Food for Thought

Food for Thought

It seems strange that after several hundred years of scientific thought so many huge gaps exist between our understanding of reality and the actual nature of it. Ever since I embarked on my engineering career, my curiosity has always prompted me to keep track of science's progress toward improving mankind's understanding. However it seems that there is a persistent gulf that exists between our theory and the real nature of things.

For example- we have discovered that Newtonian physics, the stuff we still use navigate and land men on the moon, and put machines on mars, turns out to be only a close approximation. Some of Einstein's theories seem to be the same, an approximation. It's like the science of figuring out our world is a sort of fractal: the more we know, the more accurate our predictions become, but as we look with more and more precision, there always remains a gulf between how we think things work, and how they do work.

As the Tevetron helped us uncover secrets, the size of the secrets just seem to shrink accordingly. And now as we smash particles with the LHC we find the same thing. It seems that we are taking half sized steps toward a wall and finding that at this rate, we will never reach the wall.

About 100 years ago we found something quite extraordinary- a set of theories including Heisenberg's uncertainty principal and Quantum mechanics, that essentially show that we can't really understand what we seek (which is why we are told to “shut up and calculate”), and even more incredibly (with Quantum theory) that it may take human consciousness to actuate reality in the first place. This caused me to think a lot about the most incredible experiment of all time- the double slit: which illuminates this, but which is a whole separate topic of its own so deserves it's own post (stay tuned).

The next logical step for me was one where I started to sense we have a "hidden mind". One which thinks independently and which actually remembers all that we have ever experienced. This came out of a dream where I remembered the detailed physical surroundings of a day in the 3rd grade. It included the long forgotten names and even phone numbers of my all my friends. Two amazing facts were apparent-
1- that this information was all still intact somewhere and somehow, and
2- that I have some sort of second level of mind, a deeper and more capable one that was able to access the information in such a vivid way.

We'll get into the details of this dream in a later post.

Intuitively it seems to me that the brain is simply not big enough or complex enough to contain this fantastic amount of information. The fact that we have a level of thinking that goes way beyond our normal waking thought process seems amazing.

This leads to a whole line of thinking that points to dreams (where this super-conscious mind seems to “live”) and where, it turns out, amazing stuff like lucid dreams are possible.

I had a particular lucid dream that demonstrated an apparent communication with some higher entity which I will share at some point. And even if my experience was somehow imagined (don't think it was but how would I prove such a thing?), there are many documented cases similar to this where unknowable information was communicated: in some cases the only person who knew this information was then dead! Also via various NDE type experiences we've demonstrated the ability to (re)aquire knowledge from a previous personal life, or even from another person's life. Which exposes the probability that memories of experiences exist outside of the human brain. Which would also explain many paranormal activities where one person can access another's experiences.

And what about the many tales of savants who spontaneously speak another language without having been exposed to it, or to play a symphony with ever learning to do so? A model of information being held outside of a person's biological brain addresses many of these and other unexplained and currently scientifically impossible things.

Another thing that came out of my train of thought involve stories of hypnotic regression to birth and beyond which supports and explains two incredible things- 1- reincarnation. 2- what Dr Michael Newton discovered, and calls "Life between lives".

For those who would say that hypnotic regression is inherently unreliable I would point out two things:
1- in many cases, using this technique unknowable info has been uncovered about these prior lives.
2- spontaneous child recollections have uncovered the same sorts of stories without the hocus-pocus of hypnosis.

There is enough proof here for anyone who really looks at the evidence.

If you eventually accept the life between life phenomenon, you need to look at the huge number of corroborative stories that talk about a number of levels of spirit and the eternal nature of existence. All of which ties seamlessly back to all the NDE and shared NDE stories. All of this creates one very seamless story line where all of these paranormal things offer a single amazing view of the nature of reality.

Is that enough for you to chew on?

Want to know more?

Check out Skeptiko website listed under useful websites on the right of this blog. This is a amazing resource where the host, Alex Tsakiris, interviews all sorts of people on a huge range of subject matter, who's views cover the spectrum ranging from hard core skeptic to convinced "practitioner" and all points in between.

Also, when time allows, I will be posting a pretty extensive listing of books and other resources where you can find the details on all of the topics I cover here in this blog.

Please Mam, just the facts

"Please mam just the facts"

In the 1950's and 60's in a show named Dragnet, Sgt Friday would implore some babbling witness of a crime to give him “just the facts mam”, as that was all he needed to hear in order to solve the crime.

The problem I've always had in my investigations was: it always seemed to boil down to whom and what to believe, as there is no lack of stories to digest. What if a person told you a story about the tooth fairy, and perhaps another about the formulation of an electron? How to proceed in these two cases? Do both stories carry the same weight?

To me it boils down this this.

-Is the reporter credible? i.e Have they lied to you before, and do they have a reason to lie now?

-Is the story reasonable? i.e. Does it align or conflict with what you believe to be true?

-Is the information consistent with other reporters regarding the same subject matter? It might be especially convincing if multiple reporters who had no common frame of reference reported the same thing, would it not?

For most, to believe a total stranger about something as unbelievable as a UFO sighting or a near death experience when lacking physical evidence is difficult or impossible. I would agree: the burden of proof lies on the reporter. So if a single witness to an extraordinary event has only their own description of the event to offer and no additional proof, they might not be widely believed.

However, imagine yourself in the position of experiencing something incredible and wanting to be believed. What would you do? What would you say? I may believe my own family member who I have known and trusted from many years and who I strongly believe has no need to desire to mislead me, but I wouldn't expect others to go along with apparently outrageous claims.

So that is the conundrum isn't it? How to prove something incredible when traditional evidence is lacking? I have come up with an alternative “proof” that I have found sufficient for my needs: corroboration. This is where different people from different places and times and who have no knowledge of each other all tell similar stories. We will cover many example of this.

There is also another important method of validation which was the basis of my belief in the elsewhere described re-incarnation story, and is the basis of many more to be covered in these pages. It involves a third party knowing the unknown.

As an illustration, consider the following which is based on an actual story written by a medium about her experiences.

Tom and Fred were brothers. They grew up together on a farm in the midwest. They had a happy life working and playing on the farm. They were normal American kids in every way.

Eventually as an adult Tom died and Fred went to a medium to try and connect with this beloved brother. In order to determine if the medium was for real, Fred related a story to her about when the two were were young boys. Fred had a favorite baseball glove and ball that one day disappeared. Fred always blamed Tom for stealing them but he would never admit to the deed. Fred didn't have any idea what may have become of the objects and hoped that the medium could both solve the mystery and prove that she was in-fact what she claimed.

When Fred met with the the medium she related all manner of things. She described the farm, and the fact that Fred had a sibling, a brother with whom he was quite close. She accurately described his brother's appearance and his personality. Up to this point one might claim that the medium was using common sense and perhaps a bit of trickery in pulling key facts out of Fred from which to create a believable story.

At some point Fred described the glove and the ball to the medium and without hesitation she informed him that in fact Thom did take the objects. And further she shared that he had placed them in a secret hiding place in a barn on the property. The medium went into great detail describing the precise hiding place behind a wall in the barn.

Let's pause a moment and take a look at this a bit closer-

First some new terms: clairvoyance is the ability of a medium to see things about the subject, clairaudiance being the ability to hear, and clairsentience the ability to feel.

There is one explanation that is sometimes used by skeptics in cases such as this. One might claim that when demonstrating clairvoyance and similar powers, the medium is somehow “reading the mind” of the subject. This, they may claim involves acquiring knowledge by somehow (through access to emitted electrical impulses from the other's brain perhaps?) sensing what the other is thinking.

I always get a chuckle out of this logical argument. I think it is amusing that a skeptic might point to a sense that they don't really believe in, to argue against a phenomenon in which they even more strongly disbelieve. Essentially what they are saying is: at least sensing an emitted signal from the subject's skull conforms with the “locality” aspect of their reality model. At least the knowledge itself was contained in a live brain, and at least the live brain was emitting actual electrical signals. In their mind, all of this conforms to a model of the universe to which they subscribe. One could run all sorts of tests to eliminate this brain transmission theory as a possibility, but the skeptic could demand more and more thorough proof which in the end would be impossible to satisfy. 

However, you see that's the beauty and the power of this particular story and others like it: the subject didn't have the knowledge in their brain in the first place. Fred didn't know where the objects were so how could the medium have read his mind to find out? Before you claim that Fred may have actually subconsciously known the location, what would you say to the many dozens of similar stories? Would you claim that each is some special case that can be argued in some special way? No,, the sheer numbers of similar stories point to a phenomenon which one must come to terms with if one is to be honestly searching for truth. In a moment I will propose a logical model of proof that might be useful in a case such as this, but one thing at a time. Back to our story....

Later Fred went to the barn and followed the instructions of the medium. He looked and right where she said it would be, and in a hidden compartment in the wall, was the ball and glove.

We have here a case where a medium is giving us information that she couldn't have known, and of which the subject was also unaware. In science research this would be called a “double blind” experiment. One where neither participant was aware of the data so they couldn't have gotten it from each other.

The most profound mystery here may not be obvious. One might think that if we could understand how a medium could access this information, we would gain a greater understanding of our world. I agree, but the bigger mystery before us is: where was this information stored for all the time since the death of Thom? If we assume that Thom's was the only brain that had knowledge of the hidden objects, and it had been dead and buried for years, exactly where was the information located between the time of Thom's death and when the medium accessed it? This is the crux of this line of thought, and once discovered, opens another door to quite unbelievable aspects of our world.

 One example like this wouldn't be sufficient for me to throw away a lifetime of belief in the certitude of science, but a series of stories like this can not be ignored. Especially not now that I had already conceded that science was clearly wrong about lucid dreams and unable to explain a re-incarnated girl (see separate post: "Cracking Open the Oyster"). The evidence was mounting in support of the heretofore explainable.

Run Forrest Run

Run Forrest, run!

For me, there was a watershed event that really got the ball rolling on this thing I just call “the search”.

In 2010 a combination of severe rheumatoid arthritis attack, and a ruptured vein in my brain left me in intensive care and then convalescing and ingesting over a dozen medications a day. For long periods I was almost immobile and I was continuously in some level of pain. Sometimes it was totally debilitating. During a vacation months later in and around Las Vegas it was so bad that I spent time at the Las Vegas blackjack tables in a wheel chair.

Eventually the mixture of drugs, especially heavy daily doses of steroids, left me unable to sleep. For a period of 6 days it was so severe that not only did I not go to sleep, I didn't even go through the motions of getting into bed. Although I have been told it isn't possible, I slept not once for 6 straight days. During that period, after a day or so of watching TV, I found that I couldn't stand the “mental noise” television would cause me, so at 2am I retired to the living room, built a fire and started to read.

Over the 6 days of non-sleep I read something like ten books. After the 6 day period my sleeping habit returned to a point, however I found that I could still only sleep 2-4 hours a night. During those hours I was awake I took medication to reduce my pain and continued to read. Like a literary Forrest Gump, once I started to read, I didn't know where to stop, so I continued on as one book lead to another through bibliographies and logical trains of thought. I read nearly 100 books in the first couple months.

Interestingly for the first day or two of this reading binge I decided to read about something I recently lacked: sleep, and dreaming. After learning about the various phases of sleep, and types and quality of dreaming I happened upon a vaguely familiar term: lucid dreaming. The familiarity stemmed from the fact that over the years, I had occasional instances where during the course of a dream, I mentally realized I was dreaming. I have subsequently learned and experienced many deep lucid dreaming episodes, and will review more on that separately. It turns out that Lucid dreaming is not only a substantial area of clinical physiological and psychological study, it is considered by some as a doorway to amazing things including shamanic practices like shape shifting and even out of body travel.

Many people I had spoken to about my lucid dreaming had told me it was impossible to become fully aware of dreaming, while dreaming. There were even some in the science and medical community that denied the possibility entirely. But I know differently. I've had personal first-hand experience to the contrary.

So having personal knowledge of something that some in science told me was impossible, it seemed to be reasonable to spend some time to investigate further. My personal experience with lucid dreaming caused me to realize that science didn't have the last word in some cases. What I knew as fact was, according to some scientists, impossible. This was my first real indication that science needed to be treated as a possibility or even a probability, but not an absolute given. So I decided to continue my attempt to discover how far down this rabbit hole goes.

I'll have MUCH more to say about lucid dreaming, but for now let's just consider it as a catalyst for change for me: as the basis for suspending my almost total dedication to science as the arbiter of what was or wasn't “real”.

Perhaps I had stumbled upon a doorway to impossible things. After-all, what else was I going to do all night long? Count sheep? (by the way I tried that, and it didn't work).  

"The Door To Impossible Things" part 1

Chapter 1

An Introduction

Ever wonder what the heck makes the world work? I mean, what's going on behind the scenes? I grew up thinking science had all the answers. I even became an engineer because I was convinced that everything could be boiled down to ones and zeros, facts and fiction, provable and not provable. However I slowly accumulated a multitude of experiences where I found science seemed not to apply.

This book is an account of how I used various bits of information accumulated over my life so far to make better sense of it all.

The idea here isn't to give the reader a predigested meal such as a mother bird gives to a chick. It is more along the lines of showing you where the worms are hiding so you can feed yourself.

I present myself as an example of how an otherwise normal somewhat left brained person might be convinced that there is something magical going on behind the scenes. I propose to show you how I approached this journey in order that you might decide if the journey is worthwhile for yourself.

This book is for those who are open-mindedly looking at the reality that we experience and are trying to decide what is real and what is illusion. If you are a hardcore skeptic this book probably won't resonate with you because although you profess objectivity, your requirements for proof may be so stringent that in the end you are not really open-minded at all. If, when exposed to some fantastic story, you find yourself immediately suggesting that the story teller was: looking for attention, or trying to make a buck, or part of a conspiracy or delusional, or whatever, you may want to take a closer look at your bias to see if you are really open-minded enough to consider a non-mainstream explanation.

Honestly think about it: Would you be one of those calling for Galileo's head when he proposed that we are not at the center of our solar system? At that time, most level-headed scientifically minded people, including the leading scientists of the day, did not even want to consider his radical and for then, outlandish theory. These were people who considered themselves reasonable and open-minded, but were generally not open to considering something that departed so far from their belief system.

Now don't worry, I believe in proof and validation too, but I think we occasionally need to suspend disbelief long enough to consider a different theory. Some have referred to this as being able to accept a “provisional belief”. By which we mean, being able to accept an idea for long enough to understand its implications, and to compare them to the real world data before making a judgment. This is the type of objective thought process takes to really be open minded.

So if you are thinking what goes on in Church is mostly empty ritual, but on the other hand there seems like something going on in the world that we can't explain, or perhaps for reasons beyond your conscious mind you have a feeling that there is something more waiting to be uncovered for you, read on. I think I may be able to help you plot a course through the miasma.

In this book you'll find a mix of math, psi, logic, physics, religion, metaphysics, philosophy, and such, all jumbled together. From this I have assembled what for me was sufficient to answer my nagging questions and finally to assemble a rough picture of how things actually work. If you find all this unconvincing, there may at least be enough here to get you to question the conventional wisdom and perhaps lead you on your own process to figure out the nature of things.

This book touches on quite a wide range of subject matter. One approach would have used detailed citations and covered every detail of each topic in order to make sure the reader was provided the most detailed understanding of each assertion made. Although comprehensive, this sort of assembly would have presented a tremendous chore to the reader. I have waded through similar material on the individual topics and I felt that combining that level of detail on this range of subjects within a single volume would make it almost unapproachable.

Consequently, I chose to provide enough information at each step to give the reader a good understanding of my point while not trying to attempt a proof. I'm afraid it will be up to you, dear reader, to do the additional investigation to fill in the blank spots, and to attain a level of “proof” sufficient for you. I have tried to provide enough bibliographical and other references to suit this purpose.

Section 1

The old man and the boy

On new year's eve in 1952 he stood looking at his grandson asleep in bed: the young boy slept with the covers pulled tightly up to his chin in order to keep out the winter's chill. With Robert's three brothers asleep nearby the jolly white haired man patiently watched and waited until Robert awoke with a start. As the boy lay there and the man stood at the foot of his bed, they quietly talked about some of the happenings of the day. It was mostly about trivial little things like the farm's horses and his schoolwork, but the boy and his Grampa enjoyed the easy chat as always. At some point the old man said he would be leaving for a long time but that everything would be fine and he should not worry. The child listened, and after short while, fell back into a deep peaceful sleep.

In the morning young Robert entered the kitchen warmed by the old pot bellied stove and while smelling the wood smoke and steaming coffee he asked his mother where Grampa was going. Astonished, she looked at her husband and back to the boy and asked why he would ask such a thing.

As the boy finished telling his story his mother sat, quietly staring into her cup of coffee wondering how to respond.

This conversation has occurred many times throughout the centuries with only minor changes. A person is visited by a beloved family member and informed that they will be leaving and not to worry. Only to find out later that the journey called death had already begun, some hours or perhaps just moments before. I read all about an almost identical account just yesterday (Dec 2012).

In this particular case the gray haired man was my great grandfather talking to his grandson, my uncle, Bob. Only moments before he was found standing at the foot of my uncle's bed, he had been killed in a car accident coming home from work as a night watchman on new year's eve. As most of these stories recount, the person being visited had no way of knowing the extraordinary nature of their conversation until sometime later.

How can this sort of occurrence be explained? Could it be real?

Many “scientific” thinkers will posit such explanations as: in his sleep, the boy could have overheard the terrible early morning conversation about the accident, or perhaps he heard a late night siren and correctly guessed at it's source, or maybe it was just a coincidence. Whichever explanation is chosen this time, the logical skeptic would often rather believe anything than consider the possibility of such an odd mystical event really occurring, because we are taught in science class that these things are simply impossible. The fact that this sort of thing has happened uncountable times with a wide variety of circumstances that defy logical explanation doesn't deter the ardent disbeliever.

If you were to take time with the skeptic and discuss the root of their disbelief, you might be told that it is because as humans we are separate individuals located at a distance and as-such have no connection with each other whatsoever. No connection that is, other than the known forces such as gravity and the possibility of “objects” such as light or sounds or smells, or fields of other sorts emanating from one and traveling to the other.

You would then be told the same story most any high school science student has been taught, and which Newton and those before him had developed hundreds of years ago. Sir Issac theorized a “billiard ball” universe where individual objects stood apart from each other and could only effect one another by directly interacting (touching) or by causing other “billiard balls” to travel to and impact another object. This model of separateness has been basis of all major scientific models of the universe ever since, and to many it remains so to this day.

The main changes in the theory over the decades are mainly that the objects keep shrinking in size as man improves his ability to build larger and more powerful machines to smash matter into smaller and smaller bits. The newest machine being the Large Hadron Collider located at the lab called CERN on the boarder of France and Switzerland. As of 2012 the smallest and newest bit of stuff that has been discovered is the Higgs boson, aka: the “god particle”.

The basic belief of most people today have at its core, the fact that we exist in a universe where only “local” actions are possible. Locality refers to the inability of distant objects to affect each other without any direct intervening local action such as gravity etc. Such non-local forces might even violate the oft referenced speed of light. Although the most advanced scientific theories currently acknowledge non-locality as an inseparable part of quantum theory, the average person has not yet accepted this as a part of their understanding.

Scientific doctrine now says the final irreducible size of matter may not even be an object at all, but rather a vibrating “string” of energy. However this doesn't change the fact that people generally still feel that each individual unit of stuff, whether a particle or an energy wave, stands alone and is unaffected by other “distant” units.

Quantum mechanics stands out as exposing perhaps the most famous of many strange behaviors of our reality. It may be most notable because it seems to straddle the the worlds of science and the mystic. Although it has become one of the world's most successful scientific theories, most people are either ignorant of it, or don't understand its colossal implications. In the end, many would rather ignore it since it is an inconvenient truth that opens the door to what Albert Einstein once called “spooky” occurrences which he eventually acknowledged but could never adequately explain.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. This book is about my personal journey to figure out what makes our universe tick. The idea is not to convince you, dear reader, of anything. No,,, there are thousands of books and speakers and YouTube videos that purport to do that. The problem these days is not a lack of information, but rather an overabundance of it. How to find that one critical piece of straw cleverly hidden in the haystack? Where, and for what, should you be looking? Perhaps the question for you is: whether you should you even be looking at all.

What I am offering is an account of my journey through a labyrinth that has been navigated for eons by uncountable curious searchers. I have attempted to illuminate the paths and the blind alleys I have encountered which we can re-trace together, like following a trail of breadcrumbs that I and others have dropped along the way. If, as is often the case, your personal journey is destined to follow a different route, the specific details of our search together may not be the point at all. Rather the lesson for you may be only to discover that the journey is worthwhile. Further, perhaps some of the signposts that we come across and resources we uncover may help you find that loose piece of thread that, once tugged, unravels your own amazing mystery.

As for me, I have discovered some amazing things in my journey but I won't share those thoughts until later.

START HERE-- > Marking the trail

I guess this is where to start.

In this blog I'd like to leave messages, writings and other snippets that I can use to keep a map of where I've been and where I'm going on this Crooked Road Home (as I've decided to name my journey). To me it is helpful to keep a map of where I've been and why, and what I've learned. It felt necessary in order to reinforce a sense of forward motion, of progress, however indirect, along a path. Without this I feel as though I would inevitably conclude that I have been walking in circles.

If you were ever in the Cub Scouts or had a similar outdoor learning experience, you may remember marking your trail as you explored in the woods. The reason was several fold: to find your way back home, to guide you on future deeper explorations, and for others to find and use to trace your steps.

Seems to me this blog (which is really just newer version of a set of computer document files, which was a new version of a physical journal, which still sits on my bedside table) is exactly the same as what I used in Cub Scouts all those years ago. The purpose is mostly for myself, but perhaps others may benefit as well. If so, that would make it even more valuable.

During the course of my search I've learned a lot, and in the process have reached many conclusions. I am in a very different place now than I was at the beginning. In this blog I'll try not to skip ahead to where I am now, but rather start at the beginning, where I was essentially trying to see what evidence exists that points to a non-physical aspect to reality. I think this is a better way to cover this rather than to jump ahead. I think it brings a sense of incremental discovery, as this is the experience I am having, and not an epiphany that I reached suddenly. Those who have (for whatever reason) already concluded that we are more than our physical body, will probably just jump over the incremental discovery work (which they may see as obvious) and get to "the good stuff". That's fine.

I feel like I'm making my way home to the place from where I came and where perhaps a part of me always resides. Like most of us, I can't actually remember this home. I didn't even have a sense that it existed until a few years ago. And now as time passes and I turn over more and more rocks along the trail, I discover more and more, and my sense of things grows more clear. As I turn over the rocks I invariably uncover things that fill in gaps, explain lingering questions, and help illuminate the path ahead.

If you are so inclined, please take what feels true, and discard the rest. Keep in mind though, what doesn't feel true today, may feel true later on. That's how things seem to be unfolding for me.

So I would advise, while you stroll down your path: Stay clam. Stay open. Stay alert.

If you are skeptical, I would go through these posts in chronological order (or I may actually start numbering them) so you can follow the flow from my skeptical starting point.

Happy travels.

-Jake