity, and that just did not exist. The Japanese were very good at copying things, but they were terrible at coming up with new designs on their own. The Japanese Zero fighters which were shooting down American planes left and right in 1941 were rendered useless by American innovations like the Hellcat and the radio proximity fuse. As long as the Germans don't give their technology away then the Japanese would not get nuclear weapons, not for many decades, at least.
And neither would America. If the Nazis do not drive out the Jewish scientists as they did in our timeline then all the greatest minds in the world would still be in Germany.
Whether the Germans would have developed an atomic bomb during the war is hard to tell. They might not have needed one. Assuming they were working on all the advanced science projects in the new timeline as in ours, then at the very least they would have developed something called "Virus House", which was a bomb filled with plates of enriched uranium separated by kerosene, which acts as a neutron absorber. The bomb was supposed to be dropped over Britain at a few places (London, Scapa Flow) in the water where the force of impact would send the uranium plates crashing into one another setting off a chain reaction that would contaminate the water an spread radioactive steam over a wide area. These were not nuclear bombs in that they would never go critical, they would be like miniature Chernobyls. Had there not been a German brain drain before the war they really could have come up with their own Fat Man, maybe drop it on Stalingrad if need be, depending on where their timeline diverges from ours.
Another consequence of this scenario would be routine space travel. You could imagine taking a rocket plane from Berlin to Tokyo in 3 hours. Germany was working on something they called the "America Rocket", which was a 2 stage man-piloted rocket that would fly all the way around the world and deliver a kamikaze nuclear attack on New York City. They were also developing something called the "Mars Rocket". I'll let you guess what that project's destination was. When you consider that German rocket technology is what was behind both the US and Soviet space programs, it's not difficult to imagine the Germans getting to space all on their own after the war ended. One can imagine the Germans landing on the Moon by 1955 and reaching Mars by 1980. By 2016 there would be permanent colonies on both the Moon and Mars, and maybe a floating colony on Venus (Venus' atmosphere is so dense that a capsule filled with regular air at 1 Earth atmosphere pressure would float like a balloon). Using nuclear pulse rockets a 50-year mission to the nearest stars would have been launched and might even be half way to its target. A two generation crew would be on board, with the future scientists who would do all the exploration leaving Earth as infants to be taught by their parents on the way. Most of the adult crew would likely be dead by time the ship reached its destination, and the babies would now be 50 years old. It would necessarily be a 1-way trip, but there was no shortage of people willing to die for the Fatherland.
What would happen beyond that is harder to imagine.
Saturday, March 26, 2016
The Life of Jesus Christ
I'm collecting, and ultimately re-editing and expanding, everything I've
written about Jesus on The Urban Mystic. This has been my intention for
a few years now, to basically write a short book called "The Life of Jesus Christ: An Urban Gospel". Currently it is 9,000 words, but I'd
like to double that over the next year. You can read it by following the link in the text or just below Page 2 News.
written about Jesus on The Urban Mystic. This has been my intention for
a few years now, to basically write a short book called "The Life of Jesus Christ: An Urban Gospel". Currently it is 9,000 words, but I'd
like to double that over the next year. You can read it by following the link in the text or just below Page 2 News.
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