Category: Personal thoughts
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For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ But wisdom is justified by all her children. — Luke 7:33-35, King…
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Dr. Michael Sudduth is the rare academic who takes evidence for postmortem survival seriously – seriously enough, in fact, that he's written a book about it for a scholarly audience: A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Evidence for Postmortem Survival. I have to admit I haven't read the book. I did start it, but I'm afraid…
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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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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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In a comment on my post "Four Bodies," a reader named frith objected that Crookall's scheme of four bodies seemed overly elaborate. I gave this reply: Well, Crookall was trying to work out an organizational scheme that would make sense of the various accounts. What he found was that people reporting leaving the physical body,…
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In The Supreme Adventure, Robert Crookall summarizes a great deal of evidence pointing to the idea that matter, in some sense, is part of the soul's experience throughout nearly all if its journey. Some kind of "body" is necessary, he argues, even at higher levels of development. Specifically he argues for four bodies, initially intertwined.…
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I started to post this as a comment, but like Topsy, it "just growed"; so I made it a post in its own right. The issue we were discussing was why we are so inclined to doubt or deny psi phenomena and postmortem survival even in the face of considerable evidence. And the basic point…
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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.…