Do spiritual things exist?

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I think its sadly more proof positive (at least for us) that if there's a God, he's part Steve-O from Jackass, part Andy Kaufmann, and part Maynard from Tool. Yeah, he's got a heck of a sense of humor but it waxes a bit sadistic. Why? He buries this argument in churls and we're stuck arguing about what they'd do than what we'd do.

I have to admit as well that I really must live in a bubble. I saw Mitt Romney this morning with Rob Portman and I've never been surrounded by a politer crowd. I think the strange beauty of the Cleveland area is that your vulgar conservatives are our liberals and your mild mannered liberals are our mild mannered and thoughtful conservatives.

Regardless though of how disgusting and churlish the human race is, or regarless of how much of a practical joker the Totality might be if it has senitence; ongoing research into both the validity of NDE and the validity of NDE chemical reactions in saving lives, are things that truly need their own merit. When I say that I'm a swayed atheist I really mean that the churlishness on either side makes me sick, I really think that truth should prevail, and I really think that all the sick/dark jokes about AIDS being a 'gay' disease or gays being 'sinners' above anyone else just needs to stop as its pure rubbish.

So, I really have to draw my own beliefs in accordance with what they are and take a leak on those who want to go back to Old Salem attitudes. If I have to arbitrarily call myself an atheist even though I believe there's more evidence of a higher power, just for fear of what the churls will do - I'll never be talking apples and apples and consequently I'll never have the freedom to express an honest opinion.

Admittedly the bubble I live in is really strong, I still haven't met the fag-hating racist conservatives that are talked about so much around here, I still have no idea what reality really is on that one (perhaps I don't know if I'll environmentally ever have the tools to fully sort that out in a town where the scripts are flipped) but, at a minimum I can talk about my own understandings and beliefs.

In the case of what you're saying - if I'm the privileged 1 out of 10 who can believe in a diety at all and not go villager with a torch - so be it. I still have to accept that about myself. Regardless though, if we can, we'll need to keep like with like - ie. absolute meaning with absolute meaning and cultural relativity with cultural relativity. IMHO they're different topics that need to be handled on different levels.

I grew up in the 1990s in a pretty redneck part of the state, and I can assure you that it's not something from the cold, dead past. The guy I was telling you about who has the MS, after that redneck quack took him off of his medications, ended up being hospitalized with multiple hernias. His throat was closing up, and he wasn't able to keep down food. He is lucky to be alive right now. When that damn quack heard that he was a flamer, he was pronounced AIDS-ridden without so much as a blood test, and he was left to die. This s**t is still happening in parts of our country. I know it's hard for you to believe, where you come from.

But yeah, you are right that we shouldn't let other people's ignorance control our thinking, so I would rather emphasize the value of investigating multiple angles for interpreting people's experiences. I think that this does have value to you and me. Although it is interesting to consider the spiritual interpretation of NDEs, I think it's important to avoid being drawn into the temptation of latching onto it as a conclusion. I place a high value on regarding things in sober perspective.

In fact, that's why I find it so off-putting to hear someone dancing back and forth, talking about how "amazed" he is about something. Every puritanical ounce of my heritage revolts at it. The first guy was good because he had a calm, professorial attitude about his views. I felt comfortable with him. The second guy made my skin crawl, though. The third guy's story simply doesn't add up, and his disarming sense of humor didn't help much. So far, only the first guy seems to have any face credibility.

I'll look through your other videos when I get a chance, though.

I've encountered 'bubbles' like the one you've just described, but having lived in Michigan, Missouri, and Kansas, I can tell ya that what William is describing is also sickeningly common.

Something else that was interesting - I was reading about older cultures today, including a lot of the esoteric sects and even Druids. It seemed like there was a lot of use of that - ie. higher order thought and teachings that were kept away from the general public; sometimes for control but other times over thoughts like these - ie. that the general public given certain knowledge would just about start putting heads on pikes.



I'd agree to disagree with you there in that when it goes back to people with their eyes taped shut, bags over their heads, and pulsing monitors in their ears, in a state of deep coma or supposed medical death (heart cessation longer than 37 seconds) giving full accounts of conversations - exactly as they went, problems exactly as they occurred, at other times recounting places that they never saw in a conscious state because they were brought in unconscious, sent somewhere else before they woke up and they remember things lucidly that happened inbetween - I personally don't have it in me to say "Ah yeah well.....er..... a bunch of religious nurses must have been their own worst enemies, told them everything and asked - did you see that?". It necessarily has to fall on discredit the sources and, it seems to pull that card farther than it has credible elasticity for my tastes.

Other than that though, as far as I'm concerned, evidence of spirit is there. Whether or not NDE is part of that or really just chemical overdose cascade interplaying with that to where its incredibly difficult to separate the two - I wouldn't bring myself to cast judgment on that either way, just the evidence for non locality of consciousness or the physical housing it rather than generating it seems quite strong.


Well, I guess I'd have to ask you - have you ever tripped or rolled? Even if it were purely chemical as you're suggesting, they're describing an experience that completely changed their lives, time ceased to exist, they could see 360 degrees, they were seeing neverending fields of psychic creation in what they describe as a state of lucidity so high that it made day do day consciousness look aweful.

If someone's going to have that kind of ride its quite a difficult thing for them not to express that kind of amazement.


When I posted those videos I really put the scientists first and then put the later videos down, starting with Eben Williams not quite so much as evidence but to more or less give you videos or interviews where they mapped out the typical content pretty well and to give you an idea of what these experiences end up being.


As I just mentioned above though - you've pretty much gotten through the evidential stuff. I don't know what you'll get out of the videos after that, albeit I am perhaps a little confused that you haven't commented on the 15 minute Greyson presentation at the UN.

Actually, if you were to read over the Torah, they tell you some pretty good science in there. For example, they give you lists of herbs that are useful as antimicrobial agents, right there in the book. They tell you how to go about making up ingredients for soap. They even provide a primitive concept of germ theory: if you were to go through the Torah and always wrote "germs" in the place of "demons," it would make a lot more sense.

Personally, I don't think that ancient scientists were always as closed or cryptic as you might think. A lot of the old writings are as plain as daylight to anyone who doesn't read a bunch of spiritual mumbo-jumbo into it. The thing is, I can SEE this, whereas other people can't: even a skeptical thinker makes the erroneous assumption that the practice of boiling ox blood was intended to drive off some mystical force or other, so they remain blind to the truly obvious and plain meaning. The religious thinkers make the same incorrect assumption as the skeptical thinkers, the difference being that they believe it. Only strange people like me seem to run with the assumption that our ancient ancestors were trying to do something valid and useful.

Yet you still don't have any grounds to dismiss purely physiological causation, which has a long, healthy track record for being the actual case. That's the problem. As interesting as the spiritual explanation is, it needs to be examined in sober perspective.

Actually, it's fairly common for people to be able to hear and interact with the world around them during a coma.

http://www.medindia.net/patients/patien ... a_hear.htm

"People in coma sometimes show signs that they are able to hear and understand. Often these signs are just simple reflexes -- like squeezing a hand, or sucking, in response to a touch."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/66381 ... nd-me.html

"Imagine this. You are lying in a hospital bed, in a coma, apparently dead to what is happening around you. But you experience it all the same, hear what is being said about and to you, and try in vain to communicate with your loved ones and the world outside.
That is what happened to Ron Houben, a Belgian student who spent 23 years in a so-called persistent vegetative state, after being paralysed by a 1983 car crash."

You might want to put it in your living will to have a reading list of books on tape played for you in the event that you were to fall into a coma. It would be an awesome time to catch up on your reading list. Hehe. The thing is, I routinely have a similar experience, in which I wake up with sleep paralysis. I can hear what is going around me, and I feel mentally awake. However, I can't move. I can't open my eyes except for a tiny fraction. If it ever happens to you, the best thing to do, really, is to relax and listen to your breathing. You snap out of it after a minute or so.

It would be interesting to study, though. I strongly think that, if we were to look at NDEs closely, it could lead us to methods of keeping the brain intact during cardiac arrest and other traumas long enough to make it possible to render effective treatment.

Nope. The only drug I ever had any experience with was marijuana, and I didn't like it. I constantly have a lot of interesting thoughts swirling around in my mind, and I like them. There is always music and lights and fairy bridges and stuff. When I am sleeping alone, sometimes I hear music. Usually, it's in a minor key or in some mode other than major key. It's always pleasant. Occasionally, it's what I think is an old sitcom. The marijuana shuts it all off, and I don't like that. It's like someone pulled the plug on the television, and my thought is, "okay, when is this going to be over?" So I haven't bothered messing with any other chemicals besides booze and nicotine. I figure that I'm crazy enough without the help of chemicals.

The second guy had had no such experience, though. He was just recounting it second-hand. He really made my skin crawl.

I'll look at the other ones. I'm sure they're interesting. For the past couple of days, most of my free time has been spent on tending the yard. Those weeds have just about strangled the grass. Giant patches of naked earth left in their wake. Nasty creatures.

Because I haven't looked at it yet. I like lectures. I'll make that next on my viewing list.

I'm not really sure what to tell you in that case; ie. I would tell you that LSD, mushrooms, etc. are quite inverse in a lot of ways to marijuana, but at the same time I have to wonder if what you're saying you already see in hear in a sober state isn't already half way up that track. In that sense though I'd be quite hesitant to recommend it unless you were taking an incredibly low dose just to test drive its safety against your own physiology (ie. 1/4 of what it is for the average novice).

What happens with that stuff though, aside from getting quite an adventure, is that people also have their a priori formats of thinking exposed in the open. Its one of the reason why I used to do it once or twice every couple years - even after my party days - to get a better sense on what was going on in my life, how I needed to adapt things, etc.

As for occasionally seeing (sober) sort of white washed peaceful meadows or hearing some type of trance or electronic tune written the right way and scratching my head because the feeling takes me that it's a national anthem or something of the like that I heard 10,000 years ago - that stuff does happen to me albeit in increasing rarity. I did have an odd experience though about three years ago when me and my friends all went downtown, hit the clubs as usual, lots of sort of crazy stuff happened that night, and when I was at home, meditating on it, trying to make sure that I got every possible ounce of social meaning out of it that I could I instantly saw the pictures as if they were all in a line, all trajectories against trajectories, I zoomed out on that line and saw it painting what appeared to be a patchwork quilt and as I zoomed out farther I saw would could have easily been classified as the mainframe of all my experiences stored photographically and that mainframe was essentially a rainbow colored mendalla (something I didn't know the terminology for and that had no particular meaning for me at the time). It happened at a time when I was atheistic but still open to very Jungian interpretations of how the mind operated or the size of the subconscious, the later was what I really marveled at, however I found it incredibly odd that a particular deep NDE'er who was interviewed mentioned asking God why mankind seems so dark and doomed at which point the light opened a mendalla which housed all human souls and that he saw no darkness at all in them.

I know for a lot of people its those odd coincidences like the last thing I mentioned that tend to direct them toward belief but I also think that if we (human race) are going to study the potential of spirituality from this standpoint it would be a matter of continuing to study the congruences between NDE's, the things that a three year old would be as likely to see as an adult in the US who'd be as likely to see the same thing as a Buddhist in Tibet or a villager in Africa. I think that even if what we find is so bizarre that it makes the life hereafter and the chemical death of the brain look almost indistinguishable but linked across boundaries, or if it starts looking more like aside from a few consistent polarities to the experiences that everything we see is projected from ourselves - that in and of itself would be fascinating. On the bright side though, I think as well that the growth of the current NDE spiritual movement will be a big thorn in the side to the Salem villiagers that we still perhaps have running around or trying to decide national policy based on 17th century religious thought.

The only other thing I wanted to mention; we'd also need more research into the differences between a comotose brain and a brain that's had better than 30 seconds of no blood supply. Being the social critters we are as human beings it might not intuitiely seem like a huge difference in a persons level of vegetation but it does stand to reason that a person with steady oxygen supply would be more likely to have a working brain.

Well, one thing that I've been trying to communicate here is that the loss of electrical activity in the human brain does not mean that everything in the brain has become frozen in time. If that were the case, we could always bring people back just by restoring oxygen flow.

It's easy to say that "the cells just die," but that's an oversimplification. The "death" of our brain cells involves some very dramatic chemical changes. Very dramatic. In this case, it would not be surprising if, during a brush with brain death, we were to form a whole lot of incredibly vivid experiential memories. But we can't really say that this is the case. It's a possible avenue to investigate. The problem I have with people who are obsessed over being able to say, "I have the answer," is that I hear somewhere in there, "now, let's burn down the laboratory, since we don't need it anymore." That's always my reaction when people latch on to magical interpretations for things. I just get this sense that a lot of people just resent the idea of being in a state of uncertainty, and they have this craving for something that feels good, in a base chemical way, to substitute for a real explanation. A process of truly substantial inquiry tends to be biased toward using any conclusive statement as a stepping stone to further inquiry, not as a "finished product." I don't think that you are particularly inclined to treat it that way, but I think you can understand the reasons for my prejudice.

I've watched three of your videos so far, and I'll get to the shorter one here in a minute. Here's one of my own for you.

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discove ... -video.htm

And here is a quick article on brain waves.

http://www.nhahealth.com/science.htm

The thing is, the subject we are on, here, is being studied pretty intensively by some scientists. They are coming up with some pretty interesting results, when they look at this closely.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEt41bYQBgE[/youtube]This is the kind of music. But imagine that you can turn into it...like your body is turned into a fluid mass, and it sings to the universe. And it varies more and is generally quieter, like it's in a far off corner. Does that make sense? That's the usual form of the music. Varies.

The funny thing about Mario, he actually gets attacked quite a bit as having a pro-spiritual outlook. I'll have to read up on the delta and theta waves a bit more but sure, I'd love to see how deep they can reach into this thing; all the better if they more firmly prove or disprove the idea that there is a coherent orchestration between the spiritual and physical where the two dovetail. The tendency of that last outlook is to see wave function collapse as a function of consciousness and from that wave function collapse comes the organization of the body and the precipitation of an interface between mind and a consistent/physical body.


That is fascinating. I know that when we're in a transitional layer between going to sleep and proper sleep, or between sleep and waking, that a lot of our minds organizational defenses are down and I've had significant stretches of young adulthood where I had some truly gritty, deep, and dark emotions coming at me during those times.

It sounds a bit like an involved synaesthesia though that your mind perhaps either surpresses when you have full consciousness or perhaps your sleep and waking cycles have some mechanism that they have to reach but end up going through the auditory centers of your brain. If you were to hypothetically take the spiritual outlook it would simply mean that there's a double entente - ie. that the fascinating brain chemistry was happening but that you were given that for a bigger reason that only you could figure out.

You may also find this interesting. Same guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dCpPxCbQ2Q

Your first guy said something interesting: "How do you explain that through neurological functioning?"

My first answer is, "How would you go about instructing a right-handed toddler, who has never before seen a musical instrument or had any musical instruction, on how to play Canon in Locrian F sharp on a grand piano?" Just because you can't produce instant results doesn't mean that you lack the capability of doing so. Getting something done and getting it done right requires time and patience. Neurology is still very much a young science. We don't pretend that it has the answer to everything, at present, that we don't understand. Furthermore, there are only so much resources we can direct to questions like, "why do we have NDEs?" when we have more pressing issues, such as, "how can we make life a little bit more bearable for an autistic child?"

My second answer is, "Do you have any better ideas? The ones that have a history of leading to violent persecution, ethnic cleansing and holy wars don't count. Get cracking, buddy." If you are not satisfied with scientific explanation, tough beans. Every other possible means of explaining things runs the gamut from "crap" to "mega-crap." However, just as there are a half-dozen snake-oil salesman for every doctor, there are millions of fakirs, faith-healers, witch-doctors, and ouija board practitioners, and there are comparably few people out there who have the skills and resources to perform serious investigation.

As for his comparison of this to the Newton vs. Einstein issue, here is another answer: "get on Elsevier, and look up, "ischemic cascade AND Ca+ ion." There is your relativity." We have only had the ability to study the brain at this level for a relatively short time. The science, in its modern form, is younger than I am. Before we had the ability to look at this stuff up close, we were still impressed with ourselves because we could see physical changes in the hippocampus with our naked eye. The relativity is here. What have you been doing for the past 29 years?

Doesn't matter. If he isn't performing experiments that are only deemed "successful" if they give him the answer he is looking for, he's performing valid science. In science, there are two possible "right" answers: "I correctly found the hypothesis to be true," or, "I correctly found the hypothesis to be false." It doesn't matter what your beliefs and opinions are if you can be a good scientist.

When you wake up with sleep paralysis, your impulse is to try to force yourself out of it. However, try someday letting yourself stay in that state for a while, and just listen quietly to your breathing and what is going on around you. Listen to the blood rushing in your ears. Try letting your mind wander.

I routinely walk into rooms and forget what I was going in there to do. Some people would worry about that. I just find something to do, and it is usually what I intended to do anyway. I routinely can't remember the directions to familiar places, so I just drive in what seems to be a good direction and get to where I am going anyway. I have been known to start daydreaming on my walk to classes, and I would forget what city I was in and what year it was: I would just go back to my daydreaming, and I would start paying attention again when the lecture started.

Do you think that I hold the opinions that I do because I am inept at thinking deeply or spiritually?

Listen to what he says from a little after 8:00 to 8:45 of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0G1t5Xa2Ig

That's happened a few times in his life and started when he was young enough to be well in advance of his career choices. I don't think it disqualifies his science at all but that he admits that his ongoing contact shapes and directs his science to an extent - that's the part that I find interesting.


Truth be told I don't think I've ever experienced sleep paralysis. The only odd thing I can say for myself is that since I had insomnia for so many years my ability to wake up immediately wore out. I used to love throwing myself out of bed just as an exercise of discipline when I was 20 or 21 but as I hit 25 or 26 I started getting instant migraines so now I usually hit the snooze twice and wake up on the third ring which helps give my body more time to run that metabolic process.


That's the kind of thing that people tend to worry about more I think when they've never been like that and it all of a sudden has a rapid onset at a certain age. As for forgetting what and even who you are and even performing tasks that you'd meant to do without consciously realizing it - I will admit that's novel, and if its something you can't find good neurological research on I think you'd definitely want to either look into doing research yourself, possibly finding a top hospital to communicate said symptoms who is more renowned for neurological studies to see if they can make heads or tails of it. Regardless it sounds like in a lot of ways going through what you have gives you a very specific experience and has lead you to some equally specific psychological adaptations to counterbalance/compensate the turbulence.

No, in fact I think if I had your life experience and saw as wild things from my mind on the basis you do I'm pretty sure I'd have a very similar outlook.

I'm probably closer to the opposite - ie. I maybe saw some fleeting odd things in childhood (like pink and red lightning flashes or weeds growing within three hours during a day of rain) but after maybe 6 or 7 its been very solid and consistent. I think that perhaps may be part of why certain things will cut a sharp contrast against the mundane for me as I've been soaking in the mundane and non-magical for the majority of my waking life. To that extent I highly expect that if I find the spiritual it will be hidden quite deep behind the mundane.

I'd never say that either type of experience is distinctly more valuable in total albeit I do get the sense that it would perhaps flow both ways depending on the subjects at hand. I wouldn't judge this conversation one way or another in that either, just that I can clearly see how we'd have very different conclusions.

Poor choice of words. First of all, if you know what Locrian mode is, why would you WANT to play anything in it?

Second, Locrian isn't a real mode. It's a theoretical mode built on the 7th degree of a western major scale. Ancient modes lacked a leading-tone 7th, so by the Renaissance it was added as musica ficta and not naturally occurring within the scale. Locrian mode lacks a perfect 5th relative to the tonic and could only resolve to tonic by an upper leading tone. Given the common practice of avoiding the tritone in modal music, it's darned near impossible to write anything decent-sounding in a pure Locrian mode.

I'd recommend the western Phrygian mode instead. It solves the problem of the tritone above the tonic AND has an upper leading tone 2nd. It's that upper leading tone 2nd that helps make it sound so awesome.

For me the question much more important than whether spiritual things exist is whether spiritual needs exist. I think we all have a need for the numinous quality in our lives. Psychologically, humanity has always been drawn towards the divine. The posts earlier in this thread about the harm religion has done have really nothing to do with this. Organized religion as concentrations of power, and fundmentalism with its literal interpretations of religion (both products more of logic than of belief, when you think about it) really have nothing to do with mysticism and the human need to find something holy in life, even if it's science that is considered sacrosanct.

If we only feed the logical part of our minds, we're half alive. There's another side to us that needs the chthonic, the numinous, images, art, poetry, story, and symbolic journeys in dream and fantasy.