Category: Personal thoughts
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Roger said that he didn't know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him…
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This is just something I’ve been thinking about. I have no idea if it has any validity. We sometimes hear that, when dreaming, our “astral body” leaves the physical body and explores a nonphysical plane. Our dreams are said to be garbled recollections of this exploratory activity. In this respect, it’s interesting to look at…
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Gnosticism is a very old and complicated spiritual tradition, and I don't claim to be well-versed in it. But as I understand it, the essence of the Gnostic position is that our universe was not created by the one true God, but by a lower-level deity, the demiurge, who messed things up. This explains the…
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I've been a little distracted lately and haven't been focused on blogging. But for what it's worth, here are some random tidbits of wisdom, or if not wisdom, at least thought-provoking stupidity. First, this science article claims new support for the theory of a holographic universe. Note that the universe as a holographic projection is…
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There's a notion, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, that if someone puts in ten thousand hours of practice, he or she can master almost any cognitively demanding field. The theory has been disputed, but a lot of people have heard about it and seem to subscribe to it. David Brooks even used the theory to claim…
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Popular magazines assure us that celebrities are just like you and me. But it's not really true. Celebrities, like Roman emperors of old, are given unlimited opportunities to assert their demands with no negative consequences. It's the kind of behavior you expect to see in a two-year-old, but not in an adult. Unless that adult…
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Lately I've been thinking a lot about something that one of our frequent commenters, Matt Rouge, said a while back in one of the comments threads. He said – and I hope I'm remembering this correctly – that the basic stuff of physical existence is information, while consciousness is the "I-thought" associated with any particular…
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First, a trivial and absurd premonition. While lying half awake this morning, I found myself thinking of a scene in the first Naked Gun movie, in which Leslie Nielsen is standing behind Priscilla Presley while she climbs a ladder. It's obvious that, from his vantage point, he can see up her skirt. He whistles and…
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Here's a brief excerpt from The New Inquisition, by Robert Anton Wilson, followed by some thoughts. The ghastly acceleration of violent, inexplicable and seemingly "pointless" crimes by Right Men in this century – and their hideous magnification into mass murders and war crimes by Right Men in governments – indicate the prevalence of this type…