What is a zeren? Why are thousands dying trying to get into Russia? Images.

There have been a recent religious gathering in the desert, notable because of the long running nature of the regular events:

[N]early 1,000 others assembled last month at a barren site known as Our Lady of the Rock. On the 13th of every month, they say, the Virgin Mary appears and speaks to a woman named Maria Paula Acuña. Crowds have gathered here, about 10 miles north of California City, for nearly 20 years.

Some visitors photograph the sun, saying they see Mary in the images. Some are just curious, some seek miracles and some say they want to feel closer to God. Each 13th they create a fleeting community of faith in the desert.

...

Scholars who have studied the phenomenon see a pattern: Publicity draws the curious and faithful, but the excitement quickly fizzles. Rarely is a lasting community forged, said Lisa Bitel, a professor of history and religion at USC who is co-writing a book on Our Lady of the Rock.

In 1990, Acuña said, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary in Lopez Canyon near her home in Pacoima. Her 3-year-old daughter, the youngest of six children, had leukemia, and the Virgin cured her, she said. Acuña returned to the site, and as word spread of her vision, bigger and bigger crowds joined her until the property owners complained, and the gathering soon moved to its current location.

...

Thirteen years ago, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese disavowed the reported apparitions, saying followers were "in danger of being misled" and that the archdiocese found doctrinal, canonical and financial irregularities among organizers of the ceremonies in the desert. The archdiocese has not changed its position on the desert gatherings.

Bitel said people who report apparitions are on the fringes of organized religion. Some of those drawn to these seers, as they are known, say they attend church regularly but are looking for a connection that eludes them inside the parish. Others have eschewed organized Christian denominations but still believe in the Virgin Mary.

Seers are often women or children, often poor or working class, Bitel said. They're "people who are disenfranchised from the traditional leadership of the church, people who couldn't be priests or bishops or popes but who obviously have some spiritual influence," she said.

...

Acuña, for her part, is reclusive, saying she cannot speak about her past without the permission of a "spiritual father," whom she refuses to name. Information about her past is scarce. She was born in Sonora, Mexico, and came to the United States 38 years ago "for the same reason everyone comes, to look for a better life for my children," she said.

Acuña says she lives in a trailer in California City, in Kern County, with four women, whom she calls "sisters," though they do not appear to be recognized by any church. They manage a nonprofit known as the Marian Movement of Southern California that reports tens of thousands of dollars in donations every year.

The group passes its days praying the rosary, making embroidered textiles for donations and preaching to inmates at the nearby jail, Acuña said.

"I am poor, but I am happy," she said.

Like others, Acuña's messages can tilt toward the apocalyptic. In one of her sermons a few years ago, she said the world would end in four years, Bitel said. But the majority of her followers seem not to dwell on these points.

"One feels closer to God here," said Alberto Ramos, 51, of Los Angeles, who has been coming to the site with his four brothers for nearly a year.

"I've seen the body of Christ. I've seen angels. I've seen the Virgin," Ramos said, flipping through a stack of Polaroid pictures. In one, dark rings appeared around the sun. In another, the silhouette of a woman seemed to shade the sun.

Others say they feel closer to Mary or even the Catholic Church by coming here.

Source

Hat tip

This case, and other examples (one which we touched on in passing the other day), clearly show there is a real need amongst some for a more direct connection with the divine than the Church provides and this seems to spin-off a lot of (usually unapproved) Marian cults.

Another interesting thing, for me anyway, is that this isn't the only "entity" encounter in the area. Read on below the fold.

Desert visitations

The Mojave Desert is a hotbed of odd activity. We noted the Death Valley Giants in the early days of the blog and it is famed for the UFOs cluttering up the airspace (The Integraton is out there for a reason!!). It is also the location of various government facilities, which, as you'd expect, leads us rapidly into conspiracy territory, an example of which can be seen below (Is that really a UFO? And yes he does talk about tinfoil hats too!! Bonus):

For those who want more (and more than they can handle I suspect) 13 part article called "Under Mojave" which drops in a lot of intriguing reports like:

The Mojave Desert is also, believe it or not, the very place where William Shatner claimed to have had his UFO encounter with a 'silvery disk', which he alleges saved his life after he became lost in the Mojave's other-worldly expanse, and this long before he was Christened 'Captain' of the U.S.S. Enterprise!

One can only wonder if he tried to get his leg over there too, as he did with innumerable alien "conquests" as Kirk.

However, it rapidly heads off into parts unknown throwing in such "facts" as:

Back to the Mojave Desert mystery -- it would seem that, based on the various reports (many of which we will record later on), that the Mojave Desert of Southern California and the deserts of western Nevada may in fact be a secret 'battleground' involving U.S. Government troops working in ALLIANCE with the alien races known as the 'Nordics'. Who are 'they' fighting? Their battle, according to SEVERAL sources is against the 'Grays' which have over the last century, possibly earlier, entrenched themselves below ground in underground 'bases' in the Mojave Desert region and elsewhere.

So we'll leave you to work through that on your own but there are intriguing things thrown into the mix that can be traced to more reliable, like Adamski's Nazi/occult connections (see also Dimensons, 1988 page 250-251) which make his alien encounters in the Mojave even more interesting considering it is claimed he found the impression of a Swastika in a Venusian footprint during his famed encounters out there. It certainly makes you look at the Nordics in a new light!!

Of course, we mentioned Adamski's encounter before, as there was a suggested Adamski-Hubbard connection (which I could never prove), made all the more intriguing (suspicious?) as it seems like Jack Parsons could be the earliest contactee of the Modern Era of UFOs as he appears to have met a Venusian out in the Mojave in 1946, the same period he was engaged in the Babalon Working (which itself has been linked into the Lam Hypothesis).

So I did some digging and posted a follow-up comment about Parsons and the Venusian. The main source seems to be from Vallee's Dimensions (1988, page 250):

Jack Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian in the desert in 1946

Although the source for that claim is unclear (Dimensions is, unfortunately, unreferenced), the timing and location could potentially connect this with Liber 49:

On February 28, Parsons made a solo trip back to the desert and received Liber 49 in an unexplained manner. Jacques Vall�e says Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian there in 1945 or 1946. Without the exact date, one cannot tell if the Venusian was the implied source of Liber 49. Parsons took this to be an affirmation of the need to produce a magical child.

Source

According to Sex and Rockets (page 132):

The day after she [Cameron] left for New York [i.e. Feb 28th], Parsons returned to the Mojave Desert without Hubbard, who had gone away for a while, perhaps to the VA hospital in San Francisco. Parsons invoked Babalon in the desert, presumably through a solo sexual rite of some sort, though he does not say. What resulted was phenomenal "The presence of the Goddess came upon me," he wrote, "and I was commanded to write the following communication.

The communication Parsons was commanded to write was Liber 49"

From Strange Angel (page 265):

When Cameron embarked on a brief trip to New York, Parsons went out into the desert once more. There he heard a voice speaking to him, dictating to him just as a spirit had dictated Crowley's own Book of the Law.

He then restarted the Babalon Working on 2nd March 1946, following the instructions given to him in Liber 49. This would make 1946 a busy year for Parsons, communicating with various entities in the desert, what is unclear is if Liber 49 actually came from the Venusians and if not then what were the details of this intriguing visit?

So running around in the desert you have fringe Marian cults, occult/sci-fi fraudsters (Adamski/Hubbard - take your pick), contactees, occultists and whole mixed bag of folks (far too many to list here) looking for... something. One can only wonder if there is something special about the desert, or something "special" about the people who are drawn there.

What we can say is that there is a heady fog of religious fervour, occult mysticism and flying saucer fever clinging to the Joshua Trees out there in the desert.

Marcel Cairo has put up a thoughtful piece on the newly discovered Albert Einstein letter in which the great physicist dismisses belief in God as a childish superstition.

I agree with Marcel that Einstein's view should come as no surprise, given his previously known statements on the subject.

I might add that Einstein seems to have doubted the existence of an individual soul also, opting instead for a sense of mystical oneness with all creation, as exemplified in this famous quote:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.

With all my focus on the problems caused by an overemphasis on the ego, sometimes I lose sight of the fact that the ego is a healthy and necessary stage of personal development. In fact, we need an ego if we're going to avoid becoming doormats in life. Perhaps some phenomenally advanced souls can tolerate being walked all over, but for the rest of us, the ability to stand up for ourselves when appropriate is essential. And if the Gospels are to be trusted, even Jesus placed a limit on how much crap he was will willing to take!

With that mind, I went Web surfing for information on assertiveness, and found this page, which includes, among other things, a list of the "ten assertive rights of an individual." Some of these rights are predictable enough, but others struck me as a little surprising. For instance:

Assertive Right  #2: I have the right to offer neither reason nor excuse to justify my behavior.

That's kind of interesting, don't you think? How many times are we called on to justify some opinion or action, not because the questioner genuinely wants more information, but because he or she is trying to intimidate us into backing down? 

The truth is that many of the things we say and do are hard to "justify" in strictly logical terms. I would rather watch a Ray Harryhausen movie than an Ingmar Bergman flick, but I can't say I could justify this preference through ratiocination. Any justification I came up with would probably be more of an excuse - a pretext  or a rationalization - than a valid reason. But why do I need a reason? What right does anyone have to demand a reason?

This ties in with another item on the list:

Assertive Right  #8: I have the right to be illogical in making decisions.

Refreshing, no? The Web page goes on to explain:

I sometimes employ logic as a reasoning process to assist me in making judgments. However, logic cannot predict what will happen in every situation. Logic is not much help in dealing with wants, motivations, and feelings. Logic generally deals with ''black or white,'' ''all or none,'' and ''yes or no'' issues. Logic and reasoning don't always work well when dealing with the gray areas of the human condition.

Hard to argue with that, though no doubt some bullying rationalistic types would try.

How about this next one? In an age when we are bombarded with demands for our attention and alerted to one "crisis" after another, here's an invigorating thought:

Assertive Right  #10: I have the right to say, ``I don't care.''

Do ya hear that, Save the Children/Whales/Planet? I don't care. I got my own stuff to deal with. Go away and leave me the frack alone. And that goes double for you, Sally Struthers.

There's a lot to be said for being able to stand up for yourself. At the same time, an out-of-control ego can be just as problematic as an underdeveloped one. Marcel Cairo sent me a link to an NPR story on Ayn Rand, which included this comment from a Rand supporter:

[Rand] gives egoists a positive case for why the world should revolve around them and around their efforts. If you are the person who is creating value, if you are the star, the sun really does revolve around you. And not only should it be that way, but that's the moral order of the universe.

Yikes! A philosophy that gives megalomaniacs even more reasons to admire themselves and expect the adulation of others! Just what the world doesn't need. (And what kind of metaphor has the sun revolving around a star, anyway?)

There's a proper balance to be struck here. Probably Aristotle had it right when he talked about the Golden Mean - the middle way between abject submissiveness and overweening arrogance. It's a fine line, sometimes as difficult to walk as a tightrope.

But, hey, no one ever said life was easy. Right?

Update: It turns out that the "Rand supporter" quoted above, Nick Gillespie, is not a Rand fan, after all. This was pointed out to me by Mark in the comments thread. I'm not sure how to interpret Gillespie's remarks - whether he was being sarcastically critical, or whether he does endorse this particular aspect of Rand's thought. Anyway, Rand's philosophy does inculcate this attitude in many of her followers, so I think the basic point is still valid.

UK-based researcher Dave Clarke on the newly-declassified British Ministry of Defense's UFO Files...

The Société Perillos focus their attention on Asmodeus, and wonder whether this demon might not have a mistaken identity. Could he, in fact, be Euronymos, whose images are consistent with those of the demon inside Saunière’s church?

I'm sure most parents find themselves wondering if their children aren't actually sleeping at all (in my family it was my brother, I was a sweet-natured child who slept through), but, of course, for the vast majority that isn't technically true - even if some nights it just feels like that.

However, for at least one little boy it does appear to be the case and, it is claimed, he hasn't slept in the three years since his birth (before that all bets are off):

A 3-year-old Florida boy with a rare condition has not slept in three years.

Doctors said Rhett Lamb of St. Petersburg apparently has a condition called chiari malformation that puts pressure on his brain.

Rhett has never taken a nap or gone to sleep at night, forcing his parents to keep watch day and night.

"(My husband) has the day shift and I kind of have the afternoon shift," mother Shannon Lamb said. "We share the night shift because no one can sleep in the house when he is up anyway."

...

According to the May Clinic, chiari malformation is a rare abnormality where brain tissue protrudes in the spinal canal.

Part of the skull is abnormally small and puts pressure on the brain.

Rhett checked into a hospital for an experimental surgery Thursday.

Source

Hat tip

It sounds like it is a real strain on the parents and hopefully the doctors will find a way to make life easier for everyone.

Other cases

Previously, we looked at the case of Hai Ngoc who says he hasn't slept since 1973.

See my previous post for more

We have looked at what happens When Resurrection Fails and the outcome is usually smelly and insanitary rather than glorious. However, this doesn't seem to stop people from giving it a go anyway. Perhaps this time it will work. Perhaps.

Two children and their mother lived for about two months with the decaying body of a 90-year-old woman on the toilet of their home's only bathroom, on the advice of a religious "superior" who claimed the corpse would come back to life, authorities said Friday.

The children -- a 15-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy -- cried hysterically Wednesday after a deputy who came to their Necedah home looking for Magdeline Alvina Middlesworth ordered them out because of the stench from her body.

The children were in foster care Friday. Their mother, Tammy Lewis, and self-described "bishop" Alan Bushey remained in custody on felony counts of being a party to causing mental harm to a child.

...

When Deputy Leigh Neville-Neil arrived at the house, she encountered Lewis, also known as Sister Mary Bernadett, the complaint said. Lewis, 35, initially refused to allow the deputy to check on Middlesworth, telling her that Middlesworth was on vacation and saying she had to check with her "superior" first.

But she eventually let the deputy in. The house smelled of incense and burned wood, and had religious materials everywhere and hymns playing on the stereo, according to the complaint.

When the deputy opened the last closed door, she smelled "decaying matter" and noticed something piled on what appeared to be a toilet. Lewis told her it was Middlesworth's body, the complaint said.

Lewis told the deputy that Middlesworth had died about two months earlier, but that God told her Middlesworth would come to life if she prayed hard enough.

She said she couldn't say anything more until she spoke with her "superior" -- Bushey, 57, also known as Bishop John Peter Bushey.

When Bushey (pronounced "boo-SHAY") arrived, Lewis told the deputy that Middlesworth had appeared to pass out as Lewis helped her into her underwear.

She said she propped Middlesworth on the toilet and left the room to call Bushey, who told her to leave the woman alone and pray for her, the complaint said. He said he had received signs that God would raise her from the dead with a miracle.

Lewis went on to say she thought Middlesworth was still breathing when she put her on the toilet and called Bushey, instead of an ambulance.

...

The boy at the house told a detective he had considered running away because he was uncomfortable with the situation. He said Bushey told him that demons were trying to make it look as if Middlesworth wouldn't come back to life, and that if she were to be discovered he and the girl would have to go to public school and get jobs because Middlesworth paid the bills.

Source

Hat tip

This all seems rather serious. As well as the impact on the children there is the possibility that Middlesworth could have been helped if emergency services were called. I suspect we'll never know now, but it does look like there could be more to this story and a trail might bring out more details of their religious beliefs - things never look good when your religious authority figure is a "so-called" anything (just in case you are wondering I am fully ordained so need to worry on that front). However, it could just be a cover for a cruder for of crime - here is another report:

Milwaukee Archdiocese Archbishop Timothy Dolan spoke about the dangers of cults on Sunday, after news broke of a self-proclaimed bishop and nun allegedly keeping a deceased 90-year-old woman's body in their house and cashing her Social Security checks. The District Attorney in Juneau County called the couple a cult. They're accused of using religion to commit fraud. Alan Bushey and Tammy Lewis allegedly kept the body of a 90-year-old woman sitting on the toilet for two months, claiming God would bring her back to life. Archbishop Dolan says he isn't familiar with the group, but he was saddened to hear what they're accused of. "That's not even religion, that's a terrible distortion and corruption of religion to even call that part of the patrimony and tradition of the church," Dolan said. Bushey's children, a 15-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy, were living in the house with the body of a 90-year-old Magdalene Middlesworth. Bushey calls himself a bishop, and Tammy Lewis calls herself "Sister Mary Burnadette." But their so-called Catholic church isn't recognized by Rome. "Periodically throughout the church you'll get these crackpots who claim to be bishops or claim to be priests or even claim to be part of the church, and they're not, of course," Dolan said.

Source

This clearly is part of an interesting history:

The two, who are also known as Sister Mary Bernadett and Bishop John Peter Bushey, along with the dead woman, Magdeline Alvina Middlesworth, were part of a small Bible-based church led by Bushey, Juneau County Sheriff Brent Oleson said.

Investigators are trying to determine if they were defrauding Middlesworth, Oleson said, and additional charges against the two are “a very real possibility.” He said there is evidence Middles-worth provided financial support to the church and to Lewis and her family.

Lewis and Middlesworth were not related, he said, but had been living together with Lewis’ 15-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son about 3 1/2 years.

Oleson declined to call the church a cult but said “I guess in my mind I don’t know of any faith that sanctioned his teachings.”

Bushey had been living in the area about 11 years, Oleson said, did not have outside employment and had built a chapel on the back of his home, which is about a half-mile from where Middlesworth and Lewis lived. He said Bushey’s church had few members; only eight were at a Mass about two months ago.

He said Bushey’s church was not affiliated with the Queen of the Holy Rosary Mediatrix of Peace Shrine, which is less than a mile from Middlesworth’s home. The shrine itself is not a recognized part of the Catholic Church.

Source

This shrine is interesting too:

Documents show the conflict in Necedah dates back nearly sixty years, when a woman named Mary Ann Van Hoof claimed to have seen apparitions of the Blessed Mother at the Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine. News of Van Hoof's visions drew a crowd.

"Those of us that came here really did believe that the Blessed Mother was appearing so we wanted to be here,” said Isabll Rubel.

She believed in Van Hoof's claims for 12 years and she worked closely with her. Rubel says Van Hoof would be sent messages to spread to the people, warning them of the dangers in the world: things like abortion and pornography.

"We thought coming here must be true because we were seeing these things happening,” said Rubel.

But Rubel says she stopped believing in them and rejoined the Catholic Church, which never approved of the messages.

The Diocese of La Crosse sent the Van Hoof's a letter in 1951 saying they do not approve of the shrine or the literature Van Hoof was distributing.

But her visions and claims were drawing people in from all over the nation. A few of them claiming to have a position of authority in the Catholic Church, they too were rejected.

"They are not validly ordained. They are not part of the church,” said Rubel.

One of those being 57-year-old Alan Bushey, who told Tammy Lewis, if she prayed hard enough, God would bring 90-year-old Magdeline Alvina Middlesworth back to life.

Source

So those involved in this were the fringe of a fringe group not accepted by the main church - you couldn't get much more obscure than that and still have enough followers to make it worthwhile.

I'll be keeping an eye out for more on this.

Chris Carter, author of the excellent Parapsychology and the Skeptics, was interviewed by Skeptico recently. Here's a link to the podcast and transcript.

Personally, I think Carter pretty much destroyed the interviewer in the last series of exchanges, which concern the open-mindedness (or lack thereof) of media skeptics.

Not that I'm biased or anything.

Do Bigfoot have "white skin"? What happened to the "convincing evidence" promised in 2006? Images.

Jill Price, a woman who remembers every detail of her life from age 14 to the present, has been getting a lot of media attention lately. Now the story has shown up on the political blog Ace of Spades.

What interests me about the Ace of Spades entry is the ridiculous knee-jerk skepticism exhibited by some of the commenters (and, to a lesser extent, Ace himself).

Remember that this woman has been extensively tested, and that she is not the only person who apparently has this condition. So there is every reason to believe that her memory is genuine.

Nevertheless, some self-styled experts immediately cry BS on the story. Ace himself opines,

I have a question about how they've determined her to be "bona fide," though. They determine this, they say, by checking her recall versus the diaries she's kept since a teenager; but that doesn't prove she remembers her life. That proves she's memorized her own diaries ....

Another big offer of proof from her as well as another man who's stepped forward to reveal his gift is the fact that she can remember what day of the week any particular date fell upon. The trouble is ... there's a mathematical formula to determine that ....

So I don't know. It's not so much that I doubt this is possible as I'm just unimpressed by the proof that these people can remember what they say they remember.

Get that? He's unimpressed. But wouldn't the scientists who've studied this and similar cases have already thought of these objections and countered them? Obviously, yes, as could be established merely by reading the USA Today article Ace links to. The article reports:

She was studied by memory experts at University of California-Irvine for six years before they reported the [results] in an esoteric professional journal in 2006....

[Neuroscientist James] McGaugh, with colleagues Elizabeth Parker and Larry Cahill, gave Price a battery of memory and cognitive tests. She'd kept a diary from ages 10 to 34, so the researchers could verify Price's recollections with pages randomly selected from 1,460 diary days, he says.

But that wasn't all. You could give her a date, "and within seconds she'd tell you what day of the week it was, not only what she did but other key events of the day," McGaugh says. Aug. 16, 1977? A Tuesday, Elvis died. May 18, 1980? A Sunday, when Mount St. Helens erupted. She also quickly could come up with the day and date of noted events: the start of the Gulf War, Rodney King's beating, Princess Diana's death (Aug. 30 or 31, 1997, depending on France or U.S. time, she told McGaugh).

In other words, it wasn't all diaries and days of the week. It was memories that could be checked from other sources. A couple of Ace's more informed readers point this out. One writes:

Actually, this woman was featured in a National Geographic cover article about memory a few months back. There are other people with similar conditions, and each time it's been the real deal. Memorizing diaries, for example, wouldn't be enough because she remembers details that wouldn't normally be written down.

To which some idiot responds:

If there is no record of the details, who's to say that they are, in fact, correct?  She could be making up details that fit with the notes in the diaries.

Again, the point is that she remembers details that can be checked from other sources. But the skeptical idiot - let's call him a skeptidiot - has not even bothered to read the USA Today article and, left to his own devices, cannot imagine a team of scientists taking even the most elementary precautions.

In contrast to this idiocy, a clear-headed commenter writes:

Some of the other tests were not based on her diaries.  I believe one of the checks was asking her about concrete events such as when she watched the Very Brady Christmas special.  Since she had watched it 20 years ago she was able to correctly describe when it aired, even to the point of having to correct the doctors since their source material had the dates reversed with another Christmas special (which she had also watched).

That type of recall and the fact her brain is highly overstimulated in a few key areas confirmed her diagnosis. 

Which of course is exactly the kind of common-sense test that any reasonably intelligent person would apply to this case. But since the skeptidiots cannot even think of such tests themselves, they blithely assume that no one else could think of them, either.

Most of the skeptical comments do not even attempt to engage the evidence.

Check if she's ever read Star Wars novels by Michael Stackpole or Timothy Zahn.  Perfect memory is an ability at least two of the characters they use extensively have.

So if she's ever read about a fictional case of this condition, then she must be faking! Does this mean that if I read a book about someone with cancer - Cancer Ward, say - then I can never actually get cancer? Or if I were to read one of these Star Wars books, would I then be able to simulate memories of every event in my lifetime for the past 33 years?  

Someone else snarkily asks:

But does she ever do jack shit worth remembering?

Well, she probably didn't live the kind of deeply fulfilling life exemplified by posting snark on comment threads. But that'll always be the dream.

Quoth another pompous pontificator:

This kind of claim is sooo easy to check - if one is skilled at logic and observation. Pity journalists apparently don't seem to possess those skills in abundance.

Only skeptidiots have those qualities, it seems! They can "check" a claim just by snarking about it.

Then there's the inevitable scientific fundamentalist, for whom life holds no mysteries. He already knows all the answers because he learned them in junior high:

Well I call bulls**t.  Brains just don't work that way.  If they did you'd run out of "space" pretty fast.

Unless, of course, humans actually remember by storing bits using quantum superposition.  And supertiny flying monkeys with pens and notepads.

Ha ha! ROTFLMAO. "Flying monkeys!" Priceless! After all, everybody knows that applying quantum physics to neuroscience is just as silly as theorizing about miniature flying monkeys! We already know that "brains just don't work that way." We know everything. Ain't omniscience grand?

These people really are hopeless. Carefully researched, extensively documented, multiply verified anomalous facts stare them in the face, and rather than revising their worldview, they close their eyes and sing, "La la ... LAAA!" at the the top of their lungs. And if that fails, they crack dumb jokes about them danged wimmin and their nutty, estrogen-stoked behavior (which is what the rest of the thread consists of).

The Internet is often compared to a worldwide nervous system, a planetary brain. Maybe so.

But has anyone tried measuring its IQ?

New Mexico, 1947: Still With Us...

What kind of animals are represented by the two Maine-discovered skeletons? Images.

The genus now appears to be one of the most speciose groups of frogs in the humid paramo and cloud forest habitats of the Andes.

For several months, there have been no new Mothman news, as it relates to the Mothman Death List. But that's not the end of the story. Images.

Greg at the Daily Grail has an interesting piece relating to sceptics and mysticism (The Mystical Skeptic? May 9). I was going to add a comment, but got a bit carried away, so am posting here instead.

Picking up on Susan Blackmore's recent descriptions on her LSD experiences, Greg points out that other sceptics/atheists have also expressed an interest in mystical experience.  Sam Harris, author of the polemic The End of Faith talks positively about 'rational mysticism', for instance (which in a way is not surprising, as he seemed open-minded in that book about parapsychology, although without going into any detail). He also mentions a book on the subject by John Horgan called Rational Mysticism, and cites Horgan's comment about Blackmore:

Blackmore has had flashes of the mystical self-transcendence referred to in Zen as kensho. In fact, she includes her out-of-body experience back at Oxford among them. She views that experience as a hallucination, but a profoundly meaningful one. She has taken to heart the lesson imparted to her toward the end of her journey, that no matter how much we learn and grow, there is "always something more". As a result of that lesson, she views mystical experiences not as ends in themselves but as way stations on a never-ending journey.

I agree with Greg in wondering whether the term 'rational mysticism' is not an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Eastern religion was one of the reasons I got interested in parapsychology: not having ever had any kind of mystical experience myself, I wondered about the idea that humans can temporarily achieve a state of knowing which utterly convinces them of the existence of God and a reality beyond this one, and the sense that they will continue to be a part of that reality when they are 'dead'. How much importance should one attach to it?

This insight seems to arise from meditative practices or, as described in the Rig Veda, from the effects of soma. So it's clearly related to changes in brain chemistry. Does that make it spurious? In the modern world we can approach these altered states from a secular perspective, as Blackmore clearly does. But if the experience can be subverted by a rational perspective after the event, how powerful could it have been in the first place? We would have to suppose that if all these mystics, meditators and initiates throughout history had read Dennett and Dawkins then they would have come out of their trance and decided that these ineffable and transcendental intimations were simply illusory, even if valuable or beneficial on some lower level (but what exactly ?)

I don't really buy any of this. If you read about mystical experiences of ordinary people - in Raynor Johnson's Watcher on the Hills, or Alister Hardy's The Spiritual Nature of Man, for instance - over and over you get this hugely powerful sense of what one can only term 'enlightenment'. People talk constantly about having had a glimpse of the true nature of reality, that we are all one, that love is the only true universal constant, and so on. They almost all say that they now understand what is meant by the term 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. What you tend not to find is people saying, 'yeah, while it was going on I thought I saw God and heaven, and it was really cool, but now I realise it was just stuff going on in my head, no biggie.'

I suppose a sceptic could argue that researchers and writers select, and that in fact there are grades of experience, from which they choose only the most outstanding or the ones that further their own religious agendas. I haven't actually seen that argument, but that's probably just because sceptics aren't normally at all interested in mystical experience. Yet the overwhelming impression, and one that incidentally is supported by the research on NDEs, which is pretty thorough, is that this is a quite distinct class of psychological event. You either have a transcendental, transformative life-changing experience - or you don't. 

So how is it possible to blur this boundary? I suspect that what's going on here is that semantic confusion which lies at the heart of sceptical discourse, the tendency to elevate weak experiences to the level of the real thing. It's an inability - or unwillingness - to distinguish between different types or levels of experience. I always think that Michael Persinger's work is an example of this: he claims that a lot of mystical and paranormal experiences, including elements of the NDE itself, can be induced by his magnetic helmet, but he doesn't really provide any evidence that they are the same things. The suspicion is that he's comparing apples with pears.

Blackmore's 'out-of-body' incident is another small but relevant example. My sense is that this experience, which occurred in her early twenties after smoking a joint, is pretty central to the subsequent development of her thought. The crux of it was her realization that the details of what she saw while roaming around Oxford 'out of her body' were actually inaccurate. For instance a particular roof, which she had observed as having chimneys and red tiles, did exist, but not as she had perceived it: it was actually green and had no chimneys.  She concluded that she had experienced a psychological construct, an illusion generated by the brain. The implication - and again this is absolutely central to sceptical thought - is that there really are two alternatives to choose from, and a critical, probing intelligence will understand the truth that escapes those who are less discerning.

There really is an issue here, and in fact even OBE adepts have recognised the illusory nature of some of their perceptions. (Interestingly, James Randi describes a rather similar incident in his own experience). Blackmore built on it to develop her psychological theory in Beyond the Body (1982). But while it adds a perplexing layer of complexity to the puzzling business of OBE perception it ought not to invite simplistic either-or interpretations. By the time Blackmore gets round to the near-death experience in Dying to Live ten years later it's become a central dogma - her chapter explaining away the accurate veridical perception reported by some hospital patients is as wonderful a piece of bluff and obfuscation as you will find anywhere.

What's really interesting is that Blackmore seems to be conflating her own hash experience with the full NDE. At the end of the book she says that many people who have had NDEs have come back from their experiences convinced that they have seen the spirit world, that they have grasped their 'higher self' and that they will live after they die. But she has experienced it too, she responds, and come to a different conclusion (p. 259). I found this rather shocking. As far as I can discover what she experienced differs quite markedly from the classic NDE described by Moody, Ring et al - she says nothing about tunnels, deceased relatives, life reviews, beings of light and so on - and it is quite misleading to suggest otherwise.

Finally, it strikes me that Horgan's comment about Blackmore's interest in meditation and mysticism hints at the rather incomplete nature of her experiences. The idea that there is 'always something more', and that mystical experiences are not ends in themselves but 'way stations on a never-ending journey' is an important insight in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. But has she really arrived at it herself? Or is it something that she is repeating, and that accords with the rather limited nature of her own experience, because she hasn't actually felt that overwhelming transcendence that other people sometimes report?

I don't want to push this too far, because in lots of ways I respect Blackmore's work. We have a common interest in vitally important issues that ought to engage the attention of thinking people far more widely than they do. Also, it's hard to know exactly where she's at without quizzing her directly - who knows, she may really be onto something. But without a good deal more clarity from her I shall be pretty sceptical that she really does have anything original to say about mystical experience, or indeed, more generally, that the idea of rational mysticism means anything at all.

It seems the tens of thousands who died in the recent disaster in Burma (and the mess being made of dealing with it) aren't just fading away but are forming a more spectral reaction to the devastation.

It makes for grim reading:

Bodies still littered the Delta’s landscape on Sunday, more than a week after Cyclone Nargis struck, killing an estimated 100,000 people. To the locals, the unburied represent thousands of restless souls.

...

The fishing communities of the Delta store their modest wealth in gold, and the women put their jewelry on before they tried to flee the storm. In the days that followed fishing nets were clogged with bodies, and some fishermen kept the gold.

A boatman told the story of a haunting. A man from the town had returned to his village, hoping to find some of his relatives alive. As he stepped ashore he heard a young girl screaming “help me! help me!” but when he followed the sound there was no one there.

“I know a foreigner like you won’t believe such stories,” said the boatman, although he clearly had no doubts himself.

He then told of another “haunting”.

Two boys had caught a woman’s body in their net and kept the jewelry. That night their hut was shaken and a voice demanded “give it back!” Terrified, they threw the gold away.

There are other odd aspects to the Burma story as the article explains:

When the junta moved the capital from Rangoon to a malarial town deep in the jungle, it did so because an astrologer employed by General Than Shwe had warned him of an impending catastrophe that could only be averted by moving the seat of government.

Source (the end of the article contains information on how you can help)

What intrigues me is the social function some of these tales have - people robbing corpses will think twice about it, which is good because it could also stop people from handling decomposing corpses. So, hopefully, they will help prevent some people from joining their ranks.

The ghosts of disasters past

As Q points out in the comments, this isn't the first time this has happened. Something similar took place with the Boxing Day Tsunami and we get a better view of the problems this can cause further down the line. Also keep an eye out for the local variation of the phantom hitch-hiker:

Tourism from Europe, Australia, and the United States has rebounded since the disaster. But tourist arrivals from elsewhere in Asia have plummeted since the tsunami and have yet to bounce back.

Industry observers cite Asian tourists' fears of ghosts in tsunami-stricken areas as the main reason for the decline.

...

Sopaporn and her mother had been running a restaurant, the Cat Bar, for the past two years at the beach resort of Khao Lak, just north of Thailand's popular Phuket Island.

...

The group escaped unhurt, but the restaurant, along with the rest of Khao Lak, was leveled by the huge wave. Scores of people, most likely SaLee included, were swept out to sea.

"That place is haunted," Sopaporn said. The Thai businesswoman, who is Buddhist, means that literally.

Buddhism and other Asian belief systems hold that if bodies are not recovered and properly buried, their spirits restlessly wander the Earth. Many Asians believe that lost souls try to drag living beings into a spiritual limbo.

"Please tell your fellow Japanese and Chinese back home to stop fearing ghosts and return to this region again," Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra reportedly told tourists last week after a memorial service to commemorate the victims of the tsunami.

...

Since the disaster, tales of ghost sightings have become endemic. Foreign ghosts seem to be particularly common, and many of the accounts are being covered in local newspapers.

One Phuket taxi driver reportedly said he was hailed by four western tourists who asked to go to the airport. The driver chatted as he drove, but when he pulled up at the airport to let the passengers out there was no one there.

"Belief in ghosts and spirits is widespread and all-important in Asian religious and cultural traditions," said Steven Heine, a religious studies professor at the Institute for Asian Studies at Florida International University in Miami.

As Buddhism gradually spread from India to Asia it was molded by various folk religions. Most of these belief systems have a strong element of ancestor worship.

For example, many Chinese people believe that the spirits of the dead endure after death and must be kept happy with offerings and other gestures of honor.

Spirits that are not kept happy, perhaps because they had a bad death or an improper burial, can become aggressive toward the living.

"According to Buddhist hell lore, the beings suffering in hell cannot eat, because whenever they bring food to their mouths the food immediately turns into burning hot coals," said Alvin Cohen, a professor of Chinese language and culture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

"These suffering beings are commonly called e gui, meaning hungry ghost,'" Cohen said.

Hungry ghosts may attack human beings to prompt them to meet the ghosts' needs, according to Asian folklore.

"Where someone dies prematurely … it is commonly believed that the ghosts will hang around the accident area and harass the living who come near," Cohen said.

...

Korean and Japanese travel agencies have reportedly seen a massive drop-off in the number of bookings to Thai coastal resorts. Business is so bad that many Asian airlines have cut their direct flights to Phuket.

"Asian tourists are scared of ghosts … and these are factors that have made our tourist arrivals drop short of our goal," Thai tourism minister Somsak Thepsuthin told a local radio show.

The Thai government has given private companies grants equal to millions of U.S. dollars for marketing and advertising campaigns to help Asian tourists overcome their fears.

Meanwhile, Buddhist monks have been presiding over cleansing ceremonies at resorts that were destroyed by the tsunami.

According to Buddhist teachings, the spirits of those who suffer a violent death will roam the land until they are calmed and blessed.

Days after the tsunami struck, monks in flowing orange robes could be seen walking along the beaches sprinkling holy water.

Source

There's a primary election in West Virginia on May 13th. You might be tempted to read about WV's Mothman at Wikipedia. Why you shouldn't waste your time. My alternative title for this blog is "More Reasons Why I Hate Wikipedia." Images.

S. Miles Lewis: A Comprehensive Interview. UFOs, the paranormal, 9-11 and more...