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News Briefs 16-07-2004

You know, they call them fingers…but I’ve never seen them fing.

  • Stephen Hawking says he has cracked the enigma of his Black Hole paradox – and it means a reversal of one of his main hypotheses.
  • For the third time in eight months, classified disks have been reported missing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Someone building a nuke at home?
  • The concepts behind I, Robot.
  • Trials begin on police gadget which disables cars by firing radiowaves at their computer systems.
  • The fractal origins of Earth’s complex life.
  • The rise and rise of exobiology.
  • Tsk tsk…Nature should have pulled out their Oxford Dictionary, as the term astrobiology has just been added. Keep that in mind next time you play Scrabble…it’s gotta be worth a few points.
  • Ammonia on Mars could mean life (Jim but not as we know it).
  • X-43A – full speed ahead for Mach 10 (that’s over 3 kilometres/second).
  • 35th annual MUFON conference to be held in Denver this weekend.
  • “Why don’t pilots see UFOs?”, by James McDonald.
  • Professor says that aliens have been walking among us for fifty years.
  • Cornfield square‘ still a mystery. At least it’s a nice change from ‘crop circle’.
  • Tales of psychic children. All students proficient at psychokinesis, please raise my hand.
  • The Third Eye: parapsychology in India.
  • Forget about your mouse – volunteers move cursor using power of thought.
  • Entering the world of the shaman, simply by plugging in.
  • Babies’ use of sign language shows their innate sensitivity to communication.
  • Cloud-seeding row erupts in China.
  • The all-seeing eye, and how it enthralled the White House.
  • Abydos, the last resting place of the first kings of Egypt.
  • Woman survives 12-storey plunge.
  • It’s raining fish, hallelujah it’s raining fish.
  • German police resuscitate rabbit after house fire.

Quote of the Day:

I see Hermes, unsuspected, dying, well-beloved, saying to the people, “Do not weep for me, This is not my true country, I have lived banished from my true country — I now go back there, I return to the celestial sphere where every one goes in his turn.

Walt Whitman

Editor
  1. A Warning for Neo-Shamen
    Hi Greg, thanks for a great news post as ever.

    The field of shamanism is of great interest to me and so I was given furiously to think by the article you posted on electronic inducement of shamanistic states. However, for some time now I have been perturbed by the tendency amongst modern psychonauts to jump out into the great beyond without a safety tether, as it were. Every shamanic or magical tradition has an elaborate set of safeguards (magical circles or sacred spaces; guardian spirits, totems or guides; elders of the tribe or priesthood who act as navigators and protectors etc.) to ensure that journeyers in alternate consciousness do not lose their grounding in this reality or become seduced by personifications of the collective myth which appear to be of named “entities” but come with no guarantees that the apparent origin is the true one. Thus shamen and magicians have guarded thier experiences against “possesion”, “trickster spirits” and dislocation from base reality for generations. Where these safeguards are not practised, it is not at all unusual for neo-shamen to become extremely seperated from their grounding. This makes their usefulness to the tribe minimal, as they no longer have the discernment or grip on language to pass on their experiences in meaningful terms to the “tribe”, instead meandering about the illusory nature of reality and even ascribing to this base reality fantastical tales which suggest in confused terms that it is in some way constructed by powerful entities. The base reality is the one where if you do not recognise the tiger, then the tiger will eat you in a very messy and visceral way. While it is in many ways perceived by the brain not the senses and in that sense alone is illusory, the spilling of guts on the ground proves in the realest way possible to the grounded shaman that to treat it as in any way “virtual” is folly to say the least.

    To sit in silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men

    1. Its all
      Shamanism, Spirituality and the rest of the mumbo-jumbo is all in the mind. Everything else is reality.

      dd Reality is the line where rival gangs of shamans fought to a standstill -Robert Anton Wilson

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