I'm kinda confused by the American political system. You guys have this thing of 8 year maximums for presidency. But then you vote Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush, and now perhaps Clinton (and then Clinton again?). Perhaps it's time to scrap the 8 years...you might even want to look at re-instituting some sort of monarchy and royal family too.
;)

Couple of odd synchronicities happened to me this past week, which I thought might be worth posting. I'm currently editing an old 'classic' alternative-topic book for reprinting via Daily Grail Publishing, and had spent the night reading through a chapter about David Lewis-Williams and his theories connecting rock art and shamanism. Upon finishing the chapter, I left my office area and went to switch on the television for a bit of 'chill-out' time. As the TV came on, I was presented by a man discussing rock art..."nice synchronicity", I thought to myself. Then he started talking about shamanism connected to this rock art. Then the narrator points out that the guy talking is David Lewis-Williams. I was pretty much able to narrate the rest of the documentary, as it was almost a carbon copy of the chapter I had just edited!

A couple of days later, I watched (not for the first time) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Upon switching off the DVD after the movie finished, the TV was on a music channel and playing "Lucas with the Lid Off". The interesting part is that this video clip was directed by Michel Gondry, who directed Eternal Sunshine.

Granted, the latter isn't as impressive as the former, but both made me sit up and pay attention. And while both are well within the bounds of chance happenings, it's worth noting that I had never seen David Lewis Williams on television before.

Update: One more TV synchronicity!

Just posted this on Graham Hancock's message board, as part of my Author of the Month stint:

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In modern western culture, we are brought up with the assumption that everything 'material' is real, and everything else is not. However, the writings of Henri Corbin dispute this position, in which he argues for a difference between the 'imaginary' and the 'imaginal':

The choice of these two words was imposed upon me some time ago, because it was impossible for me, in what I had to translate or say, to be satisfied with the word 'imaginary'...we cannot prevent the term 'imaginary', in current usage that is not deliberate, from being equivalent to signifying unreal, something that is and remains outside of being and existence - in brief, something 'utopian'. I was absolutely obliged to find another term because, for many years, I have been by vocation and profession an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts, the purposes of which I would certainly have betrayed if I had been entirely and simply content - even with every possible precaution - with the term 'imaginary'. I was absolutely obliged to find another term if I did not want to mislead the Western reader...

In other words, if we usually speak of the 'imaginary' as the unreal, the utopian, this must contain the symptom of something. In contrast to this something, we may examine briefly together the order of reality that I designate as 'mundus imaginalis', and what our theosophers in Islam designate as the "eight climate".

Corbin then goes on to cite some examples from the Persian and Arabic literature, and many sound very much like the common examples of border experiences (as mentioned in my essay). For instance:

At the beginning of the tale that Sohravardi entitles "The Crimson Archangel", the captive, who has just escaped the surveillance of his jailers, that is, has temporarily left the world of sensory experience, finds himself in the desert in the presence of a being whom he asks, since he sees in him all the charms of adolescence, "O Youth! where do you come from?" He receives this reply: "What? I am the first-born of the children of the Creator [in gnostic terms, the 'Protoktistos', the First-Created] and you call me a youth?" There, in this origin, is the mystery of the crimson color that clothes his appearance: that of a being of pure Light whose splendor the sensory world reduces to the crimson of twilight. "I come from beyond the mountain of Qaf... It is there that you were yourself at the beginning, and it is there that you will return when you are finally rid of your bonds."

A couple of interesting points - often, apparitions of angelic beings, in various cultures, say that the 'angel' is youthful in appearance. This includes many 'Virgin Mary' apparitions. Secondly, the notion of being 'clothed in colour' is reminiscent of magically evoked beings, e.g. the Enochian angels. Lastly, the final statement certainly suggests that this imaginal/angelic land is one and the same as the 'afterlife'.
(Incidentally, in terms of the topic of my own essay, I find the title of another story quite evocative: "The Rustling of Gabriel's Wings".)

Corbin again:

Neither the tales of Sohravardi, nor the tales which in the Shi'ite tradition tell us of reaching the "land of the Hidden Imam," are imaginary, unreal, or allegorical, precisely because the eighth climate or the "land of No-where" is not what we commonly call a 'utopia'. It is certainly a world that remains beyond the empirical verification of our sciences. Otherwise, anyone could find access to it and evidence for it. It is a supersensory world, insofar as it is not perceptible except by the imaginative perception, and insofar as the events that occur in it cannot be experienced except by the imaginative or imaginant consciousness...

...the world into which our witnesses have penetrated...is a perfectly 'real' world, more evident even and more coherent, in its own reality, than the 'real' empirical world perceived by the senses. Its witnesses were afterward perfectly conscious that they had been "elsewhere"; they are not schizophrenics. It is a matter of a world that is hidden in the act itself of sensory perception...

Corbin's words are explanatory in regards to the visions which occur under sensory deprivation ("a world hidden in the act itself of sensory perception"), and also echo comments about the mental state of so-called "alien abductees" ("they are not schizophrenics").

John Mack embraced Corbin's views, and spoke at length on the ontological status of the material vs the imaginal. In his essay "Intrusions from the Subtle Realms", Mack had this to say:

"The Western world view, what Tulane philosopher Michael Zimmerman calls anthromorphic humanism, has reduced reality largely to the manifest or physical world and puts the human mind or the human being at the top of the cosmic intellectual heirarchy, eliminating not only God but virtually all spirit from the cosmos. The phenomena that really shake up that world view are those that seem to cross over from the unseen world and manifest in the physical world.

Mack also quotes Margaret Mead:

"People still ask each other, 'Do you believe in UFOs?' I think this is a silly question, born of confusion. Belief has to do with matters of faith. It has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge that is based on scientific inquiry...When we want to understand something strange, something previously unknown, we have to begin with an entirely different set of questions. What is it? How does it work? Are there recurrent regularities?"

My essay is an attempt at helping to catalogue these "recurrent regularities".

My article in Darklore Volume 1 - as many of you would know - was on the topic of the common sounds heard during border experiences/altered states ("Her Sweet Murmur" - you can read it online at the Darklore website as a free PDF download). Author Michael Prescott emailed me to point another historical instance of the 'sounds' of altered states. It is mentioned in the writing of Peter Kingsley, discussing techniques of the ancient Greeks for reaching altered states:

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"4 The Sound of Silence

There’s one simple detail in Parmenides’ account of his journey to the underworld that’s so easy to miss. During the whole of his journey there’s no mention at all of any noise — apart from one single sound. That’s the sound the chariot makes as the daughters of the Sun draw him along: ‘the sound of a pipe’. . .

After Parmenides mentions the sound of the pipe he uses the same word again to explain how the huge doors spin open, rotating in hollow tubes or ‘pipes’. This use of the word is extraordinary. It’s the only time in the whole Greek language that it’s ever applied to doors or parts of doors, and scholars have pointed out that Parmenides must have chosen it for a particular reason: not simply to describe what the doors look like but also to give a sense of the sound they make. On his journey everything that moves has to do with the sound or the appearance of pipes. (DPW 126–127)

The word for ‘pipe’ that Parmenides keeps using is syrinx. It had a very particular spread of meanings. Syrinx was the name either for a musical instrument or for the part of an instrument that makes a piping, whistling sound — the sound called syrigmos. But there’s one aspect of these words that you have to bear in mind: for Greeks this sound of piping and whistling was also the sound of the hissing made by snakes.

It would be so simple to dismiss as totally insignificant the fact that this piping, whistling, hissing noise is the only sound Parmenides associates with his journey to another world — except for one small matter. Ancient Greek accounts of incubation repeatedly mention certain signs that mark the point of entry into another world: into another state of awareness that’s neither waking nor sleep. One of the signs is that you become aware of a rapid spinning movement. Another is that you hear the powerful vibration produced by a piping, whistling, hissing sound.

In India exactly the same signs are described as the prelude to entering samādhi, the state beyond sleep and waking. And they’re directly related to the process known as the awakening of kundalinī — of the ‘serpent power’ that’s the basic energy in all creation but that’s almost completely asleep in human beings. When it starts waking up it makes a hissing sound.

The parallels between standard Indian accounts of the process and Parmenides’ account of his journey are obvious enough; specialists in Indian traditions have written about them and discussed them. But what hasn’t been noticed is that the particular sound mentioned by Parmenides also happens to be the sound made by a hissing snake..."

(PDF here)
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As I've mentioned previously, once you know the connection, you start seeing it everywhere...

For Australian readers, Jan Kounen's 'shamanic western' Blueberry is on SBS tonight at 10.15pm. I posted an article about Kounen this week here on TDG, and you view his documentary about ayahuasca shamanism, Other Worlds, here on TDG.

Skeptic and former parapsychologist Susan Blackmore was one of the respondents in this year's Edge Foundation question, "What have you changed your mind about?". She tells how she was originally enthusiastic about the paranormal and parapsychology, but after numerous experiments came to the conclusion that there is no evidence for psi:

I did the experiments. I tested telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance; I got only chance results. I trained fellow students in imagery techniques and tested them again; chance results. I tested twins in pairs; chance results. I worked in play groups and nursery schools with very young children (their naturally telepathic minds are not yet warped by education, you see); chance results. I trained as a Tarot reader and tested the readings; chance results.

...Parapsychologists called me a "psi-inhibitory experimenter", meaning that I didn't get paranormal results because I didn't believe strongly enough. I studied other people's results and found more errors and even outright fraud. By the time my PhD was completed, I had become a sceptic.

Synchronistically, when I read this entry I had just finished reading a section of Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics (available from Amazon US), in which he talks about...Susan Blackmore! His comments are interesting: ... Read More »

Skeptics of uber-medium Mrs Leonora Piper often raise the issue of the imaginary 'Bessie Beals'. In the first of a series of six sittings with Mrs Piper, the skeptical psychologist Professor Stanley Hall tricked 'Hodgson' (the alleged deceased former psychical researcher, who had become Mrs Piper's trance control) by asking about his (Hall's) niece, "Bessie Beals" - a supposed invention of Hall (bracketed words are Hall, unbracketed 'Hodgson'):

(Could you find two people for me, either Mr. Clark or my niece, Bessie Beals?)

One or both. Has your niece got a mother there?

(No, her mother's here.)

No, I mean in the body there. I know her. I think I know I have heard her speak about her mother there and say she wished she I could prove that she was living....to...her. I think I saw...her. Did she not have a sister?

(No, no sister.)

Who came here in infancy?

(I think not.)

Yes she did. Hardly lived. Scarcely lived at all in the body. I'll tell you about her if I see you again.

Hall certainly appears to have shown that Mrs Piper's controls were prone to creative invention, at least at times. But this was not a new discovery by the skeptics: before the third sitting, Hall asked Mrs Piper's psychical research 'manager' Mr George Dorr whether anyone had ever tried fraud or foolery, "for example, bringing in a living person as if dead.":

Mr Dorr says that many have tried foolery and sometimes have succeeded splendidly, and other times have failed. Controls are very suggestible and very willing to take up any ideas presented by the sitters, so that they can be very easily taken in.

Which makes the Hall sittings rather undramatic. Certainly, good points are raised occasionally (more in later posts). But the whole series of sittings were almost completely aimed at proving that Mrs Piper's controls were secondary personalities, with no interest in finding evidence for supernormal communication. Hall and his offsider Amy Tanner explicitly say:

...we had no desire whatever to obtain "test messages," my results from the published sittings having shown their triviality and dreariness and the impossibility of getting down all the remarks and other circumstances which might explain them.

Hall consistently deceived the Hodgson control, inventing personalities, and when 'Hodgson' presented 'outside' information and contacts (which may have offered some test evidence), Hall quite simply ignored it and didn't respond. Personally, the account of the sittings led me to one simple conclusion - that Stanley Hall was quite an obnoxious man. Most of the sittings comprise of him deceiving and misleading the control (and gloating in the final sittings). In the fifth sitting, tests were done which caused Mrs Piper harm (pressure tests on the hand, and blistering to her lips from camphor put in the mouth). But there is one final thing worth pointing out about the 'imaginary' Bessie Beals, which are in Hall's notes subsequent to the sittings:

The pseudopersonality, Bessie Beals, was accepted and she immediately appeared. What could this mean? Possibly there was a soul to be thus named awaiting birth, or one who had lived and was awaiting reincarnation, if transmigration is true. Here is indeed a plump and astonishing new fact, and I must later reconstruct my astral psychology at my leisure. To complete the confusion, a relative within three days mentioned to me incidentally one Bessie Beals, still living, as a friend, whom I may have heard her speak of before. If so, the control read the name registered in my subliminal mind. I hope that she will not be told, for such an incident might seem an uncanny prognostication that she will soon join the spirit forces. Is it possible to construct a phantom spirit out of the stuff that dreams are made of?

This doesn't change the fact that Hodgson claimed Bessie Beals as being in the spirit, when the girl was in fact alive. However, numerous questions are raised about other aspects of the communication - did the girl have a younger sister who had passed away? Was this the same Bessie Beals? And why do Hall and Tanner repeatedly refer to the 'pseudopersonality' Bessie Beals, without any footnote, until Hall mentions this in passing in his notes?

In the final sitting, as Hall and Tanner gloat over their scheming, the following exchange transpires:

...I have felt so keenly, I have felt so keenly your various whoppers all this time.

[We made some incredulous remarks to each other, laughing at his inability to explain his various mistakes, and he went on:]

I think I told you so before.

[Which he certainly had not, having been trustful to the point of credulity.]

This final statement is rather a sleight on the memory or judgement of the investigators Hall and Tanner, as Hodgson is in fact correct. In the fourth sitting Hodgson responded to Hall's deceiving and needling with:

I am interested in seeing I I I am interested in seeing how many stories you can tell in a minute. They are awfully bad. They are awful whoppers. They are awful whoppers. I never heard so many from one in a minute.

I'm hoping to OCR the sittings from Tanner's book Studies in Spiritism soon, and will put them up as individual blog posts for those interested in the full transcription.

A quick but amusing observation:

In his book An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi opens his entry on physical medium Daniel Dunglas Home with the following words, which I can only assume are there to impugn Home's credibility:

His middle name, Dunglas, was an invented affectation, obviously an attempt to dignify his name by association with Scottish royalty; it does not appear on his birth certificate.

So says James 'The Amazing' Randi (aka. Randall James Hamilton Zwinge). I presume with a straight face...

And I thought the initial news stories were bad - check out this steaming pile of excrement from Science A Go Go. It would be nice if people would have a clue before they write on a subject, really...

In the Richard Dawkins documentary 'The Enemies of Reason' which I posted today, I noticed one statement by Dawkins that perhaps could use some clarification. In sitting with self-professed psychic Simon Goodfellow, Dawkins was asked if there was anybody in his background who was in the military. Dawkins replies "well I've got really nobody" fitting that description. This, as a statement, is incorrect - Dawkins' father served in World War II.

I barely thought this worth mentioning though, for a few reasons -

(a) Dawkins was probably thinking Goodfellow was referring to deceased family...Dawkins' father is still alive.

(b) A British person of Dawkins' age is very likely to have some family who served in the military, most notably WWII. So it's hardly a specific and amazing 'hit'.

(c) Goodfellow connects the military service to a 'G' initial, which does not correspond to Dawkins' father.

The only reason I note this is because some hints from psychics (the good ones, that I am still puzzled by) follow this trend of starting with obscure, incidental details which sometimes sound like they mean something else, which are then clarified later (no, I'm not talking about cold reading, which follows the same process - I'm talking about the clarifications involving highly specific details). In this case, it *could* (and I say that tentatively) be the case that a 'deceased spirit' was referring to his father's military service. Dawkins' reply that he had no-one in his background brought that thread to a close though.

I have plenty more to say about the documentary, but perhaps I should write a book. 'The Scientism Delusion' anyone?

Richard Dawkins' new television series will go to air next week in the UK - following on from his attack on religion, "The Root of All Evil" (and in book form, The God Delusion), the new series is titled "The Enemies of Reason", and in it he sets his sights "at the whole new age caravanserai, including astrologers, spirit mediums, faith healers and homeopathic medicine.":

Leaning back on a sofa in the faded gothic splendour of Oxford’s 14th century New College he sighs with something approaching despair: "It belittles our universe. To have astrologers demeaning astronomy by tapping into the spine-tingling wonder of the universe is..." he struggles briefly for a word, then finds one and pronounces it with a keen awareness of the irony: "Sacrilegious!"

I actually don't think he has a "keen awareness of the irony", otherwise he would probably take more pause to question his own approach. Yes, there are cheats out there. Yes, there are morons out there. I think most of us know that. But it "belittles our universe", to paraphrase Dawkins himself, to think that sitting down with an individual medium who gets things wrong (most do, actually...even the good ones) shows that mediumship is a crock. Sit down with the SPR records, sit down with modern day researchers, take the time to find the top five you can through the scientific process. Is it worthwhile me going out and asking high school students about microbial evolution, and then laughing at their ignorance? No.

The further thing worth contemplating - and entirely separate to the notion of scientific proof as justification for anything - is whether life should consist of absolute, objective truths only, or whether life is made of more than this. I've always been in search of these objective truths, but the more I search, the less inclined I am to believe that they are really that important. What's important is getting through life to the best of your abilities, being good to others, and enjoying yourself (IMO). Here's a question that I'm not sure has an answer. Who does more damage to a person's life? A fraudulent spirit medium (note I'm not saying they all are) who charges $50 to tell a grieving mother that her murdered son has 'carried on' into an afterlife, giving her respite from her pain, or Richard Dawkins saying that the truth simply is that her son died an agonising, terrifying death, wasting what little life he had, and that she will never have a connection to her child again? Spare me the "the truth is all that matters, no matter how much it hurts" - I've been over that a million times already, and I'm not sure it's the answer. There's a reason for the body producing pain too, but you still take painkillers.

The trouble with Richard Dawkins - who, in most respects, I'm a fan of - is that he thinks he knows far better than everyone else, despite not having walked a step in their shoes. I'm not sure how he expects to educate and 'convert' the masses, when he so regularly sneers down his nose at their stupidity and ignorance. Which is a shame, because he has some wonderful things to say.

I had a little UFO experience on the weekend. Was driving home at about 9.30pm on Saturday night (28/07/2007) along the South-east Freeway (around the Daisy Hill area) and half-noticed a bright object about the size (and light intensity) of the Moon in the Western sky (being in the upper left of my visual field). I remember thinking to myself that it was a strange object, but for some reason I didn't make more effort to look at it directly (perhaps because I was driving in traffic at the time). What I do remember is then noticing it basically vanish, like the illumination suddenly 'sucked' into the center of the object.

I probably would have written it off as some visual misperception (eg. reflection on my windscreen), except my wife Tonita then remarked 'did you see that?'. She had seen the object more directly, and said it resembled a spotlight shining onto a metallic surface - ie. circular, with very demarcated edges, and metallic in appearance. She also said it appeared to be moving, and disappeared in the manner that I described.

My first thought was that it might have been a spotlight shining up into the sky, but there was absolutely no cloud cover that night, and so I'm not sure how that could happen. Next I considered that it might be an iridium flare, but it seems a bit late in the evening for that (and on checking the next day, none were 'scheduled' for that time), and it also persisted as a large, consistent object for a bit longer than iridium flares usually do.

So, any Brisbanites know what I saw? Was there some light show on Saturday night that could have produced this?

Michael Shermer's latest Skeptic column in Sci-Am quotes social psychologist Philip Zimbardo (he of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment), on the psychology of Abu Ghraib torturers:

Staff Sergeant Ivan 'Chip' Frederick — the military police officer in charge of the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B, the most abusive cell blocks at Abu Ghraib - "was an all-American patriot, a regular churchgoing kind of guy who raises the American flag in front of his home, gets goose bumps and tears up when he listens to our national anthem, believes in American values of democracy and freedom, and joined the army to defend those values.

The quote is meant as a qualification that Frederick was psychologically 'normal' or 'good'. To me though, 80% of what is called 'patriotism' is really a fundamentalist belief system, and could therefore actually qualify an individual as having abnormal psychology. Far from the intention, the quoted passage actually suggests to me that Frederick was prime fodder for a 'de-evolution' into torture and abuse (contra to the intent of painting him as a 'good guy').

Fundamentalist belief allows people to ignore logic, as the belief supercedes all, and allows the individual to rationalise their actions via that belief system. To me, the 'patriotism' of Frederick is likely a contributing factor to his blind acceptance of torture as the right way forward - ie. if it can save American lives/values, then it can be rationalised as a good thing.

I bring this up, because I don't think it's a case restricted to Ivan Frederick...

I read an interview with former CIA chief George Tenet bemoaning the fact that the Bush administration had thrown him under the bus with the 'slam-dunk' quote:

"You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. It's all you have."

What an incredibly ironic thought, from the former chief of an organisation that dealt in mistrust, disinformation and snooping into people's private lives....

Plenty more to say about the interview, but don't have time right now.

For anyone looking for an excuse to celebrate some anniversaries, especially those of the esoteric kind, now's a good time to crack that bottle open and drink some toasts. Today, October 12th, is of course Crowleymas (the 'Great Beast' was born 131 years ago today). Tomorrow is not only Friday the 13th (as the paraskavedekatriaphobes out there would know), but also Friday, the 13th of October - the 699th anniversary of the arrest of hundreds of Knights Templar in France by agents of King Philip (which also took place on Friday, the 13th of October). At least it's not the 666th anniversary! And to top it all off, tomorrow is also the 89th anniversary of the Miracle of Fatima.

Funnily enough, the new issue of Sub Rosa has major features on both Crowley and also Fatima. We're just tying up the loose ends and will have it out in no time. Just a shame we couldn't release it at midnight on this auspicious confluence of esoteric anniversaries...