Michael Prescott's Blog
Archived blog focusing on the paranormal
Category: Consciousness
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Though this blog is kaput, its content — appropriately enough — lives on after death! Recently I published a nonfiction book culled from years of blog posts and also containing a great deal of original work. I call it LIFE & AFTERLIFE, and it's available in a variety of editions, including Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apple…
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Matt Rouge recently reminded me of a study that came out in 2017, purporting to show that split-brain patients retain a single locus of consciousness. Although I put up a brief post about it at the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated the implications. In a corpus callosotomy, the sheaf of neural fibers connecting…
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Matt Rouge's thought-provoking guest post has stimulated a lot of discussion, and it got me thinking, as well. Lying in bed last night around 2 AM, I couldn't help noodling on the whole question of UFOs and some related matters. The idea I kept coming back to was "bleed-throughs." According to Wiktionary, the three main definitions…
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In my last post, I mentioned the idea of a powerful collective unconscious that might somehow manifest phenomena such as UFOs. But I also said I thought this was kind of a copout. Having thought a little more about it, I wanted to explain why feel that way. In the prescientific era, people had a…
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I’ve been noodling a little more on the subject of UFOs after reading a second book by Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College, and part of a compendium of UFO reports edited by Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record. What strikes me most strongly about the subject are the many similarities…
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This will probably not be a very well thought-out post. I'd like to present a few ideas and send then see if there's a way of stitching them together. I'm not sure if it will work. My inspiration for this train of thought is Passport to Magonia, by Jacques Vallee, a well-known UFO researcher who…
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Here's a pretty common exchange in debates over parapsychology. Someone will point to a correlation between a brain state and a mental state, using it as evidence that consciousness originates in brain activity. An opponent will respond that correlation is not causation, and that the brain may be functioning only as a mediator of consciousness,…
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I’ve been thinking about various issues relating to postmortem survival and the evolution of consciousness. Well, I guess I’m always sort of thinking about that. But lately I’ve been thinking that I’ve probably gotten off on the wrong track with my focus on information processing and my attempted analogies to computer systems and virtual reality.…
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Doing research for a novel, I read up recently on salvia divinorum, a psychoactive plant that is usually smoked or chewed. Known more commonly as salvia or just Sally, the plant is legal in some jurisdictions and has a long history of use in traditional societies. It can be quite dangerous, though. While I don't…
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Lately, at bedtime, I've been reading bits and pieces of Richard Maurice Bucke's famous 1901 study Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. The book is a compilation of accounts featuring persons both notable and unknown who underwent mystical experiences that uplifted their thought and character – essentially what psychologist Abraham…